About Kristy
I have apparently been doing this my entire life.
Long before I called any of this performance coaching, I was trying to understand how people worked.
Some of that started because it had to.
My mother didn't speak English particularly well when I was growing up, so I became one of her translators.
Then my elementary school discovered that I was pretty good at making people understand one another and decided this qualification apparently extended to all languages.
It did not.
But somehow, when a child arrived who couldn't speak English, I was often the person asked to help them find their way.
I couldn't necessarily speak their language.
I could usually find a way to communicate.
And more importantly, I could make them feel welcome while we figured it out.
That part has never really changed.
I am fascinated by the way people learn.
I worked my way through college and graduate school as a private tutor and small-group teacher.
And I loved it.
Particularly the supposedly “difficult” students.
The kids who had stopped trying.
The kids who were convinced they weren't smart.
The kids who had been labelled learning disabled.
The kids with neurological injuries whose brains simply weren't doing things in the standard order.
I had no formal training in education.
What I did have was a deep interest in human behaviour and an increasingly obsessive curiosity about how this particular person learned.
So I built individual learning systems for them.
We experimented.
We changed things.
We found the way in.
And those kids frequently did extraordinary things once somebody stopped demanding that they learn exactly like everybody else.
I eventually stopped tutoring because my acting-coaching work had me travelling too much to give those students the consistency they deserved.
But I never stopped working that way.
I still don't begin with the system. I begin with the human being.
Then actors became my laboratory.
For nearly three decades, I have worked with professional actors and performers.
I've worked on Oscar-winning projects.
I've worked on student films.
And I still happily work across that spectrum because I don't particularly believe anyone reaches a level at which there is nothing left to learn.
Some of the biggest work I've done will never appear in a bio.
That's deliberate.
I have signed away credit on major projects. I do not publicly name private clients. And I don't use somebody else's success as advertising for my own.
Sometimes very successful people need help.
They are entitled to get that help without announcing it to the world.
And when someone I've coached does something extraordinary, they did it.
I may have helped them see something, practise something or get out of their own way.
But they stood there and did the work.
They get the credit.
Somewhere along the way, I realised I wasn't really studying acting.
I was studying human performance.
I was watching what happens when people are observed.
Evaluated.
Under pressure.
Trying to communicate clearly.
Trying to connect.
Trying very hard to do something well without losing access to themselves in the process.
Actors gave me an unusually intense laboratory for studying those questions.
But those questions aren't exclusive to actors. They show up in boardrooms, presentations, interviews, pitches, difficult conversations, creative work and leadership.
Different room.
Same nervous system.
Same human being.
I don't look at people and think, “What's wrong with you?”
People occasionally assume I'm judging them.
Usually because they're already judging themselves.
We're astonishingly good at that.
I don't find people particularly interesting as collections of deficiencies.
I find them fascinating as puzzles.
I want to know:
What's naturally working here?
What does this person do that they don't realise is compelling?
Where does their thinking become beautifully clear?
What's unusual about them?
What happens to those qualities when the pressure rises?
And what could we develop so they have more access to those things when they need them?
Because your idiosyncrasies are not an unfortunate manufacturing error.
They're usually where the interesting stuff is.
The things that make us distinctive are often the very things that allow other people to connect with us.
I am going to notice your sparkle.
You may hate that word.
Fine.
We'll call it your X factor if that makes everyone feel more serious.
But I am extraordinarily interested in the part of someone that is unmistakably them.
The humour.
The intelligence.
The timing.
The directness.
The weirdness.
The thing they keep trying to hide because somewhere along the way they decided it wasn't how a successful person was supposed to behave.
I want to know what's there before we start improving anything.
Because there is no point developing somebody by accidentally training the life out of them.
What I bring to the room.
My work sits at the intersection of performance, communication, behaviour and human learning.
Nearly three decades of coaching actors taught me an enormous amount about what happens when people are watched, evaluated, exposed and under pressure.
My background in psychology and neuroscience helps me understand the systems underneath that behaviour.
My work as an Intimacy Coordinator has deepened the way I think about trust, boundaries, agency, vulnerability and power.
And decades of teaching have taught me something equally important: the explanation does not matter if the person in front of me cannot use it.
So I observe. I ask questions. We experiment. We find the way in.
And yes, I am a bit of a Mama Bear.
I care about the people I work with.
I want you to succeed.
I will celebrate what's extraordinary about you.
I will help you find the way through something when you're stuck.
And when necessary, I will happily pick up a metaphorical machete and start cutting us a path through the jungle.
But I'm not carrying you through it.
You've got legs.
Use them.
I can teach.
I can observe.
I can challenge.
I can experiment with you.
I can explain the same thing seventeen different ways until we find the one your brain actually understands.
What I cannot do is practise for you.
Eventually, you have to do the fucking work.
With love.
Obviously.
I believe growth is available to almost everybody.
Not at the same speed.
Not through the same method.
And certainly not in a neat upward line.
Comparison is therefore fairly useless.
Sometimes development arrives in a spectacular leap.
More often it looks like:
You noticed the pattern ten seconds earlier.
You recovered faster.
You stayed present through a conversation that normally would have knocked you sideways.
You made a different choice once.
Then twice.
Then eventually without thinking quite so hard about it.
Those tiny changes can be incredibly hard earned.
They are also often where the biggest transformation begins.
Range creates choice. Choice creates freedom.
A final warning.
I like animals and children enormously.
The general population has to compete a little harder for my affection.
Fortunately, animals — including wild ones — have a slightly alarming tendency to find me anyway.
I will probably swear at some point while we're working together.
There is also a reasonable chance I will immediately follow the swear word with a fifteen-syllable scientific term.
Don't worry about either.
If you don't understand me, I'll find another way to explain it.
And another.
And another.
Because communication isn't successful when I've explained something beautifully.
It's successful when you can access it.
More of you
I don't want to teach you how somebody else has presence.
I want to discover what presence looks like on you.
Private coaching online. Australia, United States and worldwide.