You’re moving through a change in work, identity, purpose or personal life.
Transformational coaching with Clay Lowe
Coaching for a shift in being.
Sometimes the problem isn’t that you need a better plan. The life you’ve been planning from may no longer fit.
“What kind of life would feel more honest to inhabit?”
You are not a problem to be optimised.
Much of modern coaching borrows its language from business performance. Set the target. Identify the obstacle. Build the habit. Measure the result.
That approach has its place. Sometimes a person does need a clearer goal or a workable plan. But there are moments when increased efficiency only helps you travel faster in a direction you no longer want to go.
Transformational coaching begins further upstream. We can work with decisions, goals and practical problems, but we also examine the person making those decisions: the assumptions you’re living inside, the stories shaping your choices, and the life that may be asking something different of you.
01Who are you becoming through the way you are living now?
02Which definitions of success have you inherited rather than chosen?
03What story about yourself has become too narrow?
04What would change if you trusted your own experience more deeply?
Coaching as a practice of living.
My work is grounded in an older understanding of philosophy: not a collection of ideas to admire, but a practice that changes how a person sees and lives.
Pierre Hadot recovered the idea that ancient philosophy involved practices of attention, dialogue and self-examination. That spirit runs through my coaching. We bring the questions back to the work you do, the relationships you inhabit, the choices you face and the life you are actually living.
Leon VanderPol’s A Shift in Being offers another important influence. Lasting change doesn’t always begin with new behaviour. Sometimes it begins with a change in the person’s relationship to themselves and their situation. Action then arises from a different place.
This doesn’t mean discussing abstract ideas while your life waits outside the door. It means looking closely enough at your experience that any action you take belongs to you.
Philosophy becomes personal and practical again.
Philosophy as a way of life
You don’t need a perfectly formed goal.
People often come to coaching with something less tidy than a goal. A restlessness. A transition. A decision that keeps circling. The feeling that they’ve become absent from their own life.
You’re successful on paper but increasingly absent from what you’re doing.
You’re caught between an old version of yourself and something not yet formed.
You’re questioning the expectations you’ve organised your life around.
You’re facing a choice that can’t be solved by another pros-and-cons list.
You want to speak honestly without being hurried towards an answer.
The work begins with listening.
I listen to the problem you bring, but I also listen for the conversation beneath it.
The language you use. The assumption hidden inside a sentence. The story that keeps returning. The possibility you mention and then quickly dismiss.
I won’t hand you a prefabricated system for living. I will ask questions, offer reflections, notice patterns and challenge a frame when it has become too tight. A philosophical idea, a metaphor or a thought experiment may enter the conversation, not as final truth, but as a lens we can test against your experience.
The pace matters. Insight can’t always be bullied into appearing on schedule.
Training matters. So does the life behind it.
I am formally qualified as a coach, trained in NLP and accredited in Lumina Spark and Clarity4D. But qualifications are only part of what makes a coach.
My ability to accompany people has been shaped by a life lived across very different worlds. I graduated from West Point and served as an Army officer. I moved into corporate life and have spent more than twenty-six years working in learning and development, leadership, facilitation and human change.
I know something about discipline, duty and institutional life. I also know what it is to question an established direction, cross from one world into another and discover that the old map no longer describes the ground beneath your feet.
I have spent much of my life moving between worlds. That has taught me how to sit with people who find themselves between one version of life and the next.
West Point graduate and former Army officer
26+ years in learning and development
Coach, facilitator, trainer and writer
NLP, Lumina Spark and Clarity4D
Ways we can work together
A conversation can take more than one form.
Face to face, wherever you are.
An online conversation for people who value visual presence and the familiarity of a shared screen. We can work together wherever you are in the world.
A voice without the screen.
Voice-only coaching removes the pressure of watching yourself being watched. Many people find it easier to concentrate on what they are saying and what they are beginning to hear in their own words.
Some thoughts need the slower rhythm of writing.
Email coaching gives you time to reflect, find language for your experience and return to what you have written. It suits people who think more fully through text or want a written conversation they can revisit.
Presence without an interface.
If geography allows, we can share a physical room. There is more space for silence, gesture and the unplanned movement of a real conversation.
Take the question outside.
Coaching conducted on foot. The body moves, the surroundings change, silence becomes natural, and questions can be carried instead of forced towards an immediate answer.
For the more adventurous
Wisdom Walking.
We begin with a live question or situation and let the conversation develop as we walk. The path, an unexpected turn or something encountered along the way may enter the work. The world becomes part of the conversation.
This isn’t an outdoor meeting with a few scenic views added. Walking is part of the method. It changes the rhythm of attention and often loosens thought from its familiar grooves.
Location and route agreed in advance. Pace and accessibility shaped around the person, not the performance.
A different way of seeing can become a different way of living.
A useful coaching conversation doesn’t always end with a ten-point action plan. Sometimes you leave with a decision. Sometimes an old assumption loses its hold. Sometimes a possibility that had been dismissed begins to feel inhabitable.
01Understand yourself and your recurring patterns more clearly.
02Make choices that feel more consciously your own.
03Question inherited ideas about success, duty and who you should be.
04Move through change without rushing into another rigid identity.
05Turn insight into experiments and lived practice.
Begin where you are
Bring the question.
You don’t need a polished account of your life. Bring the friction, the crossroads, or the thing you haven’t yet found words for. We’ll explore what is happening and whether this work is right for you.
Book a conversation with Clay →