Somewhere to put the thing you cannot say.
A standing arrangement with one person who has no stake in your board, your team or your reputation.
"It's a demanding role. That's what I signed up for."
You have said this to your chair, your partner and yourself, in roughly that order.
"I am not sure how much longer I can do this at the level people expect."
Which has nowhere to go, because every person who could hear it has something riding on your answer.
Seniority removes the people you could once talk to.
Early in a career you have peers. You complain in a pub, someone says they had the same week, and the thing shrinks to a manageable size. Then you get promoted past them.
By the time you are running something, the list is short and every name on it has a conflict. Your executive team reports to you and needs you steady. Your chair appointed you and is assessing you. Your peers in the sector are competing with you, sometimes for the job you are currently doing. Your family gets the version that does not frighten them.
So the pressure has nowhere to go, and it does not evaporate. It comes out as short temper, as decisions made too fast to avoid sitting with them, as a drink that became three, as the low-grade dread on a Sunday afternoon. None of that appears in a board pack. All of it shows up in the quality of what you decide.
What a session actually is
A conversation with no agenda I have written. You talk, I listen properly, and I ask the questions the people around you cannot afford to ask. Sometimes you arrive with one specific decision. More often you arrive with a feeling you have not been able to name, and naming it is most of the work.
I will tell you what I think. Not as an instruction, because you run the organisation and I do not, but because agreeable company is not worth paying for. If I think you are rationalising, I will say so.
Nothing is recorded. I keep no notes between sessions, which occasionally means asking you to remind me of a name. That trade is deliberate.
Where confidentiality stops
It holds, with two exceptions I will name now rather than leave you to assume. If I believed your life or someone else's was at immediate risk, I would act, and I would tell you I was doing it. If a court compelled disclosure, I would comply. Nothing else reaches anyone: not your board, not whoever made the introduction, not the organisation paying the invoice.
What it is not
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Not therapy.
I am not a clinician. If you need one, I will say so and help you find one.
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Not coaching.
No framework, no competency model, no goal I have set for you.
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Not a non-executive seat.
I hold no position in your organisation and no view I have to defend at a meeting.
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Not a report.
Whoever pays receives an invoice. They do not receive a summary.
The qualification is that I have been the person who could not say it.
I reached clinical burnout inside a high-pressure banking career. For a long time before that I gave the composed version to everyone who asked, and I believed it while I was saying it.
The letters came later. Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health, Fellow of the Chartered Management Institute, the Institute of Directors' Wellbeing Ambassador for the UK, Stevie Awards judge. Useful for credibility, irrelevant to why the phone rings.
It rings because you can say the actual thing and watch nothing happen. No flinch, no note, no change in how you are treated afterwards.
More of the record →"It would be hard to imagine a better qualified Wellbeing practitioner than Craig Fearn. Craig stands out as a true professional in an area attracting people with little experience or real qualifications."
Questions people ask before they call
- Is this therapy?
- No, and it is worth being exact about that. I am not a clinician and I do not treat mental illness. If what you are carrying needs clinical help, I will say so early and help you find it rather than take your money for something I cannot do. What I offer is counsel from someone who has held a comparable job and come apart in it.
- How is it different from an executive coach?
- A coach usually works towards a goal you set, using a method they have been trained in. This has no goal and no method. You bring the thing you have not said out loud, and we look at it together. Most of my clients have had coaching and found it useful for performance and useless for this.
- Who else finds out?
- Nobody. There is no report to your board, no summary to HR, no note to whoever arranged the introduction. If your organisation is paying, they receive an invoice and nothing else. I do not keep session notes.
- What if I am the problem?
- Then that is what we talk about. I have no stake in your reputation and nothing to protect by agreeing with you, which is the entire reason this works. Your team cannot tell you when you are wrong. I can.
- How often, and for how long?
- We agree the rhythm in the first conversation rather than fitting you to a package. Some people want it around one specific situation and stop when that resolves. Others keep it running quietly for years, which is usually the version that does the most good.
- What does it cost?
- I do not publish a fee for this. The shape of the arrangement decides it, and working out the shape is what the first conversation is for. That conversation costs nothing. If it turns out you need someone other than me, I will say so rather than quote you for the wrong thing.
- Can my organisation pay?
- Yes, and it changes nothing about what is said or who hears it. They receive an invoice. They do not receive a summary, a progress note or a hint about what we discussed.
Write two lines. That is the whole first step.
You do not have to explain the situation properly, or make it sound reasonable. I answer everything myself, usually inside a day, and the first conversation costs nothing.
Request a call