ABOUT
A working writer who helps others
find their words.
People often leave a conversation with me having said something they didn't expect to say. Sometimes it's the thing they came to say but couldn't find the words for. Sometimes it's something they didn't know they were carrying.
I'm completing my memoir, Whipbird, while knee-deep in drafts of my first novel. I also write on Substack, exploring the gap between the lives people are living and the ones they meant to say something about.
I've spent over twenty years studying why people behave and communicate the way they do. That combination is unusual. The behavioural science informs the writing. The writing informs everything else.
People who work with me tend to leave with more belief in their work than they arrived with, and a clearer sense of what they're actually capable of.
I hold an MSc in Business Psychology with Distinction and a Certificate in Behavioural Economics from the University of Toronto.
MSc Business Psychology (Distinction)
Certificate in Behavioural Economics, University of Toronto
20+ years senior organisational communications
Culture and strategy consultancy
Facilitator and qualitative researcher
Human-centred design practitioner
Working memoirist — Whipbird
Substack author
Interviewer and editorial collaborator
Your voice, not mine
The words that come from our work are yours. When I draft, I write in your voice. When I edit, I work with what's already there. Either way, the thinking is yours, the perspective is yours, and no part of it belongs to a machine.
What I'm always listening for is the voice that comes out in the aside, the unrehearsed sentence, the thing you said before you started performing. It's my job is to find it, show it to you, and help you trust it enough to use it.
What you leave with sounds like you. Only more so.
Built around you
Every engagement is built around you, not a programme you fit yourself into. Before anything is written or shaped, I pay close attention to how you actually work: how you think out loud, where your best material surfaces, what stops you.
Understanding how people behave under pressure, and why, means I can see past the obvious to what's actually getting in the way. The process that follows is designed around what I observe. The tools you leave with are built from your language, your patterns, your way of finding the words. They belong to you, not to me.
The questions within questions
Most people edit themselves in real time. They say something true, then immediately qualify it, move past it, or dismiss it as beside the point. It rarely is.
Years of interviewing, research and genuine curiosity about the human condition have taught me to hear what's being lost when people edit themselves. The questions I ask are designed to go back to the aside, the hesitation, the thing said in passing, and stay there until we understand what it's actually telling us.
It's then that the magic really starts to happen.
Grounded in science
Behavioural science and applied psychology are not add-ons. They are woven into how I listen, how I ask questions, and how I help people move through the places where they get stuck.
They also give me something beyond instinct: an understanding of why the sticking points are where they are, what's actually happening when someone can't find the words, and what it takes to shift it. Most people don't expect that from a writing mentor. It makes a difference.
