Helping leaders to have more effective conversations.

A coach and business trainer, Meirion Jones helps leaders to have more effective conversations.

When I’m feeling self-important, I describe myself as having had a hyphenate career; in my more reflective moments, I’ll admit that the first 25 years of my working life were aimless. I meandered purposelessly from art college to bookselling, journalism to ghost writing health books, public relations to management consulting and, ultimately, marketing director roles in large city firms. If I’d had a coat of arms it would have been inscribed with the motto, Sumere Viam Minima Resistente* (* take the line of least resistance).

I think a part of me was always aware of this underlying lack of purpose and it left me feeling unfulfilled and frustrated. As a form of compensation, I’d try to impose structure on my colleagues and our working environments, usually in the form of beautifully drafted strategy, business planning, sales and training plans. The general indifference to this planning work only fed my feelings of ineffectiveness. In my final in-house role – in a huge US firm – I realised that not only was I unable to take horses to water, but that I even lacked the skills to help them to understand how thirsty they were.

I was in my late 40s, when, working with a US business school to develop a partner training curriculum, I discovered coaching. Its power to unleash transformational insights and to unlock hitherto hidden skills, resources and levels of self-determination blew my mind. The coaching I received changed my life and set me on a developmental path that I’ve been on ever since.

In 2012 I enrolled on Meyler Campbell’s Mastered Programme. This was a critical step in enabling me to run my own coaching and training business, reasonably successfully, for the past fifteen years. As I went through the programme I realised that every aspect of my service offering – be it sales and business development, negotiation, leadership, collaboration, business planning or managing transitions – is grounded in the principles of coaching: of asking and listening, of encouraging reflective self-discovery and of immersing oneself in service of the client’s own process. In a working environment nothing comes close to coaching for instilling greater self-awareness – in individuals and teams – which I see as the essential requirement for meaningful, deep-rooted change.

There were many valuable aspects of the Mastered Programme, not least the opportunity to work with fascinating and very differently-minded cohort members. Perhaps the most useful aspect of the programme, and of Meyler Campbell’s general philosophy, is its unfettered jackdaw-like approach towards coaching models and subject matter. Jungian archetypes, the artfully vague language models of Milton Erickson and Galway’s inner games have all been instrumental in helping me to develop a toolbox which follow no unifying principle other than their ability to potentiate the work I do with my clients.

It’s this agnostic, open-minded approach that has, in turn, encouraged me to develop an approach to coaching of my own – which I call Illustrated Coaching. This integrates my training as an illustrator with exploratory coaching conversations, visiting the motifs images, archetypes, metaphors and dream of my coaching client, to create imagery that encapsulates their journey.

Without the support, intellectual richness, and the breadth of the Meyler Campbell network to use as a sounding board in developing this approach, I suspect my life would now be on a very different path.

Meirion Jones is a coach and business trainer. He helps leaders to have more effective conversations. Meirion graduated from Meyler Campbell Mastered in 2012.