COACHING PHILOSOPHIA · A ONE-TO-ONE PHILOSOPHICAL PRACTICE
The problem is you.
You were never the problem.
For people who did everything right and still feel hollowed out. You cannot leave the machine, and I will not pretend you can. This practice teaches you to stand free inside it.
DR. RODNEY KING · ISLE O MAN
THE SITUATION
You did everything they told you. The qualifications came, then the promotion that quietly ate your evenings. There is a meditation app on your phone gathering guilt. And still, on certain mornings, before the first meeting takes you, a thought gets through that you have trained yourself to push away before it finishes: something here is wrong, and it might not be me.
That thought is correct, and this practice exists to take it seriously.
Modern working culture has one great trick. When its promise fails, and it fails on schedule, it sells you back yourself as the problem. Your discipline was the issue, or your mindset, anything but the pace, anything but the strange arithmetic of measuring a human life in quarterly increments. Then an industry of self-improvement stands ready to repair the person the machine just broke, using the machine's own logic, so you can be fed back in smoothly. The treadmill does not care whether you are running toward ambition or toward healing. It only cares that you keep running.
THE REFUSAL
Two promises, before anything else.
I will not sell you the exit. There are mortgages and there are school runs, and the machine has no door marked exit; it is the condition we live inside, the water and the weather. Anyone selling you an escape is selling a holiday brochure printed on the machine's own presses.
And I will not try to fix you. Fixing is the repair industry's business, and it depends on you agreeing that you are broken. You were never broken. What you are is under-equipped for a fight nobody told you that you were in.
THE WORK
If you cannot get out, the question becomes who you are going to be in here, and people have been answering it for over two thousand years. Epictetus worked it out as a slave. Marcus Aurelius worked at it while running the empire, keeping one small territory, his own mind, beyond the reach of the machine he operated. For them philosophy was survival technology, a set of daily practices for staying human inside conditions you cannot control, and that is exactly how it is practised here.
Nothing gets read for the sake of having read it. The work is trained the way I trained fighters, through repetition and correction, over time: your attention brought back under your own command, presence held inside pressure you cannot run from, and somewhere private, a self that is never submitted for review. I call the result rebellion, and I use the word deliberately. Camus drew the line I stand on: the rebel says no, and inside that no defends something worth a yes.
The rebellion is small and mostly invisible, practised daily, and it changes more than you. A person who stands this way inside an organisation changes the weather around them; meetings become more honest simply because they are in the room. I call it being a light in the machine.
YOUR CONERMAN
I built the kind of life modernity says should make you happy.
From being homeless at 17, I went on to build a global brand and spend three decades coaching people from Tier 1 special forces and law enforcement to airline cabin crew, corporate teams, and everyday people on how to stay present inside pressure they cannot run from, and to protect themselves without shutting down.
On paper, I had many of the markers modern culture tells us to chase. The house in the right postcode, children in private schools, and professional recognition. Even though I never finished high school, I went back to school, earning a PhD in mindful-embodied leadership, with a 2nd PhD in applied philosophy underway at Rhodes University. Alongside this I completed two master’s degrees, a Fellow-level coaching accreditation with the IAPC&M, and certified as a Philosophical Counselor (APPA).
I have worked within organisations such as Google, Airbnb, Facebook, and Singapore Airlines, to name just a few.
Then came a life-changing health crisis.
In the long climb back, something became painfully clear. For much of my life, I had been chasing the accolades of modernity, believing they would eventually deliver the sense of peace, meaning, and wholeness I was looking for. But they never quite did. And the more honestly I spoke with people, the more I realised I was not alone.
Many had done everything “right”. They had earned the qualifications, secured the promotion, built the career, bought the house, kept going, kept producing, kept performing. Yet somewhere beneath it all, often in the quiet of the morning, the same question remained: What if something here is wrong, and it is not actually me?
What I teach now, one person at a time, is a form of rebellion. It begins with bringing your attention back under your own command. It deepens when you stop handing your inner life over for constant review. It grows when you learn how to remain present, grounded, and human inside systems that often reward the opposite.
HOW IT BEGINS
The work opens with an arc of four sessions, one to one over Zoom, forty-five minutes each. In-person work is possible on the Isle of Man and, by arrangement, elsewhere. The arc is a beginning rather than the whole; some people stay a season, some months.
I.
Locate
Before anything can change, the honest map. We find the point where the machine's account of your life stopped matching your own, and we name what pretending otherwise has been costing you.
II.
Loosen
Every script you were sold arrived with its installer hidden: work harder, want it more. We loosen the beliefs that hold the treadmill together, and you discover how few of them you ever actually chose.
III.
Lean In
The fighter's move. Avoidance is a defeat and so is collapse; the trained alternative is presence inside the pressure. You learn to stay in range without being hit, in the boardroom and in the silence at your desk at nine at night.
IV.
Live It
Philosophical-Coaching that stays inside the session is decoration. We build your daily practice, the un-optimised walk, the true thing said once in the meeting, a rhythm of small rebellions that nobody needs to notice for them to work.
THE TERMS
THE FOUR-SESSION ARC £400
CONTINUING WORK, PER SESSION £80
THE FIRST CONVERSATION, 15 MIN FREE
The price is on this page because hiding it behind a sales call is the machine's move, and a practice built on honesty should not begin with a trap. I take on a small number of people at a time. That is a fact about the work, whatever it sounds like: the kind of attention it asks of me does not scale, and I would never want it to.
FROM A CLIENT
" I approached Dr King because I was at a crossroads. We explored how to welcome back a side of myself I had set aside for years, and what integrating it into my work could look like. The clarity that followed was a direct outcome of working with him, and I highly recommend his philosophical coaching.
Christoph Spiessens · Founder of the Manchester Mindfulness Festival, MA in Teaching Mindfulness
THE DOOR
If any of this landed somewhere real, begin with a conversation. Fifteen minutes, free, unscripted, with no funnel waiting at the end of it. Come with your situation in your own words; polish is not required. We find out whether this work and your life fit, and if they do not, I will say so and point you somewhere better.
Still deciding? Read the manifesto. It is free and always will be, and it will tell you faster than any sales page whether I am your man.
“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”
- Albert Camus