Executive Coaching for Leaders and Entrepreneurs

I have worked with senior leaders for most of my 35-year career. Their roles are complex — the decisions they have to make often involve highly ambiguous situations, and personal stakes are often high. This is often a war of egos, where politics run high. The issues you face are challenging, what reaches your desk is the problem no one else could solve, the plan that isn't landing, the person telling you "it's not possible." That's the job but it means you're metabolising an unrelenting diet of bad news, systemic complexity, and other people's stuck points, day after day, often for years.

The traits that got you to this level — drive, composure, the ability to carry weight without flinching — are often the same traits that make it hardest to stay open when a plan fails or your competence feels threatened. Under pressure, it's easy for ego to take over: to defend, dismiss, or shut down the very information you need to hear. What I often find in them is a deep longing to be able to "just be themselves", their most authentic self.

This goal is often hard to achieve in organisations, where we put on a mask version of ourselves to survive and stay safe within the culture, or narrow down who we are to fit in. You can only maintain this strategy for so long before your body tells you it can't keep the lid on it any longer. This suppression often shows up as extreme discomfort, fractured relationships, health issues, or simply feeling unhappy or dissatisfied in life. We long for something more, but often we don't know what that more is.

This is the work I do with leaders and it has two parts. One is building the actual skill to work with complexity and systemic problems well. The other, less talked about, is building the internal capacity to bear witness to your own inner emotional world as it gets activated, and to self-soothe, rather than react, suppress, or project it onto whoever brought you the bad news. That capacity to stay with yourself under pressure isn't a soft skill. It's what lets you stay ethical, clear-headed, and genuinely open when it matters most , It’s your ethical spine, in the moments it's tested hardest.

This is not about changing mindset or behaviour. This coaching works where decisions, authority and reactions live within us - in the body.

Embodied Leadership

This approach supports four essential pillars of leadership:

Presence — Presence is the capacity to stay when things get tough. Many leaders learn to perform composure through bracing or dissociating. When we can stay attuned to our own internal experience, noticing our feet on the ground, our breath, the reality of the moment — we are present. This creates a quality of honest leadership, as opposed to performative leadership.

Capacity — As we build presence, we start to build our capacity for what we can hold in our own body. When we can attune to ourselves, we can be with others' feelings and emotions in the moment, without leaving the room physically or psychologically. This helps us stay in our body - stay present - during conflict, make a request without resentment leaking through, influence a relationship without managing, controlling or contorting the relational field.

Connection — Connection starts inside the body. Leaders are often highly attuned to others and to cultural systems, but they often lose contact with their own internal signals — tension, fear, impulse, fatigue. Embodied leadership restores connection to the body without undermining authority or professionalism.

Choice — Every day, leaders face tough and complex decisions. Decision-making isn't purely a thinking task, there's an emotive component too. Under stress, our nervous system defaults to patterns learned long ago, woven deep into implicit, unconscious memory: shutting down, second-guessing ourselves, speeding up, avoiding. These aren't wrong patterns, they're adaptive patterns you learned young to survive. They just don't serve you well as an adult. As we build more presence, capacity and connection, we gain more choice, expanding the space between stimulus and response. Choice gives you the ease to act in alignment with your values, your purpose, and the responsibilities of running an organisation in ambiguous, uncertain times.

This is the work I do with leaders: helping you meet the complexity of your role without losing contact with yourself. I hold this work in a trauma-informed, compassionate, non-judgemental way. Every program is unique and tailored to you, because your home self and your work self are interconnected. When we work on one, it moves the other too.

Coaching is unique and the program is tailored to you. When you work with me we focus on all aspects of cognition - thinking, feeling and doing. Your home self and work self are interconnected and affect each other, so when we focus on one area, it will help many other aspects of your life.

What is executive coaching with you actually like?

My unique coaching methodology combines traditional coaching and somatic coaching, cutting edge neuroscience, relationship coaching and modern adult development, so that you have a completely holistic experience of your coaching and transformation. We work at the level of the unconscious and the nervous system, to create new ways of being and interacting. This is top-down and bottom-up change. This is sustainable change. I bring in multiple modalities (developmental approaches, systems and complexity theory and modern neuroscience) and work with you in a holistic way.

What's your experience as an executive coach?

I am an accomplished executive coach with over 2500+ hours coaching experience and have worked in executive development for twenty years. I have coached and consulted across a broad range of industries in private and public sectors, and have personally worked in executive roles and consulted to a wide range of organisational sectors.

What do you actually help leaders with?

Much of my coaching work with leaders and entrepreneurs has been about growing their emotional mastery and relationship skills, as well as growing the complexity of their decision-making and their ethical reasoning, so that they may lead more effectively in the complex times we face now.

What will I learn to do?

You will learn many strategies to self-regulate your emotional self and embrace your emotions with curiosity and open arms. Most people who work with me tell me they experience a feeling of more spaciousness, clarity, resilience and calm inside of themselves. They feel more empowered in themselves and become more discerning in all the choices they make in all aspects of their lives.

How is this different from typical executive coaching?

I am a certified somatic experiencing practitioner and trained to work with trauma, burnout and chronic stress. This means I am trauma-informed in my work and hold you in a compassionate and non-judgemental way. Coaching is unique, and the program is tailored to you. When you work with me, we focus on all aspects of cognition — thinking, feeling and doing. This is for people who have done the inner work and nothing much has changed. It is for those of you who know there is something more that they need to work on and you can’t quite put your finger on it; it is an instinctive knowing. This work requires honesty, commitment and a willingness to stay present when it becomes challenging or uncomfortable.

”I was at the stage of my career that I had undertaken further educational qualifications and I had the required experience, but I was looking for someone to really tap into areas that I was not able to work through myself, but I knew were stopping me from being a better business leader and person.

Kellie was able to navigate me through these areas of my life that were impacting my way of working. She is professional, experienced, compassionate, and caring. Kellie was able to create a really safe environment where I could explore these deep-seated past experiences and develop strategies to grow.

I now feel that I have a much better understanding of how my past experiences impact my current abilities, and I have really defined strategies and skills to address these.

Thank you, Kellie, you really have changed my life.”

My coaching packages run for six months with fortnightly sessions. I will provide 12 x 90 minute sessions over that period, as well providing home practices that I give you to build the somatic skills. You will have access to video content of mine on special topical issues, to enhance your understanding of our work, and this is all available to you in my online learning platform.

Book a complimentary clarity call to see if we are a match to work together. When booking please let me know if you are sponsored through your workplace for this work or whether you are undertaking this on your own and will be paying independently. I am happy to work with your for your workplace budget restrictions to create a program for you.

“Kellie is a well rounded coach, with a vast wealth of life and professional experiences that she draws on during her coaching sessions. Her ability to connect with me during our sessions made her invaluable in taking me on the journey of personal and professional transformation I had chosen.

A safe environment of understanding and acceptance is what she created during our time together. This helped her explore the root causes of my constraints and she assisted me in unraveling them and more importantly dealing with them.

I feel lucky to have been coached by Kellie as she has assisted in my professional and personal development, a gift that will last for the rest of my life. For that I will always be grateful. Thank you Kellie.”

“Working with Kellie was challenging, rewarding and for me transformational. I feel more equipped now to tackle life's challenges.

I originally practiced the strategies we developed everyday, now I don't need to as they have just become part of how I interpret, interact and reflect on the relationships and world around me.

There are very few experiences that change how we see the world, and ourselves in it, Kellie was able to provide me with skills to develop my reflective practice without living in the past, forethought without constantly chasing the future and the mindfulness to live in the now.”

Do you have some more questions? Click below to check out the Coaching FAQs. If the answer is not in there, feel free to message me via the contact page.