Impactful coaching fosters sustainable change for the individual and transforms your business
Our global clients repeatedly describe our coaching as sharp and strategic with a pragmatic business focus. Coaching will help your people see themselves more clearly, and gain the insights they need to grow and develop.
But that’s not the whole story. We help them with the right balance of support and challenge to find their answers and the route to change. We are experts in neuroscience, including behavioural, and strategies for performance. That means it’s a long-term and sustainable transformation, and they will feel the benefit long after we have stopped working with them.
Getting the right coach for your leaders can be daunting, but we will help make it easier. Because we have been matching coaches to leaders for years, and we know what works. And our global and diverse team of coaches are the best; we carefully selected each one -all 90 plus of them.
Region
United Kingdom
Area of expertise
Women in the Workplace, Developing Leaders
Gillian Gabriel
Executive Coach
Gillian spent 26 years working in a variety of leadership and management positions in the John Lewis Partnership spanning John Lewis Department Stores, Waitrose Supermarkets, and Head Office. She knows what it’s like to lead and manage teams and all the joy and complexity that can come with that. Her soul work is Learning and Development (L&D) having spent over 23 years in L&D roles covering strategy, design, delivery, and evaluation. As a management development trainee many moons ago, she first bumped into coaching as a style, and went on to design and deliver many leadership programmes incorporating a more coaching and empowering style.
Most of all, Gillian understands what it’s like to be a human being, being human, and the emotional rollercoaster that comes with life and work challenges and change. She gets what it’s like to have self-doubt, feel a bit lost, and to need time to think. It was inevitable that her background, alongside qualifications in psychology and human resource management, and her own love of learning would lead her to specialise in coaching and to become a qualified professional coach and coaching supervisor. She believes in coaching as a powerful tool of self-discovery, awareness, realisation and action planning. She’s experienced and witnessed coaching having a significant impact on individuals who feel stuck in some way and are seeking support to untangle the spaghetti inside.
Coaching Style
Personal development and deeper growth have always been at the heart of Gillian’s work and approach. Gillian walks alongside clients, creating a respectful, professional partnership, working together in an exploration of self-awareness, self-discovery and self-belief. Seeing clients as experts of their own life, Gillian invites clients to pause, breathe, reflect, think, gain clarity, take back their power, choose, and to be comfortable with being vulnerable, brave and daring.
She works with a simple beginning, middle and end framework which enables clients’ thinking to ebb and flow. She sees clients as experts in their own life and therefore empowers them to decide the agenda and choose what happens. Gillian works with others, rather than doing it for them. She believes clients are perfectly capable and more creative than they often think at coming up with solutions.
Gillian balances support and challenge, encouraging clients into their stretch zone. She is very comfortable with silence, believes in the power of reflection, and naturally creates a thinking environment so clients can gain clarity for themselves. She invites clients to face challenges and barriers, and supports them to question their own beliefs and assumptions. She notices what clients say, and what they don’t, and follows the breadcrumbs clients lay out with curiosity, asking what the clues are telling them always in service of learning, forward movement and progress.
“I tune into what I am sensing in my gut, feeling in my heart, and wondering about in my head, and combine that with what’s going on for you to see what we can learn together. I am empathic, and treat what’s discussed with care, respect and in a non-judgemental way. I am very comfortable with others’ emotions, and will encourage you to be comfortable being yourself with me.”
The words clients most commonly use to describe Gillian’s approach are: supportive & challenging, structured & flexible, empowering & adult:adult, deep & calm, warm & non-judgemental.
Special Interests
- Building self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-belief
- Gaining clarity around identity, purpose, and values
- Climbing out of the conditioning and expectations placed on us
- Improving mental wellbeing and resilience
- Thriving in life and work uncertainty, disruption, change and transitions
- Improving personal and working relationships
Training & Qualifications
- Diploma in Coaching accredited by the ICF (International Coaching Federation)
- Diploma in Coaching Supervision accredited by the AC (Association for Coaching)
- Post Graduate Diploma in Human Resource Management
- Bachelor of Science (Honours) in Psychology
- Certificates in TA (Transactional Analysis) 101 and TA 102
- Certificate in Training Practice, CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development)
- ICF credentialed ACC (Associate Certified Coach)
- Chartered Member of the CIPD (Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development)
Current Clients
In addition to a wealth of experience as an Internal Coach and Coaching Supervisor within the retail sector, Gillian has gone on to work with clients, at all role levels, from across a number of sectors including the private, public and charity sectors. She has worked closely with employees spanning:
- Charity e.g. MIND, British Paralympic Association, SeeAbility
- Comms e.g. Google, British Telecommunications
- Education e.g. The Open University, various schools
- Energy e.g. Eon-Next, Wartsila
- Engineering e.g. EPAM Systems, Hall & Kay Fire Engineering
- Financial Services e.g. Lloyds Banking Group, ING
- Healthcare e.g. The NHS
- Professional Services e.g. Accenture, OLX Group
- Tech e.g. Ocado, Salesforce
- Tourism e.g. Visit Scotland
- Transportation & Logistics e.g. Maersk
What Our Clients Say
Gillian had an incredibly warm and calming presence from the start, which was hugely important in helping me relax. Gillian has this amazing skill in picking up on subtle threads/trends during the conversation and then allowing me to surface them with new perspectives - every time this led to a level of deeper thinking that I’d not known was there, leading to more meaningful actions and outcomes.
Gillian instantly created an environment and relationship with me where I felt I could be open and honest without any judgement. She could push and challenge me on my thinking in a way I haven’t been able to do on my own, in an environment where I had complete trust. As a result, I have grown in confidence, am more self-aware, and more content. Gillian helped me build the skills to be able to do this type of thinking on my own, skills I genuinely use on a daily basis.
Gillian is a truly exceptional coach who I cannot recommend enough. She has a unique skill in listening carefully and being able to sift through the words to pull out the things driving thoughts and feelings. She really helped me get back on my feet at a time when I was lacking direction and a sense of purpose, to know where I am so much clearer and feel more resilient to navigating personal and business challenges.
I feel we instantly bonded, I felt really comfortable and trusted Gillian. She listened intently, provided great feedback, and a safe environment. She enabled me to come up with great solutions to my problems and I am now fully capable of resolving anything in my path. I am more confident and have the tools to tackle issues with a positive attitude. This has helped me to achieve more by having better, more constructive conversations with my peers and team leaders which has increased KPI results.
I worked with Gillian when I was uncertain about my career path. She helped me to identify some of the things that were holding me back, giving me the skills to challenge some of the beliefs I had in order to try and overcome them. Gillian immediately put me at ease with her calmness, understanding and her sense of humour. I would highly recommend Gillian!
Inspiring, thoughtful, kind, generous and patient - Gillian helped me to rediscover my mojo following (and during) a period of significant change in my life. She worked with me to focus on both the current activities to get me through as well as the longer term solutions to succeed. Each session gave me a new sense of purpose, confidence and focus on creating my new beautiful future.
Gillian puts you at ease very quickly and she is genuinely interested in helping you to succeed. She doesn't make everything easy for you but makes you think and come up with solutions, and also questions what's behind things, a lot! I believe it has helped me to respond to feedback more effectively and be clearer about my future path, and I am much more confident in what I can achieve.
What Our Clients Say
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.
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.
The team is a pleasure to work with, consistently bringing expert advice and guidance, energy and professionalism to the partnership.
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.
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.