About George Brown

I find this section of any coaching website a bit awkward. Here is what I think you actually need to know, and I will keep it short.

Right now

I work almost entirely with coaches. Supervision, practice mentoring, and occasional marketing conversations for people who are trying to build something sustainable. I have been doing this since 2012, which means over 14 years of watching what works and what does not.

The coaching I do with coaches is the same attentive, careful work as coaching with any other client. It just happens to be about practice rather than career. I find the combination of the two kinds of work — direct coaching when I take on career coaching clients, and supervision and mentoring with coaches — keeps me thinking clearly about both.

I have a particular interest in coaches who came from industries outside the traditional coaching pipeline: people who had a career first, found coaching, and are now trying to work out how that background fits into a practice. That is, more or less, how I got here.

Before this

Before coaching, I spent eleven years in investment banking. I left in 2013.

What happened: at a difficult point in that career, my employer arranged a series of coaching sessions. I took them sceptically. By the fourth session I was asking the coach more questions about what she was doing than I was answering her questions. By the time the engagement ended I had started reading about the field. I started coaching in 2012.

That trajectory (corporate career, coaching intervention at a rough patch, conversion to practice) is not unusual. What I try to bring from it is a clear sense of what clients from professional industries actually need, rather than what coaching theory suggests they need. Those are not always the same thing.

Earlier

I started in investment banking in 2005. Eleven years of it: operational work, a couple of significant restructures, a stint managing teams through a period nobody would describe as easy. I am not going to list the roles. They are not the point of this page. What is relevant is that I understand how large organisations work from the inside, and I understand what the career of a professional in that kind of environment actually looks like.

Credentials

Where I work

Mostly online, which suits the coaches I work with; they are scattered across the UK and a few are abroad. For coaching and supervision in Manchester I can work in person if that is what makes sense. The format follows the work, not the other way round.

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