PHILOSOPHICAL COACHING
Stop Living by Borrowed
Definitions of Success
Philosophy-inspired coaching, for people who look functional on the outside, but feel disconnected from their own lives.
Modern life teaches us to measure our worth by achievement, productivity, status, approval, and the roles we perform well for others. For a while, that can look like success. But underneath it often brings burnout, inner conflict, and the quiet sense that somewhere along the way, you lost contact with yourself.
My work helps people step out of inherited scripts and develop a philosophy they can actually live by, one grounded in meaning, clarity, inner steadiness, and a life that feels like their own.
When outward success no longer feels like enough
You may have done many of the things you were supposed to do. You have worked hard, carried responsibility, perhaps built something substantial, and tried to live well. From the outside, things may even look fine.
But privately, something feels off.
You may be tired in a way that rest alone does not fix. You may feel split between what the world rewards and what your inner life is asking of you. You may sense that you have been living by expectations you never fully chose, and that the cost of that has been a gradual estrangement from yourself.
Sometimes people come to this work because they are burned out. Sometimes because they are in transition. Sometimes because success has not brought the depth, peace, or meaning they expected. And sometimes because a quiet but persistent question will no longer leave them alone:
How do I live in a way that is actually mine?
What philosophical coaching is
Philosophical coaching is not therapy, and it is not performance coaching.
It is a grounded, reflective, and practical form of dialogue for people who want to think more deeply about how they are living, what they believe, what they value, and what kind of life is truly theirs to live.
In our work together, we do not chase hacks, quick fixes, or borrowed formulas for success. We slow down enough to examine the deeper questions shaping your life. What are you serving? What are you measuring yourself against? Which beliefs have you inherited without ever fully choosing them? Where have you become divided against yourself? What would it mean to live with greater integrity, freedom, and wholeness?
My approach is rooted in lived philosophical practice. That means philosophy not as abstract theory, but as something to be inhabited. Something that can orient the way you work, love, choose, suffer, speak, rest, and live.
What this work can help with
This work can help you recover clarity where life has become noisy, inner authority where you have become over-dependent on external validation, and steadiness where chronic pressure has narrowed your sense of self.
It can help you think more honestly about a major life transition, a conflict you can no longer ignore, a loss of meaning, a growing sense of misalignment, or the suspicion that the life you have built no longer fits the person you are becoming.
It can also help you question inherited ideas of success, reconnect with values that feel deeply your own, and begin building a life from the inside out rather than the outside in.
You do not need to arrive with a perfectly defined problem. Sometimes the most important work begins with a vague but unmistakable knowing that something in your life needs to be rethought, reclaimed, or reinhabited.
How sessions work
Sessions are held one-to-one over Zoom and last 45 minutes.
We begin by arriving. Where helpful, this may include a brief grounding or breath-based practice to help you step out of the noise of the day and into a more reflective space.
From there, we enter into dialogue. Sometimes that means exploring a live dilemma or a difficult decision. Sometimes it means tracing a deeper pattern or contradiction in how you are living. Sometimes it means staying with a question that has been quietly shaping your life for years.
Where useful, I also bring in embodied reflection, mindfulness-based awareness, and simple integrative practices to help insight move beyond the level of thought alone.
The aim is not to leave with a temporary motivational lift. It is to leave with greater honesty, clearer orientation, and something real to live into between sessions.
My approach
My work brings together lived philosophy, reflective dialogue, embodied awareness, and decades of experience helping fellow human beings function under pressure.
I do not see human struggle merely as a matter of mindset or personal weakness.
Much of what people experience today is inseparable from the wider cultural conditions they are living inside: chronic acceleration, external validation, performative success, disconnection from inner life, and the pressure to turn oneself into a project.
That is why this work is not about helping you become more efficient at living a life that is already costing you too much. It is about helping you re-examine the terms altogether.
The goal is not perfection. It is not optimisation. It is not becoming endlessly impressive.
The goal is to help you develop a way of seeing and living that feels more truthful, more grounded, and more fully your own.
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"I approached Dr King for a philosophical coaching session because I was at a crossroads. After completing my MA in Teaching Mindfulness, I felt a strong pull to reconnect with the spiritual side of me that I had intentionally ignored during my academic years. In my coaching session with Dr King, we not only explored how to welcome back my spiritual side, but what successful integration of spirituality with my mindfulness teaching work could look like. This almost immediately resulted in creating and launching a new service for my clients called, "the Stillpoint Sessions" - an integration between Mindfulness, Spirituality, and Coaching - A Different Kind of Insight for a Different Kind of Seeker. This clarity was a direct outcome of working with Dr King, and I highly recommend his philosophical coaching sessions!"
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Christoph Spiessens
Founder of The Manchester Mindfulness Festival | MA in Teaching Mindfulness | Supervisor & Mentor
Why work with me
I came to this work not through neat theory alone, but through lived difficulty and the long process of discovering that achievement does not answer the deeper human questions.
I grew up in Johannesburg and was homeless at seventeen. Over the years, I built a global martial arts organisation taught in more than fifteen countries, worked with special forces, law enforcement, and major companies, and achieved many of the things the modern world tells us should make a person feel successful.
But eventually I was brought to a harder question: what does it mean to be human when you no longer measure your worth by what the world rewards?
That question now sits at the centre of both my professional and academic life.
I am a Philosophical Cooach (APPA), an Accredited Fellow Coach (IAPC&M), hold a PhD in Mindful-Embodied Leadership, an MA in Leading Innovation & Change, and an MSc in Health Psychology, and I am currently a PhD researcher in Philosophy at Rhodes University, where my research explores the contemporary crisis of meaning.
What I bring to this work is not only training, but lived inquiry.
“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