“I have been working with Robyn for over a year now and I would recommend her superb coaching skills to anyone interested and ready for corporate coaching. She makes individual coaching sessions challenging and enjoyable and always productive. Her ability to tailor sessions to your individual needs almost on-the-fly means you are not dealing with “one size fits all” psycho babble, but rather you are gaining an invaluable insight into your own behaviours and drivers and those of others. I can honestly say that Robyn has made a tangible difference to the company’s bottom line as well as my own personal effectiveness.”

When I went into coaching, I really had no clue what to expect and more importantly, no clue as to what I might get from it. I wasn’t really sure what the purpose of it all was. What I did know was that I was ready for it.

For me, what Coaching was before I talked to Robyn was more of a management fad; buzzwords that people throw around to make extra jobs to be the middleman. With hindsight, what Coaching is for me is nothing to do with building skills or expertise; I think I already have a lot of that. What it is for me is building an awareness of what makes me tick, what makes me take the decisions that I take, what makes me good at the things I’m good at and what makes me ineffective at the things I’m not very good at. It’s also an awareness of the impact of what I’m doing and the way I do it has on other people, whether it is personally or whether it is at work. My aim with this was to improve my business, but it does float into all areas of my life.

If I said, what difference does it make to me after nine months, and certainly I am not finished yet, I am still work in progress, I’ll put that in two ways: one is that I regularly have light bulb moments; that is, whether it is during a session or afterwards or while I’m doing something, I suddenly realise why something works that I have done for a long time, but I’ve no clue why or how I was doing it. The other thing that I have become aware of that was completely unconscious, was that the way I behave has changed. I didn’t notice this, but other people commented. “You seem to be more enthusiastic lately” or “you seem to be clearer lately in what you want, in what you are doing”. And I hadn’t been aware that I was changing, so it’s interesting that other people noticed that.

If that is too touchy-feely for some people, and it’s not a reason to go and do Coaching, the other thing I’ve noticed is a direct result on the business bottom line. I’ve improved my profits from this. The way that has happened for me (and it will be different for everyone I am sure) is that when I went to Business School and through various things I have read, one of the things I had been taught was that it is really difficult to get new customers, and it is really easy to lose them. It sounds logical and it sounds true, but actually if you think what that does to the way you operate it makes you go out with a completely different frame of mind, it makes you think “I’ve got to have a really big effort here to go find a new customer because it’s so difficult.” And you’re stressing out all the time that you’re going to lose the ones you’ve got. But if you turn that around and teach yourself to believe that it’s really easy to get new customers, there are opportunities everywhere, you could fall on one at any stage of the day, it doesn’t matter what you are doing. You can stop worrying about it and the way to keep customers is obviously just to do a lot of great things for them and they won’t want to go anywhere else.

Now, that’s not a massive change in anything except the way I’ve got my brain wired if you like, but it has resulted in more conversions of leads over the last few months than we have had in the last two years. And yes, there could be other factors, but I am absolutely convinced that Coaching with Robyn is a major part of it.

Finally, there are two other things I would like to say: if you think you’re ready for Coaching, don’t hesitate. Even if you’re not sure why you are ready or what it might do for you. Jump in with both feet as that was exactly my situation. Approach it with an open mind. The fact is you have no idea what Coaching is going to do for you or what form it is going to take. So just let it happen and see what happens. Be open-minded.

Robyn has done a great job for me and I will continue to work with her and I will probably get some of my other staff to do the same thing once I have finished the process.

Tim Thomas-Peter, Managing Director, Ambidect Ltd