The practice

Forty clients between three coaches, and that is the ceiling.

We are not trying to grow. We are trying to be the practice you can ring in year four and get the same voice.

Why Ruth started it

In 2013 Ruth Halden was an operations director at a manufacturer off Kirkstall Road, fourteen years in, signing off a restructure she privately thought was wrong. Nobody in that building was paid to ask her whether she believed in it. She spent the following year training with the ICF, took her first client in the spring of 2014, and built the practice around the question she had needed someone to ask her: what would have to be true for you to say no to this?

The three of us

Ruth Halden holds the ICF Professional Certified Coach credential and has logged more than 1,400 coaching hours. She leads the executive work and most of the founder clients, and she is the one who will pick up the phone if you ring the office before nine. Daniel Okonjo joined in 2019 from an NHS service-management post in Bradford; he is an ICF Associate Certified Coach and takes almost all of the career-transition work, which is a specialism rather than a euphemism — he has walked out of a career himself and can say what the first six weeks feel like. Priya Raval is a chartered occupational psychologist and an EMCC Senior Practitioner, and she runs the team programmes and the 360° feedback rounds, because a leadership team needs someone who can read the data as well as the room. Marianne Ottey manages the practice: scheduling, invoicing, purchase orders and the quiet business of making sure a client who has gone silent for three weeks gets a note rather than an invoice. All three coaches are supervised quarterly by an external supervisor, insured to £2m in professional indemnity, and bound by the ICF code of ethics — which is a document you can read, and which we will send you if you ask.
The refusals

Three things we will not do

Every practice publishes what it offers. These are the three we turn down, which tells you rather more.

We will not take you on if we cannot help

About eleven clients a year
Roughly one discovery call in six ends with us saying no, and naming two people who do the thing you actually need. It is also the only reason the two hundred yeses mean anything.
How the call works

We will not report on you

Attendance and nothing else
Where an employer pays, they are told that the sessions happened and whether the programme is on track. No assessment of you, no summary of your character, no quiet telephone call. If they ask for more, we refuse — and we tell you that they asked.
Read the confidentiality note

We will not sell you the next thing

No membership, no retreat
There is no upsell at the end of a programme. When the work is finished we say so. The outcome we are proudest of is a client who does not need us for three years and then rings again.
See the programmes
How it runs

Four stages, and you can leave at any of them

Coaching goes wrong when nobody agrees what it is for. This is the order we work in, on every programme, whichever one you pick.
  1. Week 0

    The discovery call

    Thirty minutes on the telephone, free and without obligation. You describe the situation; we say honestly whether coaching is the right instrument for it, and who else to try if it is not.
  2. Weeks 1–2

    The mapping session

    A double session where we set out what "better" actually looks like in your words, and turn it into three or four goals specific enough to be wrong about.
  3. Months 1–5

    The working sessions

    The work itself. Each session ends with one commitment you have chosen, and a written summary in your inbox the next morning so nothing depends on memory.
  4. Month 6

    The review

    We measure the goals we wrote at the start against where you are now, in writing. If the answer is disappointing, we say so, and the halfway guarantee still stands.
“I have had three coaches through three employers. Ruth is the only one who ever told me I was wrong, and the only one worth the money.”
Marcus Deane · Head of Engineering, Leeds · twelve sessions, 2024–25
The first step

Half an hour, no charge, and no pitch at the end.

Tell us what is on your mind and we will tell you plainly whether coaching helps with it. If it does not, we will say what does — that conversation is worth having either way.
Book a discovery call0113 496 0184
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