About Trevor
There is life outside of work, so let's start there, shall we?
I'm Irish, although France has been home for more than 25 years so these days I'm probably a mixture of both cultures.
I can feel completely at home looking out over the Irish coastline, walking through the vineyards in Alsace, or sitting outside a French café with a coffee and a book that I'm taking far too long to finish.
I'm a dad to two grown-up daughters who I still refer to as my babies, and time with them matters enormously to me. I particularly enjoy catching up with them one-to-one as somehow the conversations are different when it's just the two of you. Although I'm not sure they'd necessarily agree that Dad needs quite as many questions answered as I do at times :)
Outside work, give me somewhere new to walk and explore, good food and great company, or an intriguing Netflix series, and I'm pretty content.
I have an interest in nutrition and make a reasonable attempt at staying fit. A bit of gym, some yoga, hiking and increasingly my e-bike, because I've reluctantly discovered that hills don't get any flatter with age.
I've also always been curious about people. Why we do what we do. Why two people can experience exactly the same situation and react completely differently. And why perfectly capable people, myself included, can sometimes be remarkably good at getting in their own way.
As it happens, that last bit had quite a lot to do with where my career eventually took me.
A career I didn't exactly plan
I started out in process improvement and Six Sigma at GE, which somehow led to people development, more than a decade at Novartis, coaching, leadership development and eventually performance psychology.
Along the way I've led people, facilitated leadership programs, coached individuals and teams and stood on stages that, earlier in my life, I would have done almost anything to avoid.
That variety has probably shaped me more than any single qualification. I've seen organisational life from the inside, including the good intentions, the pressure, politics and competing priorities.
A little of the formal stuff
Qualifications
Executive MBA
Postgraduate Performance Psychology
Oxford Executive Leadership Programme
Professional development
Systemic Team Coaching
MBTI, HBDI, DiSC, EQ-i 2.0, Immunity to Change
Languages
English & French
Yes, I wrote a book with an F-word in the title.
In 2022 I wrote Yes You Freakin' Can! (with the milder F) about something I've wrestled with myself for much of my life - how easily we can get in our own way, and what helps us do things we once thought were out of reach.
I haven't always been someone who would happily walk onto a stage in front of hundreds of people*. To be fair, I still see it as a growth challenge. There have been plenty of things I've wanted to do, or even say, while another part of me was busy producing a very convincing list of reasons why I couldn't.
Sometimes what gets in the way is confidence. Other times it's simply being more intentional about how we want to show up when it matters.
*TBH, I still use techniques from the book and my events before I walk onto a stage. They help me prepare how I want to show up and get myself in the zone. As I occasionally tell an audience, a little tongue in cheek, this s*** works. I use it too.
