Mindful Talent

The plan: 10 press ups before the morning calls start.

The reality: a dog standing directly under your face, fully invested in what you’re doing down there.

Zero reps completed. Ten out of ten morale.

Happy Take Your Dog to Work Day to everyone.

We were at in Leith on Monday, for our first off-site in a long time.

This is something Michele, Raymy, Ilaria and Alister used to do all the time in our early years, step away from the day to day, find a different space, and think bigger about where we were going.

So when we sat down to bring that tradition back, it felt right to ask Michelle to come and hold it with us.

In the clip above, Alister asked her what she’s taking from the morning. Her answer stayed with us, she spoke about legacy, about what it means to step back into something she built over twenty years ago and watch it continue without needing to hold every part of it herself.

There’s a particular kind of trust in that. Building something, handing pieces of it on, and still being welcomed back into the room when it matters.

If you trained with us, or with Michele directly in those early years, we’d love to hear what that time meant to you…

What happens in a coaching session?

Coaching is different for every client, partly because every coach brings their own unique expression to it. But at the heart of it, Alister says, is the same starting point: a deep sense of safety within the partnership, built on trust, confidentiality, and the coaching agreement set at the very beginning.

Once that safety is established, something shifts, you enter what he describes in our course as a vacuum with the client, a moment of such presence and engagement that it feels like shared understanding, almost oneness. That’s where the magic happens. When someone feels held, safe, trusted, and connected, they access a deeper reservoir, intuition, inner wisdom, creativity, possibility.

They begin to break out of the conditioning and day-to-day thinking they’ve been stuck in, and suddenly there’s release, expansion, a sense of options they couldn’t see before.

For Alister, that’s what coaching really is: helping someone reach that deeper place within themselves.

www.mindfultalent.co.uk

Lynette, Alister’s sister and a graduate of the 2018 cohort, spent eight years coaching. She ran group programmes, created a course during lockdown with that reached 600 people, and went on to create, host and speak on her panel talks at the Virgin Hotel for nearly two years. That last part still surprises her. Before coaching, she would never have believed that was possible.

She’s not coaching now, but as she puts it, the course still gives to her every day. The skills are woven into everything she does, from how she listens to clients in her social media work, to how she holds people accountable to the actions they say they’ll take. The coaching didn’t stop when the career chapter changed. It became part of how she shows up.

What strikes Ali about watching his sister’s journey, and the journeys of hundreds of graduates since, is that the growth isn’t accidental. The confidence that builds over those 20 weeks isn’t luck. It’s the result of real coaching practice, real experience, and a course structure designed to stretch you just enough, consistently enough, that by the end you have the evidence to believe in yourself.

Lynette is honest that the nerves don’t disappear. She still felt her stomach before stepping into a room of a hundred people. But coaching gave her something more useful than the absence of fear. It gave her a toolkit to meet the fear, ground herself, and step forward anyway. Positive affirmations, breathwork, recalling the evidence, self-coaching in the moments of doubt. These aren’t techniques she uses occasionally. They’re part of how she thinks.

That’s the thing about transformation. It doesn’t stay inside a coaching session. It travels with you.

This is my sister Lynette. She joined The Transformational Coach back in 2017, but it took me about a year of asking before she said yes.

Her hesitations were ones we hear all the time. She was worried about the written work, school hadn’t been easy for her, and the thought of being assessed on her writing took her straight back to that feeling. And she didn’t feel confident enough to coach someone, to actually hold that space.

In the end, she joined for herself. She was a new parent, going through her own season of growth, and she thought, why not?

What happened to her fear of the writing? It dissolved. Once she realised it wasn’t about grammar or perfect sentences, it was about writing from her own experience, it stopped being a block.

If any of this sounds familiar, it’s worth knowing: the hesitation you’re feeling is part of the journey too.

Our values were born in 2017. Seven years later, they still hold.

When we first launched our academy, Ilaria, Michelle, and Raymy took two full days away from the business to get deeply honest about who we are.

Not what we do, but who we are.

What emerged were five values that have guided every significant decision we’ve made since:

Loving compassion
Belief in human potential
Being of service
Authenticity
Connection

These aren’t words on a wall they are our compass.

When an opportunity has come our way that felt off, even when we couldn’t quite articulate why, Raymy would bring us back to the question: “Is this in alignment with who we are?” that question has saved us more than once.

After a two-and-a-half year pause, we came back together and asked: do these values still stand up? Do we still feel them? The answer was an unequivocal yes.

Because at the heart of what we do at Mindful Talent is a deep desire for our academy to be a place where every student, every mentor, every member of our training team feels a genuine sense of belonging and where we never lose sight of the profound power coaching has to change lives.

That’s who we are, that’s who we’ve always been.

What are the values that guide your work? I’d love to hear them in the comments. 👇