Testimonials

I have benefited tremendously from having Professor Keith Straughan as my personal coach. Having a portfolio career across economic consulting, government and academia I occasionally suffer from an inability to focus due to overwhelm, which Keith uses his skills as a hot knife through butter to address my issues. After engaging with Keith, I feel my ambitions are more achievable and I can focus on highest value goals – allowing me to sift the great out of the many goods.Engaging a coach required me to make a mental shift to open up and be really honest. But with Professor Keith Straughan my only regret has been not having requested him to coach me sooner.

Keith has gone above anything I was expecting. I look forward to our sessions. He has helped me to face my leadership challenges more effectively. I would highly recommend Keith.

It was the first time to have an official tutor and I was very lucky to have picked Keith. He has been instrumental for my growth personally and professionally, he helped me in understanding my value based on my skills and experience increasing my confidence very crucial in my current career and of course for future opportunities. He helped me position myself in the market opening new avenues never considered before. His leadership style is exactly what a person with my personality needed and I would recommend him to anyone.

My coaching sessions with Keith have been undoubtedly one of the best investments I have made in my business. As a new small business owner, I was finding myself bogged down with the operations side of things and Keith has offered much welcomed (and needed) clarity and support. I feel very lucky to have access to someone who has achieved so much in the business world, as Keith has.

I had limited success with coaching prior to working with Prof. Straughan. My prior coaching engagements had been too rigid in format or too narrow in scope which led to limited personal and professional growth. This all changed when I began working with Prof. Straughan. He deftly adjusted his approach to draw out better and more ambitious goals than I myself had created for our time together and has helped me update and evolve those goals as professional conditions and personal circumstances have changed. In other words, he helps me ‘grow the pie’ – finding adjacencies or framings that take our joint explorations (and learnings) and apply them to new challenges in and out of the office. More than anything, Prof. Straughan creates a comfortable environment for open dialogue, frank conversation, and space for vulnerability – to combine that with his careful reflection, demonstrated understanding, and tremendously valuable advice, makes for a unique combination.

Keith has been providing me with leadership coaching for approximately one year now. Prior to starting coaching, I was quite apprehensive and unsure of what to expect: I wasn’t entirely sure what leadership coaching entailed, how it differed from mentorship, or how any of this could help me develop in the ways that I desired. From the first session, Keith put me at ease. With his laid-back, amiable manner and astute intellect, I found it both easy and hugely engaging to talk with him. Keith addressed all of my concerns and helped me to understand how I could get the most out of our sessions together. Early on, we initiated a 360-feedback survey with my colleagues, and Keith helped me in interpreting the results of this and in identifying my foremost strengths and weaknesses as a leader. Since then, throughout our sessions, Keith has provided me with invaluable guidance on how I can improve myself. The insights that he draws through careful and considered analysis of the real work situations in which I find myself have helped me overcome many of the challenges that I have encountered and learn from those experiences. Over time, we referred less frequently back to those 360 outcomes, and our sessions became more dynamic and unstructured: they would often be driven by a scenario that I may have encountered at work or a particular topic that he or I were interested in exploring that particular session. For me, this worked very well as I prefer this more flexible way of working. I’m sure that for others, more structure and continual focus may be preferable or even necessary, and I’m confident that Keith would recognize this and adapt accordingly, as he did with me. Keith has a real depth of knowledge in the area of strategic leadership, as evidenced by his laudable ability to link his insights and expositions to theories outlined in books and articles written in the field; Keith is never without a book recommendation. He is also an exceptionally strong communicator, able to describe leadership theories and concepts in a readily digestible and actionable manner. As someone who likes to understand the theory behind the practice but lacks any prior management or business training, I have found these twin talents to be incredibly valuable in helping me gain the most from these sessions. Towards the end of our year together, I was struggling with a particularly challenging situation at work. I found Keith’s support during this period to be invaluable. He was always available and willing to talk things through with me, and I greatly appreciated his insights and dedication to helping me during this period. Overall, Keith has been a crucial part of my personal and professional growth over the past year, and I am deeply grateful for his guidance and support

I very much enjoyed our wide-ranging conversations. They took me out of my day-to-day context and allowed my brain to wander. While our conversations provided strong intellectual stimulus, the atmosphere of our talks gave me satisfaction and comfort. [Keith] creates a space in which [his] coachees can relax and reflect. [He is] flexible in style, switching from probing to (at times) mentoring. [His] intellectual bandwidth and curiosity ensures that topics can vary greatly both in breadth and depth.

Prof. Keith Straughan is a superb coach. He can scrutinise what is beneath the surface, to understand the underlaying reasons for a professional’s behavior. He incentivises our cognitive capabilities to ensure the learned lessons are deeply in our minds, to guarantee that our actions and reactions will follow suit. He changed my life, both professionally and personally. Boosted my energy, changed the way I felt about my environment and my colleagues’ reactions, providing me with tools to boost my abilities. Keith positions himself as a partner more than a coach, he celebrates together our evolution. It was wonderful. I will have him again as my coach soon, definitely. 

I worked with Keith for around 6 months, embarking on the process with only a rough idea of what I hoped to gain from coaching. Despite having referred dozens of others for coaching, it was my first experience of working with an executive coach, so I was naturally curious to see how it would pan out. Our sessions each had a slightly different dynamic, ranging from the gently meandering and reflective to those of a much more practical nature. While I have not yet had the opportunity to fully assess how the insights I gained from my time working with Keith will show up in my professional life, I have already noticed that I feel more comfortable leaning in to the more strategic aspects of my role. I have also observed that when dealing with work-related frustrations, I am better able to contextualise and contain them as minor hurdles on a more clearly sketched out – and appealing – future career path than I felt I had previously, and I am therefore less likely to get distracted or derailed by such challenges. These changes are subtle but significant, and I am incredibly grateful to Keith for his gentle yet deliberate guidance to enable this old dog to learn a few new tricks!

Keith is a great listener, he is approachable and can leverage his extensive career in our coaching  session. I really appreciate that Keith always tries to stretch me outside my comfort zone and tries to elevate my ambitions. We have been working together for a year now and I very easily refer to Keith when having to take some critical decisions, e.g. career decisions, and in those instances, he can make himself available at very short notice which is much appreciated. I would really recommend Keith as an executive coach.

Keith provided a space for me to truly consider what it means to be an advocate for myself in the professional space. He asked insightful questions that prompted me to traverse a new career path, and I couldn’t be more grateful for that push.

I have enjoyed working with [Keith] over the last few months. This was my first experience with a coach, and [Keith has] made it an amazing one so far. I love that [Keith has] allowed the flow of what’s going on to lead to what we discuss each week instead of having a rigid structure, set themes, and talking points. I came to this role with a huge imposter syndrome and anxiety about whether I have what it takes, but [Keith’s] coaching style has also allowed me to build confidence in my ability to take on this role while also discovering where I fall short and learning how best to build capacity and grow. I have also been impressed by how easy it has been for [Keith] to understand the full context around me, our company, and our country. I haven’t had to educate [him] extensively on any aspect of our culture or my background. Overall, for the first coaching experience for me, I couldn’t have asked for better, and for that, I am very grateful. 

Keith Straughan is highly professional and highly ethical coach, being a great help in navigating through the professional career, its lows and highs. Working closely with Keith, I was able to polish my strategic thinking and adopt a coaching leadership style to educate and develop my teams further. I highly recommend Keith to any leader looking for further professional development!

From my first session with Keith I was confident that I had a safe space to be honest, that the support I would receive would be given from a perspective of experience and knowledge which would enable me to achieve my objectives. Immediately I felt in safe hands and I looked forward to learning from Keith. Throughout our year of knowing each other Keith maintained a friendly environment that allowed me to be open without fear of judgment. Keith was always supportive and went above and beyond to ensure that I was always doing well. I felt at all times that if needed I could contact Keith. His support and coaching was invaluable to me, leading me to see the bigger picture and act strategically, the outcome of which was positive in ways I couldn’t have imagined in terms of my achievements. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Keith as a coach for any senior management person looking to focus on their growth.

Keith supported me for more than 9 months on an intensive coaching program, aimed at increasing my self confidence in Strategic Thinking and Communication. I found Keith’s professional support immensely valuable since he was able to progress my ability to explain complex concepts in a structured but brief and efficient way. I recommend Keith to all professionals who are in need to improve either strategic thinking or communication, as he was fully successful in my case.

I really enjoyed the sessions as [Keith] guided my thought processes in a super helpful way. I liked the style and blend of coaching – and occasional mentoring – which made the time together authentic, which in my experience is hard.

Our coaching journey has been really personal and inspiring. I felt understood and supported, with the biggest contribution being identifying my strengths and areas of improvement and analysing the available study path in line with my profile and expectations. [Keith’s] guidance and professional and academic expertise have been key to evaluate and manage my lack of motivation in the workplace and find innovative and tailored solutions.

I very much valued Keith’s way of making me think and talk. This helped me address the issues at hand and find possible solutions, i.e. behavioural changes on my side. We also linked the situation to other development topics that I was aware of. So our discussions broadened. It was a very positive experience and certainly helped me improve the issue we were tackling.

I found my coaching sessions with Keith to be incredibly valuable – personally and professionally. I felt that Keith very quickly realized my rather pragmatic communication style and goals and tailored our interactions accordingly. Keith is a wonderful listener, asks very thoughtful questions and leaves plenty of space and time for reflection in between. After developing some goals together, Keith held me accountable; as a result, I made significant progress on projects related to my professional growth that I had been sitting on for quite some time. He’s also a very kind person and a pleasure to talk with. 

Keith’s coaching was instrumental in helping me appreciate my true value as a professional and as a leader. His coaching style is relaxed and engaging. Keith builds trust very naturally and asks relevant, highly perceptive questions which draw from his own extensive experience in business and academia. He challenged my thinking in a very subtle way, which prompted me to think deeply about whether I was making the most of my potential. In short, I’d highly recommend working with Keith.