Melissa is a self-employed coach, facilitator and mediator. Her clients include universities, law firms, social housing providers and professional bodies. Melissa’s passion lies in working with individuals and teams to help them maximise motivation and enthusiasm for their work, while also delivering for their organisations and meeting their professional and personal goals.  She supports clients to create environments in which high quality conversations and meetings can take place and during which excellent ideas and solutions are generated. Particular areas of specialism include negotiation skills and managing difficult conversations.

Although Melissa’s coaching approach varies depending on the client and issue, she favours a solutions-focussed and person-centred approach. The former encourages her clients to concentrate on positive, future-focussed steps they can take to achieve their objectives and the latter helps them build and maintain confidence in the changes they are making. Melissa is also a firm believer that ‘career’ and ‘life’ cannot realistically be separated and she therefore takes a holistic approach to her coaching conversations, taking into account all aspects of her client’s work and life more broadly.

Melissa has a commercial background, having spent the early part of her career training and practising as a solicitor in a large London law firm and subsequently working as a commercial negotiator for a global communications company in both the UK and USA. She has a BA (Hons) from the University of Birmingham and the University of California at Berkeley and she studied for her legal qualifications at the College of Law in London. Melissa is also a Myers-Briggs certified practitioner and an accredited mediator, qualified to mediate commercial and civil disputes.