The
concept of leadership and engaging and motivating teams and individuals has been a theme right from my earliest years.
At 13, having joined a youth organisation, I found myself leading teams on local expeditions. By 16 I was instructing
other young people in such skills as sailing, mountain leadership and teamwork.
At 18 I was responsible for organising
activities for up to 30 young people most weekends and several evenings a week throughout the year.
At the
same time I began studying design and communications over a five year period at Chelsea School of Art and LCP.
In 1981, I began working in the Audio Visual industry as a producer and designer - essentially
in the area of helping companies communicate to internal teams, customers and shareholders. This involved producing live events,
presentations and video programmes for mostly blue chip companies.
To further my career I began working as a
freelance Producer for a number of leading London production companies; this lead to the decision to form my own communications
agency – MJ Productions Ltd. Our mission was to deliver communications that made a real difference and to be able to
deliver this across the most appropriate blend of media and technologies - including face to face communications,
live events, multi-media, print, video and later, online.
Our client
base grew to include The Woolwich, Epson, Barclays, Whitbread, Siemens, Qinetiq, DTI and many other well known organisations,
as well as smaller specialist businesses. The team also grew and along with this came the challenge of adapting my own
role many times over – from design and delivery of the work, to salesman, manager, leader and consultant.
Often working alongside management consultants
and internal communications teams, the topic of change was always close to hand. This ignited my intrigue into other
ways of working. Having run the agency for many successful years I was now ready to move on and wanted a new challenge that
enabled me to work at a deeper level within organisations to bring about individual and business change.
Coaching offered the natural
step forward. I trained as a coach with Newcastle College and at the same time continued my studies of NLP, taking the full
Practitioners certificate , then Master Practitioner and finally The NLP Trainers Training.
I set up 80/20 Challenge in
2005 as a vehicle to use my vast experience in business, communications and behavioural change and offer this to the business
world via a coaching approach.
Working with
executives and their teams, I am continually amazed at how performance and change can be accomplished often rapidly and with
lasting impact. Advanced Performance sums it up.
Learning to be at your best; achieving all that you can; being your own greatest supporter and backing yourself 100%.
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As early as 1997 I was using
NLP as part of communications projects. Our commitment was to help clients engage more deeply with customers and staff –
to open up true understanding and dialogue. NLP seemed to have a whole range of tools that could assist us in this process.
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