The Experts

Adam is an author, coach, podcast host, and domestic abuse campaigner who is passionate about developing individuals and teams. He is a qualified and accredited personal and business coach and holds the International Coaching Federation’s ACC coaching credential. With nearly two decades of experience in leadership development and coaching, Adam has designed and delivered impactful coaching programmes for global organisations, including Boots, Channel 4, Bentley, Natwest, Lloyds, the NHS and The Prince’s Trust. 

​​Adam is a regular guest on BBC Radio and regional television, where he shares lifestyle coaching tips and exercises. His debut self-coaching book, The Way of The Diva – Your Guide to a Bolder, Braver and More Confident You, is available from thewayofthediva.com, Amazon and Waterstones.

Adam is a proud Ambassador for Broxtowe Women’s Project, a Nottinghamshire-based domestic abuse charity, and White Ribbon UK, a national initiative engaging men and boys to end violence against women and girls. 

Coaching Credentials:

• Post Graduate Certificate in Personal & Business Coaching from Barefoot Coaching and The University of Chester
• Member of The International Coaching Federation (ICF)
• Associate Certified Coach (ACC) of the International Coaching Federation (ICF)
• Graduate of the CEQ Coaching Mastery Programme
• Master Strengthscope® Practitioner (Strengthscope Standard, 360, Leader and Team)
• Total SDI and NLP Accredited Practitioner
• Accredited Meditation Practitioner
• CIPD L5 Diploma in HR Development/L&D

Useful Links:

• Website: by Adam
• Linkedin: Adam Goodman-Smith
• Instagram: thewayofthedivabook
• Book & Products: thewayofthediva.com 
• Coaching Podcast: Make a Change to Make a Difference

Camilla Long is the award-winning co-founder of Bespoke Communications, a leading training and professional development company serving the UK and Ireland.  As a coach and mentor, Camilla helps executives and experts to communicate their ideas to build trust and influence.  Her core belief is that everyone can feel fulfilled at work by knowing who they are, so that they show up authentically and powerfully.

In her interactive masterclasses and programmes, Camilla inspires teams to develop a fresh approach to their communication, inspired by behavioural science.  She personally coaches business leaders and senior executives in public speaking through her company’s Speakeasy public speaking course.

Camilla is a Professional Member of the Professional Speaking Association, and a recipient of the PSA Emerging Speaker of 2021 Award.   She is also a Member of the Chartered Management Institute, a Board Member of the Causeway Chamber of Commerce, a mentor with Women in Business and a Samaritans Listening Volunteer.  Camilla holds a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Strategic Management.

Sarah Travers is co-founder and director of Bespoke Communications, a leading training and professional development company serving the UK and Ireland. Sarah is a former BBC news journalist and TV presenter, with a keen interest in stories and the people that shape them. Sarah is a familiar face to many in Northern Ireland, where she was news anchor in the BBC newsroom for 17 years, covering high profile stories throughout the Northern Ireland peace process, and key events like the London 2012 Paralympics and BBC Children in Need. Sarah has also presented lifestyle programming for UTV and is in demand as an event and conference MC and podcast host.

Sarah is passionate about communication and helping leaders communicate effectively to their relevant target audiences no matter what the subject area may be. Through Bespoke Communications tailored training and development programmes, including Powerful Presentations, Resilience Skills and Media Training, Sarah will help you to develop your confidence to communicate with passion and conviction.

Sarah is a proud ambassador for the Alzheimer’s Society in NI, Tinylife and Young Enterprise.

Founded in 2001, Focal Point Training is a consultancy company specializing in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) training. By identifying the behaviors needed for a respectful and collaborative workplace, Focal Point Training works with organizations across all sectors to help build and embed a culture of inclusion.

Andrew is a former barrister, now MD of Griffin Safety Training, the UK’s leading provider of Corporate Manslaughter training. He is absolutely passionate about delivering affordable training in a language that all can understand. He’s been around the health and safety world since 1996, delivering training and consultancy services in organizations of all sizes and across all sectors. He works hard to build strong client relationships and deliver relevant training courses that demystify health and safety.

Ian has over 40 years of experience in the financial services industry. He is a Chartered Insurer and Fellow of the Chartered Insurance Institute as well as being a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Insurers.Ian has always been passionate about learning and development, helping employers to get the most from their staff. He owned and led Searchlight Solutions, the UK’s leading provider of learning services to the insurance and financial services industry, until selling the company on in 2018. He now provides consultancy advice to a limited number of financial services companies, specialising in compliance matters and good company practice.

Rebecca has worked for a variety of local authorities in adult services since qualifying as a social worker 15 years ago. Her experience spans mental capacity assessments, continuing healthcare, implementation of the Care Act in practice and social work education. Rebecca is passionate about service user engagement and feedback in learning.

B & CO Care is made up of three sisters from Derry City in Northern Ireland; Bronagh, Clare & Orla. They started their company in 2020, with the aim to bring some self-care into the lives and homes of those who receive their packs.

The three sisters have qualifications and backgrounds in Social Prescribing, Project Management and Human Resources, the perfect combination for a self-care start up company. With over 20 years combined experience in mental health and well-being, service user engagement, people management and I.T, the sisters are passionate about educating and aiding in self-care.

Tracy is co-director of Focal Point Training – specialists in helping organisations tackle
inappropriate behaviour and build respectful, inclusive workplaces. Focal Point particularly
help address the behavioural “grey” areas, which managers and team members often find
difficult to address and which can be very excluding and detrimental to great company
performance.
Prior to launching Focal Point, she had over 10 years’ experience as a Director of a growing
business in the private sector and as a Management and Leadership Development
consultant working with a range of organisations.

Kate Dean spent over 10 years leading and managing student facing disability support teams in universities before setting up Enable Disability & Inclusion Consultants in March 2020.

Kate has lots of experience of identifying appropriate adjustments and enabling strategies that allow people to work to their strengths, working across a wide range of disabilities and long-term conditions, but particularly specialising in neurodiversity, mental health, and hidden disabilities.

Kate now supports organisations with end-to-end solution focused support to deliver specialist consultancy, training, and individual workplace assessments to identify and remove barriers to high performance in the workplace.

Kate brings her own lived experience and the strengths of neurodiversity to her work.

Dr Denise Taylor is a qualified sustainability consultant who her founded family-run
business, Wylde Connections, alongside her daughter in January 2020. The inception of
Wylde brought together Denise’s knowledge, skills and experience gained over 30 years
across three main disciplines: environmental education, strategic marketing
communications, and learning and development.

Denise’s environmental credentials stem from her practical environmental experience and
academic research working at an international level with wildlife conservation and
biodiversity projects across the globe. Her strategic business and marketing comms skills
and experience have been gained working throughout most of her career within a number
of sectors, including manufacturing, public sector, creative industries and professional
services. As a lifelong learner herself, gaining her PhD when she is 50 years old, Denise is
passionate about education. Wylde is also a learning organisation and offers a number of
training and education programmes to businesses. As part of her commitment to education:
Denise also supports two charity programmes: Wild Earth and the Chrysalis Youth
Empowerment Network in Uganda, working with young people helping them to become
social entrepreneurs and change-makers.

Collaboration is key to the success of Wylde and the work Denise carries out. She strongly
believes that successful companies are those that have strong values and ethics with
sustainability at their heart and collaborative working embedded throughout.
Denise is passionate about demystifying sustainability and taking a practical approach to
overcoming the obstacles, barriers and challenges we all face in living more ethically and
responsibly.

Catherine is passionate about encouraging conversations and responsibility around all areas
of inclusion. She was an early supporter of women’s only training and mentoring and went
on to Head up Inclusion and Diversity for National Grid UK. As an operational manager of
dispersed teams, she became very aware of treating other’s fairly and with respect, valuing
all their strengths and differences. She was instrumental in developing and implementing
behavioural change programmes to instil a more inclusive and empathetic culture and
designed and facilitated many learning interventions to support development. She now runs
her own coaching and training company, focussing on supporting individuals and
organisations across all sectors to develop inclusive, respectful workplaces.

Jackie has over twenty years’ experience in Senior HR positions – over half of those as an HRD. During this time, she has handled the full range of sensitive HR issues, including investigating and addressing bullying behaviour at a senior level, as well as creating and delivering values based cultures in organisations internationally. Her training and qualifications in mediation skills, psychometrics, NLP and executive coaching underpins her real world expertise. She now runs her own coaching and facilitation practice, focussing on supporting individuals and organisations to develop inclusive, respectful workplaces.

Ruth is a Human Rights Practitioner and qualified Barrister working with both local and international organisations globally including West Africa, East Africa, Europe and the Caribbean. As a subject matter expert with more than 10 years’ experience, she offers professional and technical support and advice including research, policy development, report writing, strategic development and planning, project management and coordination, capacity building and monitoring and evaluation. She has worked on a range of key international frameworks and civil society initiatives, particularly on human rights matters relating to women and children, as well as business and human rights

Richard has over a decade of safeguarding leadership experience across the statutory, health and
charitable sectors. He has led safeguarding practice at two major UK charities and also worked internationally, in partnership with Age Concern Ukraine and the Red Cross of Serbia, to support their work in developing sustainable and person-centred safeguarding frameworks.
He has a Master’s degree in Social Work and has coordinated multi-agency adult safeguarding
partnerships and Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS) practice in three London boroughs and an NHS Foundation Trust.
He has particular expertise in developing policy and customer focused responses for consumers in
vulnerable circumstances and has worked with national regulators, trade associations and commercial organisations to support and develop best practice.

Cathy has been a qualified social worker for over 25 years.  In this time she has worked in  children’s social care as a therapeutic social worker, team manager, independent reviewing officer (IRO) and safeguarding quality assurance manager.  She has a keen interest in the child’s voice and improving the quality of services for children and young people.

Established in 2015 by Rachel Reese, Global Butterflies was created to bring awareness of trans and non-binary issues to the business sector.  She was joined by Emma Cusdin in 2018 and together they work closely with organisations to help create a zero-tolerance approach to trans-phobic behaviour and attitudes, while also taking steps to help them to see the benefits of a more trans & non-binary inclusive culture.

Claire Harvey is an experienced senior leader, inclusion expert and Paralympian. Currently working as Global Inclusion Lead for Vodafone Claire is recognised as a world leader in diversity, inclusion and culture, incorporating change management and leadership behaviours into impactful change.

 She has worked within the criminal justice system, notably as a Prison Governor, managing a resettlement prison and as a riot commander. She also took on the role as the Equality and Diversity Lead, and later joined the FSA (the UK financial regulator) as Head of Corporate Responsibility and Culture; embedding inclusion, ethical leadership and positive culture into the supervisory framework across the financial sector. Within 18 months as Head of inclusive leadership at KPMG, the organisation rose over 300 places in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index to 10th and was in the top tier of all of equality benchmarks (gender, race, part time workers and disability).

In 2017, Claire was awarded an MBE for both her services to Sport and also to inclusion.

Amy holds a BA (hons) in French and Italian and an MSC in International Marketing. She has over 10 years experience working in the marketing arena with expertise in the healthcare, technology, retail and education sectors for both B2B & B2C international organisations. 

Amy is passionate about marketing and the power of clear business communication in helping to sustainably grow a brand and connect with customers on a long term basis. Her specialities include: Copywriting, SEO, Digital Strategy, Digital PR & Content Syndication, Multichannel & Omnichannel strategies, Branding, Product Marketing and data led communications.

She is a published writer with articles in publications such as The Telegraph, European Financial Review, Fresh Business Thinking, The Guardian and Capacity Media

Esi is a trainer, disability inclusion expert, public speaker podcaster and writer.

Celebrating Disability provides professional, tangible support for businesses developing their workplace culture to be inclusive of disabled people.  Esi also runs the disability inclusion community.  An online membership community for organisations who are passionate about developing a culture of inclusion for disabled employees and customers.

As a disabled person, Esi uses her personal, lived experience as well as her professional background in the public and private sector to ensure advice given is tangible and realistic. As part of her work to advocate and champion equality for disabled people, Esi is a public speaker.  Speaking at conferences and away days on the subject of disability inclusion and equality in every cornerstone of life.

Find out more information about Esi and her related businesses at celebratingdisability.co.uk and disabilityinclusioncommunity.com

Jill and George have 35 years of experience in learning and development. They’ve managed colleague training for some of the biggest retailers and brands in the UK and globally, including Boots the Chemist, Walgreens and No7. Their L&D expertise means they’re able to consult on and create engaging and effective learning across most subject areas and sectors, from advising on strategy to designing end-to-end bespoke, blended learning programmes. Further specialisms include beauty, customer service, communications and storytelling. And with proven expertise in public relations, copywriting, editing and proofreading for household brands including DFS, Sainsbury’s and Wilko, they know just how to make every learner’s journey compelling, powerful and flawless.

Our Food Safety Subject Matter Expert, Sue, is an experienced Technical Manager / Auditor/ Quality Controller with a demonstrated history of working in the food & beverages industry. She is a strong technical professional with Lead Auditor certification and IFST Fellowship and also achieved an MSc in Food Safety Management in 2018. Sue is skilled in Food Science, HACCP, Food Safety, Foodservice Distribution, Food Specification Databases, Food Safety Training, and Food Quality. She is also experienced in working with businesses to achieve Salsa and BRC.

Sandra began working in HR more than 25 years ago. She worked her way up through the ranks from Personnel Assistant to recently being the Director of her own interim management firm. She has been a qualified member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) for more than 25 years, as well as being a trained mediator and workshop facilitator for more than five years. Her varied areas of expertise allow her to deal with numerous industries including manufacturing, professional services and distribution. No matter what a business requires regarding HR, Sandra has got the skills in order to deal with any business enquiry and carry out anything from HR and personnel planning to a mediation training workshop. She is able to objectively access situations quickly to support organizations in developing options and solutions to issues.

Mandy Webster is a lawyer with an in-house career spanning 15 years in the corporate world which developed an understanding of how businesses work and many of the key tasks in compliance, marketing, HR, facilities management, tax and finance and administration so clients don’t need to educate or explain these business operations and can rely on a good level of knowledge about routine business activities.Experience as a compliance officer in financial service gave Mandy an understanding of how to demonstrate compliance for accountability. Mandy’s legal background means that clients can rely on her interpretation and application of data protection law. Mandy is also an author of several law books on data protection.

Mike Keen brings an extensive global outlook to his current role via a series of end-to-end roles in a variety of industries, including automotive, component distribution, metal packaging, consumer electronics, rubber compounding, aerospace, engineering. Having built a successful career in a series of senior roles, Mike moved into the interim/consultant space in 2016. Passionate about people and their learning and development journeys, Mike is a strong supporter and proponent of developing organizational talent, building diverse, progressive international teams and leading transformation & change programs. Mike has a BA (Hons) in French & Business Studies and an MBA in General Management – with particular focus on procurement, logistics and operations.

Having worked in L&OD for over a decade, Nathan Dring has experience in sales, service, SME and retail. Whilst at Asda, Nathan set up and led the learning and development function for the global contact centre estate and it was during this time he was very involved in the Top 50. He was also a judge at the European Contact Centre and Customer Service awards, delivered keynote messages at both Top 50 events and the Contact Centre Expo and helped to develop the BSC in Managing the Customer Contact now run at Ulster University.

Nathan was Head of Global Organizational Development at ‘thebigword’, before setting up Nathan Dring and Associates Limited in 2018.