Our Team
Our HQ Team
Louise Chester
Founder & Managing Director
Accredited Trainers
Richard Armes
Bringing his mindfulness practice to all that he does, he now enjoys continued involvement with the financial markets through mentoring and coaching traders and helping to develop effective management tools and processes.
Richard has an Honours degree in Mathematics from the University of Bristol.
Dr Stuart Baker
Sarah Brimelow
Having held senior operational and management roles in national organisations and government bodies Sarah excels when working with organisations that value innovation and creativity and is recognised as a top coach, leadership and management training provider. She works nationally and internationally specialising in Mindfulness, Management and Leadership, Communications, Coaching and Facilitation.
She is a member of the Association of Coaching, a certified NLP Practitioner and holds both APMG PRINCE2 Practitioner and APM qualifications. She is also a qualified Cross Cultural Trainer and Executive Coach.
Sarah is a volunteer Trainer with the Shannon Trust, working in prisons to train prisoners to teach other prisoners to improve their literacy and reading skills.
Dr Nick Buckley
Wheezie Cottrell
Mike Grindle
Mike is an accredited Professional Executive Coach, Mindfulness Trainer and Teacher. He completed his training with the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice, Bangor University and continues to follow their Continuing Personal and Professional Development Programme. Mike is a long term Mindfulness practitioner which he originally came to through his interest and practice in yoga. He has found his Mindfulness practice to be a great personal resource and an underpinning to his work as an Executive Coach.
He has a particular interest in working with organisations to develop the awareness and attention skills of their employees through the practice of Mindfulness; using these skills as a base to improving performance and developing more effective leadership through the cultivation of Emotional Intelligence. In this respect, he is a qualified practitioner of the Leadership psychometric, the Emotional Capital Report, and a coach of the related Emotional Intelligence competencies.
Meredith Gunderson
Anna Kane
Anne Loyd
Anne writes for the Huffington Post on women and women’s issues. She holds a Bachelor of Business Studies and is currently writing her first non-fiction book.
Izzy McRae
Dr Julia Ronder
Julia has practised meditation since her late teens. She taught mindfulness to adolescents for 12 years as part of a DBT programme for self-harming adolescents. She is also the co-ordinator of the Kent group of the Janki Foundation, which runs regular silent retreats for healthcare practitioners.
Julia is a trained Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) Teacher with the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. She is passionate about the MSC model as a means of learning to manage emotions, and develop inner resilience.
Dr Clara Seeger
Clara has developed her own mindfulness-based coaching methodology and is passionate about introducing the benefits and neuroscience of mindfulness to the corporate world, both theoretically and practically. She is the author of Mindfulness At Work In A Week: Learn To Be Mindful In Seven Simple Steps (Hachette UK, 2016), a practical and neuroscience-based introduction to mindfulness for the workplace. Her previous book Investing in Meaning – An Alternative Approach to Leveraging your Portfolio (Completely Novel, 2012), is a coaching book for helping professionals maximise their sense of meaning at work.
Jo Shanahan
Julie Stannard
Julie is a qualified British Wheel of Yoga teacher and has been involved in teaching Mindfulness-based practices since 2005. She set up her own business in 2007 and teaches Mindfulness courses, private yoga classes, individual tuition and development, workshops and retreats in the UK and abroad. Julie has been delivering ‘Health in the Workplace’ training, working closely with a local employer for a number of years, using Mindfulness practices to both alleviate stress and develop employee performance.
Nicki Tanner
Nicki has worked in Business Consulting and People Development for over 20 years, specialising in change management and leadership development. She has wide experience of facilitation, team development and executive coaching in organisations as diverse as professional services (particularly law firms), banking and finance, publishing houses not for profit and most recently education. Her interest in promoting wellbeing, resilience and working under pressure sprung from her coaching experiences, helping people to find strategies and tools to be and perform at their best. Most recently she has returned to her psychology background, starting a PhD out of Loughborough Business School and Department of Exercise and Health Science. Her research focus is on the use of mindfulness and exercise to develop maximum health, resilience and peak performance. Trained in mindfulness with Bangor University, Nicki applies her practice both personally and professionally.
Dr Eda Uslu MD, CPCC
Eda is a Medical Doctor specialising in Pulmonology and Sleep Medicine. She has treated ten thousand patients in her 15 year career as a Medical Doctor. She is the founder of one of the first accredited Sleep Laboratories in a state hospital in Turkey and served as the chief of the Sleep Laboratory for more than 5 years, which has won many awards from both Turkish and European authorities.
“Helping people” was her childhood dream and, over time, being only a medical doctor was not enough for her. She started to research integrative medicine and with this, completed many training programmes, including Yoga Therapy and Emotional Freedom Techniques. Because she believes children are the owners of the future, she also trained in Connective Parenting and Parentology to build healthy and happy generations.
Throughout her journey, she met with mindfulness and fell in love with the scientific background supporting it, completing her training at Bangor University. She is a Certified Co-Active Coach (CTI) and has found her mindfulness practice to be a great personal resource, underpinning her work as a professional coach.
Eda set up her own business in 2013, delivering the Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course to adults and Mindfulness-based courses to children, teachers and parents. She delivers Mindfulness at Work’s MiN programmes and Taster Talks to hundreds of members of staff. She delivers all her programmes in both Turkish and English.
Renée van der Vloodt
How does one help people maintain connection with their innate talents and resources, so that they can continue to grow and express the best version of themselves?
This question has fuelled Renée’s entire professional journey and for this reason she has recently co-founded Executive Resilience Coaching to bring a brief, solution-focussed therapeutic approach to help individuals suffering with stress related problems in the workplace.
Renée is a Human Givens practitioner (PSA accredited). She is a long-standing practitioner of yoga and mindfulness and is now a trained teacher of Mindful Self-Compassion (MSC) with the Center for Mindful Self-Compassion. She is originally an Art Historian with an MA from the University of Utrecht and worked in BBC TV.
She ascribes her ability to think outside of the box to her childhood as a Third Culture Kid, attending 12 schools in 7 countries.
Adrian Wright
He then left the City to complete his English degree and trained to teach English in the secondary and FE sector. He led a large curriculum team with over ten members of staff delivering twelve courses to over one thousand students.
Adrian discovered mindfulness meditation some years ago. Since then, he has deepened his practice through Oxford and Bangor University Mindfulness Teacher Training courses, Zen meditation, Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), Interpersonal Meditation, and The Mindfulness in Schools Project courses for teachers and students. He recently left the education sector in order to focus full time on practising and teaching mindfulness. He delivers workshops and courses in the education and corporate sector from Mindfulness at Work MiN programmes to Taster Talks to hundreds of members of staff.