Custom coaching programmes… because sometimes it’s about you
Sometimes the work isn't about the whole family. Sometimes, it's about you.
The owner navigating the tension between what the business needs and what you need.
The leader who's inherited a role that nobody properly prepared you for.
The next generation trying to find your footing in a system that was built before you arrived.
The non-family executive doing extraordinary work inside a dynamic you weren't born into and can't always read so well.
In some cases working with the wider family system in a consulting process is the best place to start - and sometimes, a personal coaching programme is called for as a first stage.
Whether you’re part of the family or not, whether you’re an owner, whether you’re in the founding generation or the rising generation:
When you know the business needs help but you can’t escape a feeling of being alone, or being unable to make change happen, working with a personal coach means you’re helping the business by helping yourself.
What Coaching Is And Does
One-to-one work, focused entirely on you, to gain clarity in complex systems.
Coaching with The Mickel Practice is private, personal, and deeply transformative.
No generic leadership development or executive coaching in family business language, but reflective support and thought-partnership, for you to constantly improve your ability to engage with the challenges you face.
The pressures, expectations, and loyalties, the unspoken rules and relational complexities: these all require a thoughtful, effective treatment.
We look at the decisions you’re avoiding and the conversations you wish were happening.
I help you embrace your realities in all their complexities. Engaging with life as it is, not how you think it ‘should’ be.
This helps you illuminate - and liberate yourself from - stuck and destructive patterns in your life, transforming your relationship with yourself and others.
Working with a coach develops your skills, your resilience, your communication, and as a result you’ll get far more done inside the family system.
The basis of my practice is systemic thinking and coaching, helping you to develop your capacity to navigate the complex systems in which you live and work.
You’ll get my trademark presence, empathy and honesty, the same that I bring to my consultancy work - but here, the focus is entirely on you.
Who This Is For
Founders and owners who want to clarify what should come next - for the business, for the family, and for themselves. Who might be questioning their role, or their identity, or the legacy they want to leave - but who carry the weight of decisions that affect everyone they love and everything they’ve worked for.
Next-generation family members - perhaps you’re stepping into leadership, navigating the shift from family member to business leader, or maybe that’s in the past but now you’re trying to find a way to honour what came before… whilst building something of your own.
Non-family executives and leaders working inside a family business and who need a confidential space to make sense of the family system dynamics - and to lead effectively within them.
When you’re at a crossroads: facing a transition, or a conflict, or maybe this is a moment that calls for clarity and it’s hard to find it when you're deep inside the situation.
Or maybe the best thing for you personally is to leave the business or even sell it… but what about your loyalty to employees or ancestors, what about all that’s been built and created in the past, what about the values that you insist an acquirer have?
How do you make a decision you’re proud of and that you can stand by?
You get a coach. And if you think that might be me, let’s talk.
What To Expect
This isn't a process. It's a conversation that goes somewhere.
Coaching sessions take place one-to-one, and always in confidence.
We work at a pace that suits you, and we deal with those issues that matter most in the moment, while keeping the longer arc of what you're working towards in view.
Because of that emergent nature of coaching I don't bring an agenda or a prescribed framework. Instead I bring the ability to listen at depth, to ask the questions that unlock and advance your thinking, and to hold the space for you to arrive at clarity that's genuinely yours and that enables your best decision-making yet.
Some clients work with me for a focused period around a specific transition or decision, and others retain an ongoing coaching relationship as a private space for reflection and accountability. We'll work out together what’s going to be most helpful for your situation.
It’s not always an easy process to be coached and it requires that you bring openness and fortitude - but when you do, it becomes a powerful and very effective journey.
A Note On Confidentiality
What happens in coaching, stays in coaching.
It’s quite common for a business family to retain me for consultancy work, while an individual in the family business system receives personal coaching.
Let me reassure you that your individual coaching work and its conversation remains entirely separate and confidential. What you share with me in a coaching context is never fed back into the wider family work without your prior explicit knowledge and consent.
That boundary is non-negotiable. It's what makes the space safe enough to be useful.
Interested In Exploring Coaching?
The first conversation is always about fit — for you as much as for me. Tell me a little about where you are, and we'll take it from there.