The pivot I didn’t plan

My first real job was in a pastry shop. I learned two things there: I was not going to be a pastry chef, and I could get up very early if the reason was good enough. Both turned out to be useful later.

What I actually wanted, at eighteen, was to farm. Organic, regenerative, proper farming — the kind where you know what’s in the soil because you put it there. I spent years studying agriculture and forestry, first in the US, later at Edinburgh. I did a practicum in the Czech Republic and met my first wife there. I came back to the UK with a degree and a new marriage and a plan. The plan didn’t work. I couldn’t find steady work in organic farming. The marriage ended a few years later. Both things taught me more about myself than about farms or relationships.

From cold garages to corporate burnout

Around that time, a friend handed me a Linux installation CD and an old 486 Pentium. I’d always been the kid who took things apart — I once built a car from scratch, which sounds glamorous but mostly involved a lot of swearing in a cold garage. Computers turned out to be the same kind of puzzle with better indoor lighting.

I taught myself systems administration. My first proper IT job was at Siberia, one of the UK’s first internet cafés. From there I moved through corporate environments I could not have predicted — CERN, Credit Suisse, eventually UBS Digital Factory as an agile coach. Good titles. Real paycheques. A decade of hitting my head against the specific flavour of dysfunction that big organisations cultivate, and eventually burning out so completely that I had to stop.

Samba, India, and the accidental rehearsal for coaching

In 2011 I went to Brazil and bought a boot-load of samba instruments. In 2013, with help from Rosa and Luana Donato and an Edinburgh friend named Matt Clements, I started Zurich Samba. Twelve years later it’s still running. Running a samba school taught me things about leadership that no agile certification ever did: how to keep beginners and experts in the same room without either group leaving, how to hold a rhythm steady when someone else loses it, how to give feedback that lands instead of lands badly.

Then came the thing I didn’t expect. I gave up my corporate job just before COVID and went to India. I came back exactly as the world was closing down. During lockdown I did a six-month coaching course with a coach named Stephanie, partly because I needed structure and partly because I’d started to suspect the thing I was good at was something I hadn’t named yet.

I was right. Coaching is what I’d been doing accidentally for years — in samba rehearsals, in agile retrospectives, in conversations over coffee where people told me things they hadn’t told anyone else. The course gave me a frame for the work. It didn’t teach me how to do it. It taught me I was already doing it.

Why any of this matters to you

Here’s the argument: every apparent detour in the story above was me learning to read a different part of the same human machinery. Farming taught me about systems that don’t care how hard you try — they care whether the conditions are right. IT taught me how to debug: to resist the first obvious explanation, to isolate the variable that’s actually causing the problem. Corporate life taught me what burnout looks like from the inside, and how many smart, competent people are quietly carrying it. Samba taught me that confidence is something you can coach into someone with enough patience and the right rhythm. Jung, which I’ve been studying for years, taught me that the thing in the shadow is almost always the thing that needs the most attention.

When a client sits down with me — usually a capable person who’s good at what they do and stuck anyway — I’m not pulling from one discipline. I’m pulling from all of it. That’s not a bug of my CV. It’s the feature.

What this means for the work we’d do together

Three things, if you’re considering working with me:

• I won’t try to make you more like me. The point of range is that it lets you see patterns, not that it prescribes one. Your story will not look like mine. It shouldn’t.
• I won’t pretend the detours are wasted. If you’ve changed industries, countries, relationships, or whole versions of yourself — that’s material. We’ll use it.
• I’ll help you find the decision that’s already half-made. Most people come to coaching knowing what they need to do. They just haven’t been able to hear themselves think clearly enough to do it.

If you’re in that spot right now — you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. But if you’re ready to stop circling and start moving, the fastest way to find out if we’re a match is a fifteen-minute call. No pitch. Just a conversation.

Wrap up with a short paragraph that circles back to your opening. Don’t over-explain. Trust your reader.

If this landed — or if it didn’t and you want to argue — send me a note.