Fifty years. Two careers. One pattern.
Two years ago I was working in Shanghai.
Twenty-six million people.
Now I live in a village in rural Portugal.
Twenty-six people.
The work is the same. The setting is considerably quieter.
I started in professional performance.
Theatre first, then writing, improvisation, voice work, film and television. I worked alongside Anthony Hopkins, Pierce Brosnan and Michael Jackson.
That background taught me something that most businesspeople are never shown: communication is technical. There is a craft to how meaning is created in the moment it leaves you and lands in another person. That craft can be learned. Most people are never taught it because it lives in the performing arts, not the business school.
I have spent the last thirty years taking what I learned on stage and in studios and translating it into something useful for professionals who communicate for a living.
Then I moved into international business.
I spent years in Shanghai building a wealth management practice, advising experienced professionals and entrepreneurs on some of the most significant financial decisions of their lives. That work taught me the other half of what I now teach: how expertise travels commercially. How you turn real knowledge into a conversation that converts without ever feeling like a sales pitch.
In 2022, Apple China asked me to train their senior managers. They called the programme The Charisma Zone. I secured that engagement through a twelve-minute camera presentation built on the same principles I teach. They brought me back for a second year. That is the proof of concept I am most proud of: the methodology works in the most demanding commercial environment I have ever been given access to.
What I actually teach.
Performance Intelligence is how you show up. Body, voice, status, story, presence on camera and in the room. Outside-in technique creates inside-out expression.
Commercial Intelligence is how your expertise travels. The diagnostic model, the rules of engagement, the sequencing of influence, the pricing conversation, the referral reframe.
I am one of very few people who teaches both at depth. That combination is the genuine differentiator.
The reason the setting matters.
I chose to leave Shanghai. The big life, the big city, the constant performance of success. I moved to a village of 26 people by a river in rural Portugal. I live there with my wife Jane, who is an artist.
That choice is relevant because it is the same choice I help my clients make in miniature: the decision to stop performing a version of themselves and start expressing the real thing. I have no interest in teaching people to be more impressive. I am interested in helping them be more accurate.
Expertise is mistakes crystallised into wisdom. The work is not to package it more attractively. It is to communicate it more clearly.