About

This blog is about the new direction my life is taking and what I am learning as I progress. So a logical place to start would be some background information. Synchronicity and fate have played a major part in the winding road I have taken to reach where I am now, a first-year DPhil student at Sussex University. My career track looks something like – university student, truck driver, stage management, General Duties officer and transport pilot in the RAF, lecturer, Head of Faculty, and Vice Principal in Further Education. For the last 12 years I have been a management development consultant specializing in executive coaching with particular interests in NLP and appreciative inquiry, both of which I use in my coaching.My educational path is equally erratic. A failed BSc at Auckland University (I was too busy stage managing and sailing); leaving the RAF as a highly qualified pilot was only partly useful in my new career in FE so I studied with the OU, gaining a BA based on systems, technology and music, and followed that with a part-time MSC in Education Management at the University of East London (then known as East London Poly). An itch of the academic kind lead me to more study:- a web design course with the OU, and a PostGrad Certificate course in e-Learning Design at Sussex University. It was this later course that triggered the idea of a DPhil, of which more later. There have been a number of other significant influences in my learning. In 1989 I learned the art of facilitating Action Learning Sets with Ray Mahoney and the late Roger Gaunt. And starting in 1991 I became an NLP Practitioner under the guidance of John Seymour, a Master Practitioner with Richard Bandler and Paul McKenna, and an NLP Coach with Ian McDermott. During the ’80s I was involved in developing a range of distance learning courses for the aviation industry and these were delivered to students throughout the world. As an autodidact I had a continuing interest in learning of all types but particularly self-managed learning.