The blogs so far have been quite reflective, which is ironic as coaching really takes much of its power from future focused positive psychology. Anyway, in an effort to redress this, today’s will be about the hot-off-the-press news that James Frowen and I have formed a new company to offer our coaching and consultancy skills out to a wider audience.

I’ve worked with James in one form or another for well over a decade, when he was part of a team (including the indomitable Nicola Williams) who were looking to embed and broaden the coaching offering in Companies House in Cardiff and I was looking to do the same at the Intellectual Property Office in Newport.

We all hit it off straight away, and found that having that support and external advice was invaluable to keeping momentum going around the project (which eventually resulted in the partnership of our networks winning an award for ‘innovative coaching’).

I’ll blog in the future about the importance of surrounding yourself with great people in these endeavours (the senior coaches at the IPO, and Nicola and Hermionie and James Clark, should brace themselves for burning ears as I draft that one up).

So, ten years or so pass and James and I were still keeping in touch and still fighting the good fight to ensure that coaching is really intrinsic to the working of our organisations and across the public sector. I’ve found that motivation among coaches isn’t too hard to drum up, as we’ve all seen first hand what a difference it can make. But finding the time (alongside the day job) and in busy lives, to give it the space it deserves had always been an ongoing challenge.

Last year, James and I had a wander around Roath park, ramblechatting with each other on all things coaching and life, the universe and everything, and it seemed that the planets were aligning for us to start off this new venture. 

I’ve known for years that James has been keen to start his own business (he’s a driven guy, just check his CV…) and, over the past decade, I’ve really enjoyed the opportunities that I’ve had to coach people outside the public sector. There’s more commonalities than I realised in the challenges that individuals face regardless of their industry, but getting an insight into the quirks of the contexts that people are operating in has been properly eye-opening. And, at heart each and every coaching conversation is its own window into another world. 

With my son heading off to Uni last Autumn*, there was a bit of space in my schedule to try something new. Offering my coaching skills alongside someone as adept and authentic as James was an opportunity too good to pass up.

The remaining question was, what can James and I offer that isn’t already well served in the market? On our stroll around the lake, we talked about the wealth of experience that we’ve built in using our coaching skills in our day jobs, in how we’ve formed and grown and sustained (award winning) coaching networks and offered advice and guidance to people across the public sector in doing the same. We’ve given talks on the use of coaching to drive performance at Civil service Live in London and Cardiff (honing our double act…) and we’ve led on delivering coaching CPD across each of our organisations (from that Companies House partnership the foundations of Coaching week were laid). The work we’ve done in the coaching space has made a difference at an individual and institutional level, and the chance to share the lessons we’ve learned and to leverage the skills we’ve developed to help businesses in the private sector and the charity sector was too good an opportunity to miss.

Having “Aspiration” in the name seemed a no-brainer, as I’ve always plugged coaching as a way to turn “Aspirations into actions”. We shifted through the variants that were available and which could work as a unique title for our company – I still have a soft spot for “The aspirationalists”, though that would undoubtedly have been a bit of a mouthful, but liked the idea of James and I sat under a tree, shooting the breeze. We settled on Aspiration Experts as it neatly sums up that between us, over 25 years, we’ve developed some expertise in this field, and also, that at its core, coaching is the mechanism by which the coachee is aided in finding the solutions that are right for them. It’s a collaborative process, and what better way for people to overcome the blocks to their aspirations than to tap into their own talents? We all have the potential within ourselves to meet those challenges, and it’s the privilege of a coach to release the inner expert in each of our clients.

It’s going to be a fun journey. (A future blog will lift the lid on how our motley gang ventured up into the Brecons to film our launch video… but that’s a story for another day).

*I was up in Sheffield at the weekend doing the shuttle to bring him back to South Wales for Easter – he’s absolutely loving his time there so far.