Universities and business schools. Faculty and professional services staff who are asked to hold students in difficulty, often with no training for it. Students under sustained academic pressure who know what they should be doing and are not doing it. Institutions with duty-of-care obligations and student wellbeing commitments that need to be met in practice, not only in policy.

Executive education and alumni programmes. Programme directors who want a session that gives senior participants something they can use on Monday, and that does not read as another resilience module.

Companies and leadership teams. Organisations making frequent, high-stakes, relational decisions — integrations, restructurings, cross-border work — where a leader’s capacity to stay clear affects far more than the decision in front of them.

Talks and keynotes. 60–90 minutes. The core premise and a small number of practices participants can use immediately. Suited to conferences, alumni events, faculty away days, or delivered to a single team.

Faculty and staff training. Four to six sessions over a term, groups of 12–30. Builds the capacity to notice what is happening in a student before moving to fix it: attention before regulation. Most training in this area goes straight to techniques for calming a distressed person. A person who is calmed before they have been understood tends to come back with the same difficulty. This starts one step earlier.

Student-facing courses. A for-credit elective embedded in a degree programme, or a standalone series commissioned by programme leadership. I currently teach The Action Gap at Esade, an undergraduate elective on why students who know exactly what to do still do not do it.

Executive and corporate programmes. Tailored engagements for leadership teams, scoped to the decisions the team is actually facing. Typically a half-day or a short series rather than a single session.

Every engagement starts with a conversation. I want to understand the specific pressures your people are under, what has already been tried, and what did not work, before I propose anything, so that when a proposal comes, it is built around your situation rather than adapted from something I ran elsewhere.

There are no associates. The person who designs the programme is the person in the room.

For over twenty years I worked inside the experimental literature on how people are influenced by things they never consciously notice.

One example. In a study on brand perception, we paired brand names with attributes presented below the threshold of awareness. Participants could not report having seen anything. Their evaluations of those brands shifted anyway.¹

The paper was selected as the best article published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology that year.

What held my attention was never that the effect occurred. It was the mechanism: what process produced it. That is how I have always worked, and it is why the programmes I design begin with understanding rather than with technique.

I follow the research on decision-making under acute stress closely, and what it shows is consistent: stress does not simply make decisions harder. It changes which considerations reach the decision at all.²

None of this, on its own, changes anyone. That gap is what sent me to train further: the 350-hour Compassionate Inquiry® Professional Online Training, and ten weeks of specialist training in recognising and responding to acute emotional distress.

I have not left the research behind. My current work is on psychological safety in the classroom: what makes someone willing to speak when they only half understand something, and to keep going after an early setback. That work, with Raquel H. Ribeiro, is published in Research in Learning Technology (open access).³ And I teach The Action Gap at Esade, an undergraduate elective on why people who know exactly what to do still do not do it.