“My life’s work has revealed to me that change happens when we get connected to who we are.
That’s when we can lie down in the grass of Rumi’s field, beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing.
It’s from there that cooperation can emerge and in time, grow, to bring change.
I help my clients find a path to cooperation in the hope that we may bring more, lasting change.”
ONE-ON-ONE; WITHIN ORGANISATIONS
I believe in people.
I believe we each have everything we need inside us - our own Astonishing Light, our Duck, the name doesn’t matter - to live a full life, help others and to be great and super effective at whatever we do.
I help CEOs, senior leaders, all folk really to get connected to what’s essentially theirs, their own values, their Light, and to live from that place and be better. I help people find calm. I call it “a different way of being.”
I do this through one-on-one coaching and mentoring with individuals and within organisations. I help CEOs build strong and deep organisational cultures around their and their team’s values. Through workshops and retreats, I support organisations live their values in everything they do.
The key part of the journey is to get to know yourself and from there, get to know others and be connected to your broader surroundings. It might sound somewhat ephemeral but I’ve helped leaders in some of the world’s largest organisations take unprecedented leaps into the unknown to transform their lives, their businesses and entire industry sectors.
You can read some of my clients’ feedback on the Testimonials page.
“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good —
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
For more than 25 years, I’ve supported business leaders to improve the way they interact with people and the environment.
Before founding The Forest Trust in 1999, I worked as a consultant to businesses in Australia, across SE Asia, in Europe and Russia.
With TFT, I pioneered the Values-Transparency-Transformation-Verification (VT-TV) model with some of the world’s largest companies, working in supply chains across 20 different commodity sectors, spanning every continent and amounting to more than $1 trillion turnover. I helped business leaders understand and mitigate their supply chain impacts, build responsible sourcing programs and better interact with their stakeholders.
Today, I bring that same spirit of innovation and inspiration to my work helping business leaders to make real and meaningful progress on the many sustainability challenges the world faces.
Much remains to be done and being connected to your Values is the critical starting point in any program to move your business forward on sustainability issues.
“God help us to change. To change ourselves and to change our world. To know the need for it. To deal with the pain of it. To feel the joy of it. To undertake the journey without understanding the destination. The art of gentle revolution.
Amen.”
I live in rural Switzerland in the foothills of the Jura range that runs from France, through the length of Switzerland, all the way to Germany in the east.
I spend as much time as possible outside, either walking with Finn through the agricultural lands in the foothills or, more happily, in the forests that cloak the slopes that lead on high to the majestic “La Dole”, at 1,677m, the second highest peak in the Swiss Jura.
This walking is good for me and I am convinced that it’s good for everyone. Time in Nature helps us leave our stresses behind. It helps us to connect to ourselves, to each other and to Nature herself. It’s deeply healing for the body and the mind and a great springboard to a better life.
I offer walking services to people, both individuals or teams, who wish to walk in Nature. These can be “Wee walks” of anything up to a full day or “Big Walks” that span anything up to a week.
“Here man may acquire a nearer perspective of himself in relation to the trees. Here he may regain a sense of the rhythm of nature and be attuned to the universe.”
Since June 2016, I’ve been working with my friend Julien Troussier to offer 1, 2 and 5 day Retreats in Switzerland, Italy and France. These are held in the mountains and comprise much time spent in the stunning Nature of the region.
The Retreats aim to help people get connected to themselves, to their Duck, and to inspire them to live and speak from that place in their interactions with others.
We offer Retreats for mixed groups of no more than 12 individuals, most who don’t know each other before the Retreats and for groups from within organisations where a broader aim is to help build strong teams and organisational cultures. So far more than 100 people have experienced our Retreats and they’ve described the experience as “profound” and “life-changing.”
“What would have happened to me had I never had that pond, if I’d never had that safe place to recover? I got back in the car, breathed a deep sigh, and looked back, just once, to that little boy and his dogs at that pond. The sun was setting behind him, and he was smiling.”
I love interacting with people!
I get immense joy from sharing my thinking and grappling with new and wondrous ideas as people share back. I am always seeking to challenge myself beyond where I am today but also to challenge others - individuals, organisations and society as a whole - because I believe that we aren’t where we need to be; climate change and our litany of social and environmental woes are testimony to that. I believe that critical thinking and truthful, courageous, humble and compassionate conversation is the only way we can move forward.
I’m a published author - “Good Wood, Good Business” and “Beyond Certification” - and I have a unique and special relationship with the mysterious and shy N.A. Moncrief to support the marketing of his biographical novel, “The Magical Appearance of Earthworms.”
I blog, produce my own podcast, make videos and speak at my own events and as an invited speaker.
