It started with a fall.

My fall in 2021 was serious. I suffered a severe head injury and multiple broken bones. And no, don't ask what I was stupidly doing up on that roof!

What followed was six months of rehabilitation and a lot of time to think because, quite frankly, I couldn't do much else.

At the time, I was heading a global business unit and had spent more than 25 years building an international career in the IT industry. I had worked in start-ups, turnarounds and large international corporations, leading teams across countries and cultures. I had enjoyed much of it and learned an enormous amount along the way, but I had also been part of the career race for a very long time.

The accident brought all of that to an abrupt stop.

Somewhere during those months of rehabilitation, I realised that I could not, and would not, simply return to the life I had been living. So I resigned, without another job waiting for me and without really knowing what I would do next.

For the first time in many years, instead of thinking about the next role, the next target or the next challenge, I found myself asking very different questions. What did I actually want? What mattered to me now? And what would make the next part of my life feel meaningful?

I had to find a new direction.

During that search, a very good friend suggested that I become a coach. With all my years of business and leadership experience, he thought I could become a great business coach, and the idea made sense to me.

I started my Co-Active coach training in London and eventually began coaching professionally. I assumed that my natural path would be business coaching, but as so often happens in life, things didn't turn out quite as expected.

The people I felt most fulfilled working with were young adults.

There was something incredibly rewarding about helping a young person understand what really mattered to them, recognise thoughts or patterns that were getting in their way, or suddenly see themselves and a difficult situation from a completely different perspective.

I loved seeing what happened when something clicked.

Looking back, perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. Throughout my career, I had coached and mentored many young talents, but I had always done it in my role as a leader and within the IT industry. Now, for the first time, helping young people grow wasn't simply part of my job. It was the part I wanted to make my job.

And I kept thinking:

I wish I had known all this when I was young.

The more young adults I worked with, the more that question stayed with me.

We teach young people mathematics, physics, languages, IT and many other important subjects, but we spend surprisingly little time helping them understand the person who is going to accompany them through every single part of their life: themselves.

Where do they learn why their mind sometimes seems to work against them, or how to recognise the inner voices telling them they aren't good enough? Where do they explore what really matters to them, why they react the way they do, or how a different perspective can completely change the way they see a problem?

And where do they learn how to make choices based on who they are, rather than who they think everyone else expects them to be?

Parents can, of course, be an incredibly important source of support, but anyone who has been a teenager, or raised one, probably knows that Mum and Dad are not always the people you want to discuss everything with.

I started wondering what would happen if young people had another kind of space for those conversations.

That idea became The Self Awareness Lab™.