What is actually going on?
We separate the story you have become used to telling from the things that are genuinely creating friction, avoidance, resentment or uncertainty.
Private coaching · Thame, Oxfordshire
Change the parts of life you’ve stopped talking about.
Immersive, one-to-one coaching for professional development, life direction, burnout, intimacy, confidence and relationships. Practical, candid and completely individual.
Individuals and couples welcome · Sessions over video · In-person in Thame or at your home by arrangement
“More face time. More honesty. More room to work on what actually matters.”
Private 90-minute sessions with Tom, built around the person in front of him rather than a pre-written coaching formula.
The approach
Coaching built around real life, not labels.
Life rarely arrives as one tidy problem. Burnout affects confidence. Confidence affects relationships. Relationships affect intimacy. The work is designed to follow those connections rather than forcing you into a single box.
“Most people don’t come to me with a neat label for what’s wrong - and they don’t need to. We start with what feels off, stuck or missing, then work out what needs to change and how to actually change it.” Tom Charles
Leadership
For the person carrying the role - decisions that land on you, the narrowing circle of people you can be honest with, and the gap between how you land and how you meant to.
Read more →Burnout
For rebuilding clarity, capacity and control when work, responsibility or life itself has become relentless and your normal ways of coping have stopped working.
Read more →Life Direction
For feeling stuck, uncertain or disconnected from the life you want to be living - particularly when you know something needs to change but cannot quite define what.
Read more →Confidence
For reducing shame and self-consciousness, becoming more comfortable in your own skin and expressing what you actually think, want and need.
Read more →Intimacy
For becoming more fluent in desire, boundaries, communication and connection - including the conversations people often find hardest to have honestly.
Read more →Notice what your body is telling you.
Thoughts are only part of the picture. We pay attention to tension, discomfort, shutdown and other physical cues that can reveal where something is unresolved or difficult to voice.
Get clearer about what you want.
Many people are much better at meeting expectations than identifying their own wants. Coaching creates a judgement-free space to understand desire, limits and what genuinely feels right for you.
Then learn how to say it.
Insight is useful only if it changes something. We work on the words, boundaries and conversations needed to turn private understanding into clearer choices and more authentic relationships.
What a session tends to feel like
Talk properlyEnough time to move beyond updates and surface-level answers.
Find the patternIdentify what keeps repeating, where it shows up and what may be maintaining it.
Test the edgesExplore the thoughts, wants or conversations that have previously felt difficult to approach.
Leave with movementFinish with something concrete to notice, practise, decide or do differently.
About
Hello - I’m Tom.
Twenty years of helping people navigate pressure, uncertainty and difficult decisions - first in boardrooms, now one to one.
Tom Charles · Thame, Oxfordshire
Before moving into coaching I spent more than twenty years in senior leadership, technology, transformation and change roles, including Director and C-level positions within large global organisations, and eighteen years advising senior executives and boards.
Much of that career involved helping people navigate uncertainty, make difficult decisions, build confidence, deal with pressure and work out what they wanted to do next. Coaching became a natural extension of work I had already been doing for years.
I do this work because I enjoy helping people get unstuck. Often the answer is already there, but it is difficult to see clearly when you are in the middle of a hard career decision, a strained relationship, a period of low confidence, or simply a stage of life where things no longer feel quite right. I like helping people cut through the noise, understand what is really going on, and turn that understanding into practical change.
Coaching, mentoring and developing people has been part of my professional life for many years, through one-to-one work and through leading teams. My practice today brings that experience to a more focused, personal approach - centred on the individual rather than a corporate agenda.
One small thing. I practise as Tom Charles, but Charles is my middle name. My full name is Tom Charles David Smith, and Tom Smith turns out to be common enough to be unfindable, so Charles is what I use professionally. My corporate career and the endorsements below sit under my full name on LinkedIn.
Track record
10+
senior managers I have coached into leadership or director appointments since 2022
50+
people whose development I led over four years, having built an M&A and change delivery team from scratch
10
contractors I persuaded to give up contractor day rates and join my team as permanent employees, inside twelve months
18 yrs
advising senior executives and boards, several of whom still use me as a sounding board
More than 175 endorsements on my LinkedIn profile from people I have worked alongside, including 47 for change management, 33 for stakeholder management and 30 for project management. See the profile.
Training, accreditation and practice
- Associate Certified Coach (ACC) - International Coaching Federation.
- Accredited Member of the Association for Coaching.
- ILM Level 7 in executive and senior-level coaching (Institute of Leadership & Management).
- Coach training with Erickson Coaching International, with more than 2,000 hours of verifiable coaching practice.
- More than twenty years’ senior leadership and people-development experience, with ongoing professional development in leadership, organisational change, communication and behavioural development.
- Professional indemnity insurance in place.
- Everything discussed is confidential. Sessions are talking-based, and there is no physical contact of any kind.
Coaching is not therapy, counselling or medical treatment. If what you are dealing with needs clinical support, I will say so and help you find it.
In their words
What clients say afterwards.
Shared with permission and anonymised by role and area, because the work is private.
Tom has a very natural way of helping you see things more clearly without ever making you feel judged or pushed in a particular direction. I came to him at a point where I felt professionally successful but personally quite stuck. Our conversations helped me understand what I actually wanted, rather than what I thought I should want. I left each session feeling lighter, clearer and more confident in the decisions I was making.
I’m used to being the person other people come to for answers, so admitting that I needed some space to think things through myself wasn’t easy. Tom was excellent at asking the questions I had been avoiding and helping me separate genuine concerns from the pressure I was putting on myself. I came away with more confidence, more perspective and a much clearer sense of what I wanted next.
We started speaking to Tom at a point when life had become incredibly busy and we had both lost sight of what we wanted individually and together. He created a space where we could be completely honest, without things becoming heavy or uncomfortable. What surprised us most was how practical the process felt - some very simple changes have made a real difference to how we communicate.
What I valued most was that he understood the pressures that come with senior leadership without allowing every conversation to become about work. He helped me look at the bigger picture - career, relationships, confidence and what I actually wanted my life to feel like. No judgement and no empty motivational talk. Just thoughtful, honest conversations.
Working in HR means I spend a lot of time supporting other people, but I realised I wasn’t giving myself the same space. Tom has a rare ability to listen properly and then ask one question that completely changes the way you are looking at something. The sessions gave me clarity around decisions I had been going round in circles on for months.
I contacted Tom because I felt as though I had become stuck in a bit of a rut and couldn’t quite explain why. He made it incredibly easy to talk openly, and within a few sessions I started seeing patterns in the way I was thinking that I hadn’t noticed before. I feel more confident, much clearer about what I want and more willing to actually do something about it.
Not sure where to start?
Take Pressure Points.
A short, private two-minute questionnaire designed to identify where the greatest friction appears to be right now and whether coaching looks like a sensible fit.
Your personal Pressure Points assessment
It takes around two minutes. You’ll see your strongest theme straight away, with the full snapshot and a suggested starting point sent to you.
Life direction and alignment
Burnout and capacity
Confidence and self-expression
Relationships, desire and intimacy
Private programmes
Choose the depth of support you need.
All coaching is delivered personally by Tom. Longer programmes reduce the per-session investment and are designed for sustained change rather than occasional advice.
Start with one session
Try a single session before committing to a programme.
Book one private 90-minute session for £195. If you go on to book any programme within 14 days, that session converts into the first session of it: your £195 comes off the programme price and you pay the balance. Nothing to weigh up in advance, and nothing lost if you decide it is not for you.
Foundations
5 sessions
£750
£150 per 90-minute session
- Five private 90-minute sessions
- Ideal for a defined issue or period of change
- Personalised coaching throughout
Most popular
Transformation
15 sessions
£2,175
£145 per 90-minute session
- Fifteen private 90-minute sessions
- Designed for meaningful, sustained change
- Ideal for overlapping life, relationship or confidence goals
Deep Transformation
25 sessions
£3,375
£135 per 90-minute session
- Twenty-five private 90-minute sessions
- For deeper personal reinvention and long-term change
- Lowest per-session investment
What comes with a programme
A single session buys you 90 minutes. A programme buys you a piece of work.
| Single session£195 | Foundations£750 | Transformation£2,175 | Deep Transformation£3,375 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First session guaranteed | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Pay across monthly instalments | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| A held slot in my diary | Not included | Included | Included | Included |
| Written plan after your first session | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Messaging between sessions | Not included | Not included | Included | Included |
| Progress review | Not included | Not included | At the midpoint | Every 5 sessions |
| Your rate held | Not included | Not included | 12 months | 24 months |
| Cost per 90-minute session | £195 | £150 | £145 | £135 |
Messaging means email or voice note, with a reply within one working day, Monday to Friday. It is not crisis support; if something urgent is happening, please contact your GP or the emergency services.
Couples seen together
Joint 90-minute sessions with both partners present.
5 sessions - £1,035
15 sessions - £2,825
25 sessions - £4,395
Couples seen individually
Separate private sessions organised around the relationship as a whole.
5 sessions - £1,395
15 sessions - £3,795
25 sessions - £5,895
Your first session, guaranteed
Start any programme with confidence. If, after your first 90-minute session, you feel this isn’t right for you, tell me. You pay for that one session at your programme’s per-session rate and I refund the balance in full. No explanation needed.
Spread the cost
Every programme can be paid in full, or across monthly instalments agreed before we begin. There is no surcharge for paying in instalments, and the rate is the same either way.
Sessions cancelled or rescheduled with less than 24 hours’ notice are charged. Full terms.
Couples coaching
Work together. Or separately.
Couples do not always need the same format. Some benefit most from shared sessions; others make more progress when each partner has private space to speak openly before the work is brought back to the relationship.
Together
Joint sessions focused on communication, intimacy, desire, boundaries and reconnecting.
Individually
Separate confidential coaching for each partner, coordinated around the wider relationship.
“Sometimes the most useful relationship conversation starts with having somewhere safe to work out what you actually want to say.”
How we meet
Over video, or face to face.
Most sessions are held over video, which keeps the work private and easy to fit around a full week. If you would rather meet in person, that is available at the practice in Thame, or at your home across the surrounding area with travel priced separately by distance.
Free 20-minute consultation
See whether the fit feels right.
The introductory call is free, confidential and without obligation. Use it to explain what you are looking for, ask questions and decide whether the approach feels right for you.