About us

We are a team of humanistic psychologists who have spent almost thirty years helping individuals, teams and organisations to enhance their performance. The consultancy was founded in 1979 by John Syer and Christopher Connolly, whose experience of sports participation and coaching at international level, allied to their experience of community life and their professional skills as humanistic psychologists, brought a new approach to sports training. Emphasising the inter-relatedness of mind and body, they redefined sport psychology as ‘mental training’ and pioneered the field of team development.

During the early 1980s they worked with numerous professional and national sports teams in Britain, continental Europe and the USA and wrote two books on the subject. These books produced an unexpected result: business managers invited them to translate this type of sports training into the corporate environment. Since then, our growing consultancy has worked with a wide range of national and multi-national organisations, in both public and private sectors. While the main focus is now the business world, the link with sport and performance continues, each field enhancing and informing the other. Our experience confirms that business people, like elite athletes, have a desire to perform at their best and thrive when given the means to do so. We provide those means.

Our mission is to enable people and organisations to realise their full potential and consistently perform at their best. In doing so, they meet and exceed their objectives. They also build an empowering culture and a life-enhancing work community.

Our approach is experiential and directly related to the work context. We provide tools for personal self-management and a feedback procedure that sustains team development. By giving detailed unbiased descriptions of what we see our clients do and any discernable impact such actions have, we increase their awareness and ability to change. We help organisations to align culture, processes and systems with the minds and spirits of the workforce.
We use a unique, cross-disciplinary approach in all our work, drawing on our collective backgrounds in psychology, community life, sport, business and training. This shows through in our distinctive approach to facilitation, which draws heavily on the Gestalt approach to group work.