Meet the founder

This insight from a course on change leadership for AI adoption became the inspiration to start Pure Gold Guidance with a clear focus on the human side of leadership.  

For 15+ years in IT/tech business development I've worked alongside highly intelligent people. Many engineers turned leaders who could architect complex solutions in their sleep. Yet I witnessed a pattern: perfectly logical plans met vague resistance. Deals that should close didn't. What was missing? An understanding of the human undercurrents in relationships.

I recognized this intimately from my father, a brilliant, globally respected radio expert. When promoted to leadership, the weight of people decisions drove him back to the expert role. The human complexity was exhausting. I saw the pain of not feeling understood.

Perhaps this is why I became a “translator” between leaders and employees in many workplaces, decoding meeting dynamics and listening to frustrated employees. I saw that emotional disconnect or broken trust made talented people leave.

Back to the change leadership course. Writing my final paper on resistance to change, I recalled a digital transformation project presentation where I'd been asked to "tell a story". But how could I apply the creative writing principles I'd studied and practised in parallel for years, to a 55-slide, fact-heavy deck? The client was satisfied, but I realized that in a less tech-ready organization, it could have triggered the exact resistance I was now studying.

The research clearly showed that storytelling is the fastest route to connection, trust and engagement - a gateway to mitigating resistance. After developing a framework matching story types to resistance categories, I realised that leaders need the full spectrum of business storytelling as well as the inner capacity to better connect - the very gap I had observed for so long. One without the other fails. 

This is my work: helping leaders inspire with stories and discover a deeper connection to themselves and others to become more authentic and build the trust that competence alone never can. Strategic storytelling amplifies that trust into influence, creating leadership that is as human as it is brilliant.What was often missing was an understanding of the human undercurrents in relationships.