I spent twenty years building careers like the one I had to dismantle.
I’m James. I help senior professionals see the identity pattern running their career – and interrupt it before it costs them another decade.
This page is the longer answer to who is this man. If you’ve already taken the Dossier, this is the context behind it.
I had to change before my situation changed.
For two decades I ran transformation programmes for global organisations. Banking, consulting, the kind of work where the slides are good and the politics are worse. I was respected. I was useful. I was paid well.
I was also, quietly, doing the same rinse-and-repeat on every project – and I felt trapped. Something inside me was screaming to build a new direction for my career, but I was stuck in the pattern. It was hard to stop. Hard to step back. Hard to ask the question that mattered: what do I want?
And even when I did ask, I was stuck inside the vantage point of what I already knew. I couldn’t see further than the role I was already in.
The lightbulb moment wasn’t a breakdown. It wasn’t a crisis. It was simpler – and harder – than that. I realised I needed to change before my situation changed me. Before redundancy, or burnout, or a relationship, or a body, made the choice for me.
It was scary. It felt mysterious. I didn’t have a map to get there.
So I decided I’d have to make one.
I went back to a place I’d already fallen in love with as a boy.
On the edge of a quaint British village, on the outskirts of London, sits an 80-acre property. I stayed there one summer holiday as a schoolboy. It captured my heart and never quite let go.
After my studies, I went back – not as a visitor, but to join full time. For two years I trained in a 5,000-year-old bhakti tradition – the science of ancient wisdom. Not to escape the world, but to build the things the corporate world had never asked of me: confidence, purpose, meaningful relationships, an honest answer to who am I when nobody’s watching.
Then came twenty years in global organisations. And it was twenty years in – deep in a career crisis – that everything I’d learned at the Manor came back. Not as nostalgia. As a map.
What I came back with wasn’t spiritual decoration. It was a working model of how identity is constructed – and how it gets dismantled, and rebuilt, on purpose.
That model became the spine of the INNER Method.
The years in the ashram. Plus twenty in the suit. That combination is the work.
I know what sits underneath it.
I know how identity hardens around a role, and how it can soften again. I know the difference between the version of you that performs at work and the version that exists on Saturday — and what to do about the gap.
I know the language.
I built strategic plans, managed transformations, navigated boards, sat in the rooms. I know what your week actually looks like, what your manager actually says, what your CV actually does to you.
Coaching teaches you better thinking. Therapy works on how you feel. Neither one was enough.
I’d done both. I’d read the books. I’d had the breakthroughs. And I still kept arriving at the same place – promoted into a role I didn’t want, by a version of me I no longer was.
The thing nobody was naming was the identity pattern doing the choosing. Most career advice asks what do you want next? The harder question is what’s been running you all along?
The INNER Method is the answer I built for myself, then refined by walking 500 other senior professionals through the same process. Five letters. Five interruptions to the loop that got you here.
Credentials, briefly stated.
One of the world’s most rigorous coaching programmes
Scaled up the IIBA mentorship scheme – compiling materials, training mentors, facilitating pairs. Helped hundreds of project experts find their next chapter.
On career identity, transformation, and the inner work behind outer change
Bhaktivedanta Manor, on the outskirts of London
Through identity and career shifts. 5,416 hours of training and coaching delivered.
Banking, consulting, programme management
When I’m not doing this, you’ll find me on our small family farm in Portugal – growing our own food, together.
I won’t recommend a practice I haven’t lived with. That’s the only rule.
Three ways in. One direction.
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