Gemma Bullivant

Executive Coach

Gemma started her career as an in-house HR professional in the late 1990s. After working in senior leadership for some time, she decided to train professionally as a coach, to build on her experience and deepen her knowledge and expertise. She has been a fully accredited freelance coach since 2016, working with a wide variety of blue-chip clients across a range of sectors, including media, technology, financial services, and FMCG.

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Background

Gemma offers a unique grief coaching programme to employees who have experienced traumatic loss, and want to recover from the impact of this loss quickly, to enable them to re-engage with the working world and be the best they can be at work.

Having experienced a significant traumatic loss herself while in a senior leadership position in 2010, she found that her employer was keen to be supportive but found nothing suitable to help her. After a relatively short time she was expected to continue to operate as normal in her senior HR role, working alongside board-level directors, managing a large global team and budget, and coping with an extremely busy working week, all the while feeling ill-equipped to do this effectively.

Coaching Speciality

Gemma is a coaching specialist in grief training, and now uses this blended skillset to help individuals to positively address and recover from all forms of traumatic change and loss, including redundancy, divorce and bereavement.

Coaching Style

Because every person is different Gemma’s approach is individual and bespoke. Whilst occasionally challenging, what underpins her approach is a sense of trust and respect – a safe and positive space for clients to develop, move forward and grow.

As a positive psychologist, she fundamentally believes no one strives to be average and favours a strengths-based approach to enable individuals to truly flourish, leverage their strengths and reach their fullest potential, focusing only on weaknesses where they are genuinely hindering progress.

Her values reflect how she works:

Compassionate – a belief that caring about the people within organisations is the right thing to do, that people in organisations matter and that happy, fulfilled people deliver results.

Engaging – there’s nothing worse than being ‘talked at’ or having to sit through a long, boring presentation when there’s pressing work to be done. She aims to make the coaching experience as dynamic as possible.

Action-oriented – One of her greatest strengths is her ability to simplify a complex situation into meaningful bite-sized pieces. She takes a practical, hands-on approach and has a ‘can do’ not a ‘make do’ attitude.

Training and Qualifications

MSc Applied Coaching & Positive Psychology (University of East London) – first class
PG Cert Personal & Business Coaching (University of Chester)
Professional Certified Coach (PCC) – International Coaching Federation
Chartered Fellowship (FCIPD) – Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development
Grief Recovery Specialist ®

Current Clients

Gemma works with a wide variety of blue-chip clients across a range of sectors, including media, technology, financial services, and FMCG.

Testimonials

“The six sessions I had with my ECC Coach changed my perspective of coaching. I was initially uncertain (and possibly sceptical) about the benefits of coaching but my coach read me very well and knew when to coax a response out from me by being encouraging and when to firmly push me to see the benefits of reframing some of my previously held positions.”

Head of Legal, International Property Group

“Both from my personal experience of ECC’s approach, and from seeing the impact on our company I can particularly recommend their pragmatic approach and their insight into our collective and individual needs.”

Senior Leader, Commercial Property Management and Investment Company

“The team is a pleasure to work with, consistently bringing expert advice and guidance, energy and professionalism to the partnership.”

Diversity and Inclusion Executive, Multinational Investment Bank

"The coaches at ECC are commercial, pragmatic and highly focused. The coaching they provide on an individual basis has given valuable insight and helped our senior executives to gain greater perspective in terms of managing relationships, prioritising, strategic thinking, influencing and confidence."

Senior Leader, Multinational Retailing Company

"I found my ECC coaching sessions incredibly valuable - for the unique and necessary space I was seeking as a sole proprietor to feel heard, understood and connected to a peer in business. My coaching experience provided a safe space where I could be the real me, and provided a relationship I could truly trust. Thank you ECC."

Manager, Creative Retail Agency