You don’t have to become someone else to achieve the ambitious change you want.
(And you don’t have to battle yourself, either).
Let’s find your ‘hidden choreography’, so that you can design change that fits.
Insight-led coaching delivered through 3x 90 minute, 1:1 inquiry sessions with Dr Natasha Hardicre.
Using research-informed interviewing techniques and analytical listening, we’ll discover your ‘Hidden Choreography’ – the patterns you take into every room with you – to help you understand how you operate in different contexts, relationships and settings.
We’ll explore where those patterns serve you; how they impact your connections and interactions with the people you live with, work with and lead; and where they might need to shift.
We’ll create experiments drawing on evidence-based approaches, always selected and adapted to fit your patterns, to help you apply what we discover. You’ll have access to ongoing support throughout the work via message, email and voice note, so that you can design change for a life that fits—who you are now and who you’re working to become.
£5000 investment (payable in full or instalments)
It’s a Tuesday evening. The week’s only just underway and it already feels like you’ve done a million and one things. To give yourself a moment of downtime, you decide to allow 10 minutes (read: 60) for social-media scrolling.
It’s meant to be entertaining, non-thinking time but there it is: the post that makes your stomach sink, your heart race, your brain start spinning again.
It’s not the holiday pictures, or the new home, or even the ‘family portrait with the new puppy’ photos that do it.
It’s the announcement of someone’s promotion into a new role at a great company; the post sharing how delighted someone is to be invited to speak at a big event; the person shortlisted for an award; the project someone’s been asked to lead; the book that’s just been published and hit the bestseller list already; the stage someone got to stand on last week.
It’s an encounter with other peoples’ success.
And it’s not that you’re not happy for them—you are. You’re someone who genuinely delights in other peoples’ achievements. You want good things for them. And you know that success is not a zero-sum game.
But there’s also a part of you that feels something else. And it’s not exactly comfortable.
You’re not sure what to do about it. But it is a reminder. You might already have achieved a lot… but…
You’re not done yet.
You also know that you don’t have the energy or space to hustle for this next thing like you have done before. And whilst it wasn’t always fun, there’s a part of you that loved the grind you had to do back then – it felt energising and exciting - but this stage feels different and a bit unfamiliar.
If you’d like to talk this unfamiliar feeling through, or you want have a chat about how working together could help you unlock your next phase of change in ways that fit who are now and where you want to be in the future, book a call – I’d love to discuss this with you.
You show up as the answer. What if that’s also part of the problem?
You're standing somewhere you worked years to reach. A stage. A meeting that matters. A room where the thing you built is finally being seen. And you're good in it. Not just performing ‘good’. Actually good. You see what the moment needs and you meet it.
Or it's eleven at night and you're rewriting a document someone else should have got right, because it isn't good enough yet and you will not let your team take the fall for it. No stage. No audience. The same move exactly. You saw what the moment needed and you met it.
That's the throughline of your whole life. The public accomplishments and the midnight rewrite are the same person. You are the one who shows up as the answer — in the rooms with lights and the rooms without them.
You know you’re insightful and you’re great at what you do… and one of the things you do is find problems and then find ways to fix them.
And that’s looked like small change, big change and everything in between. You’re no stranger to doing hard things… but there’s something about this stage, now, that feels harder than normal.
That’s because your existing approaches to finding and fixing problems aren’t quite working as you’d like and you suspect that as much as you’re going to be the eventual solution, you’re also part of the problem.
Sometimes it feels like you should follow the advice you were given when you were a kid: quit whilst you’re ahead.
Sometimes, it’s tempting.
You've accomplished enough to stay here (but you don’t want to).
There’s a lot you’ve already achieved—more than some people thought you were capable of (and more than you thought you might be capable of, at times).
You know that you could stay at your current level, that you’d never run out of things to do, and you’d still be considered successful.
You’ve also got to a stage where more effort seems to create diminishing returns: you’ve reached a ceiling.
You just don’t know if you’ve reached your ceiling (and you know you’re not ready to give up).
That’s because there’s something you’re still working towards. And it’s big (even if the only person that knows how big it feels, is you). It might be delivering the big impact change project, making a million in revenue, writing a book, leaving a partnership to step out on your own, winning a competition or award, landing the high-profile role, standing on that stage (and feeling great doing it), or just saying the unsaid thing that you know is high risk but has the potential to be really high reward.
The problem is your usual methods of delivering aren’t working:
· You know how to work hard, but more effort isn’t helping you make meaningful progress.
· You know how to solve problems, but this particular problem isn’t responding.
· You know how to be disciplined, but your old routines aren’t working, and new routines aren’t holding.
Or maybe you’re not in a context where you can take the massive risks and ‘power through’ in the ways you did before.
Or maybe you just don’t want to.
Because as much as many of those experiences were exhilarating, sometimes you felt like you were in a tug-of-war with yourself and you’re not sure you want to keep pulling so hard.
And that’s created a bind:
You’re grateful for everything you have,
You still want to see what more is out there for you,
You need something to shift,
You want those shifts to be meaningful and in keeping with your level of ambition,
You want to honour everything you’ve already built,
You want change to work with, rather than against, yourself.
Adaptive Discovery Coaching is about enabling you to hold all of these at same time, by discovering the hidden patterns that have contributed to your success and are also keeping you where you are right now.
I call your patterned ways of being in the world your ‘hidden choreography’—not because it’s not findable, but because it’s so easily taken-for-granted as ‘just the way I am’ that it’s hard to see from inside it.
Together, we find it to understand it; so, you can decide whether and how you want to change it.
Then we design ways to help you adapt those same patterns for your benefit, so that you can design the life you want in ways that fit.
Through one-to-one coaching and advisory work with Dr Natasha Hardicre, over three 60-90 minute sessions of in-depth inquiry and analysis of your patterns, we’ll explore the various contexts of your life; with advice and experiments designed to help you apply the session insights; and support via message, email or voice note throughout the two coaching. Usually delivered over 3-6 months, depending on your preferences and the situations we are working with. It’s a £5k investment, payable in full or instalments through Stripe.
If you’re facing your next challenge and thinking ‘I know I can do this because I've done it before. So why can't I seem to do it now?’ let’s have a chat about finding ways to use your patterns to your advantage.
What is Adaptive Discovery Coaching about?
It’s about who you are, but it’s also about the contexts you operate within.
That means the work we do together will be applicable across various aspects of your life, such as work, leadership and business; your relationships with family and friends; your hobbies and leisure time; and your goals, accomplishments and future dreams—those you’ve already planned for and those you want to leave room for.
We explore:
· How you perceive things and how you create meaning from that,
· How you see yourself and how that influences what do,
· How you express yourself to others (and how you don’t),
· Your communication styles and how you interact with people in different settings,
· Your connections with others and the relationship dynamics you have a tendency to create or end up in, and
· Your approach to change and how that shapes how you navigate through life.
You’ll get more insight into your patterns, alongside a greater understanding about how, when, and with whom those patterns are serving you.
The aim is to enable you to:
Feel more confident in the choices you make – and those you don’t;
Address organising issues, not just surface-level problems;
Communicate more effectively with the people you do life with, work with and lead; and
Create a better fit between who you are, what you’re doing, and what you’re trying to achieve…
…for the person you are now, and who you’re working on becoming.
What we do.
Adaptive Discovery Coaching is organised in cycles.
Each cycle is the same shape, but the spaces between are determined by you.
An in-depth interview (usually 60-90 minutes), where I listen for how you construct meaning and make decisions—not just how you've learned to explain yourself.
Pattern identification, where I surface the choreography, including how, when, and with whom it's been serving you. (It has been serving you. That's why it's lasted.)
Experiments designed from your strongest existing capacities, not your least developed. Drawing on evidence (and some creative problem-solving), interventions are always selected and adapted to your choreography. In each cycle you’ll always get something to do; something to design; something to notice.
Time in TheBetweenSpace, where you take the experiments back into your real life. The session gives you the lens. Life gives you the data. Noticing gives you the learning. During this time, you have ongoing access to my support through messages, emails, and voice notes.
A debrief session, where we read what the data showed and adjust from there.
Adaptive Discovery Coaching is two cycles and costs £5,000.
Why this approach might suit.
In a world where where’s no shortage of solutions available, why Adaptive Discovery Coaching?
I’m never going to tell you my approach is the only way—the whole premise of my work is that there are loads of ways to do something, and the ‘right’ way is the way that’s right for you, in your situation and based on what you’re trying to achieve.
But there are types of experiences that Adaptive Discovery is particularly well-suited to.
You’re talking yourself out of going to the gym or on the walk, even though you know it’ll probably help. You tell yourself you’re giving yourself grace, but you fear you’re just making excuses.
You have moments where you feel energised but then you sit down to work and you get easily distracted.
You sit or lie down to rest and end up scrolling longer than intended and not in a way that actually felt enjoyable.
You feel like you’re watching television but not really concentrating—like you’re not quite ‘all in’ whether you’re meant to be working or relaxing.
You can still show up, and you can still summon the best of yourself in important situations—but you feel guilty because you feel like the people you love sometimes get what is left, which was not the point of this.
You experience periods of energy and hope alternating with periods of depletion and worry—looping in a way that doesn’t get you anywhere.
You have a life that looks great on paper, which makes the dissatisfaction hard to explain (and you feel guilty for not being satisfied because you’re genuinely grateful and you also know there’s more that you could do).
You’ve probably been told by other people that everything is fine because, objectively, it is—you know they mean well, but it hasn’t helped and it actually just makes you feel more lonely.
What other people think of you matters—you’ve spent so long building up a great reputation by delivering excellence that taking this next leap feels like you could risk it all; failure no longer feels optional (and that terrifies you).
You have already tried a lot because you’re a problem-solver—but another routine, more discipline, more rest, more effort hasn’t helped and you don’t know why or what to do next.
You’re seeing different problems in different parts of life but beginning to suspect something familiar is underneath them—you know that you have something to do with it, even though other people reassure you that you’re doing well.
You’re trying to find answers about your barriers – what aspect of you and the way you’re showing up – are getting in the way of your next step but none of the label feel quite right… you do procrastinate, but it’s not quite that; you can be self-critical and doubt your skills and talents, but it doesn’t feel like imposter syndrome; you feel like you want the next step to be the right one but it’s not perfectionism.
You can be decisive for everyone else and oddly stuck over your next move.
You sit down to write – the book, the blog post, the CV, the application – and you second guess every word, reading and re-reading, drafting and deleting.
You generally consider yourself good at communication—but there’s a conversation that you’re not having because you don’t know how to say what you want to say. Or perhaps it’s the opposite—there’s a discussion or a meeting that you feel like you’re having on repeat. You’ve tried it another way, but it somehow ends up sounding the same. Like there’s an invisible script you’re all repeating, regardless.
What all of these experiences have in common is a growing gap between what you know you're capable of, what you want for yourself and the people you care about, and what you're actually experiencing.
That might be showing up as
Capability without consistency
Success without satisfaction
Intention without corresponding action
Effort without meaningful progress
Awareness without understanding
Agency and autonomy without freedom.
And this is what Adaptive Discovery Coaching is perfect for.
Because when you’re experiencing a collection of situations in which your existing understanding of yourself, your circumstances and what works is no longer sufficient to explain or navigate what's happening, finding the organising pattern underneath these experiences – your hidden choreography – can stop you trying to solve each problem separately, by helping you address what’s underneath all of them.
Why this is different to other approaches.
We look beyond the problems you bring to what’s organising them. Using research-led interviewing and analytical listening approaches, honed through over a decade of academic training and over 20 years of personal and professional practice, I will help you uncover the hidden patterns shaping how you think, act and relate—often revealing unexpected connections and distinctions between experiences that initially seem unrelated.
We work with who you are, not who you think you need to become. Rather than asking you to adopt someone else's habits, mindset or methods, I help you recognise and use your existing capacities to create meaningful change.
Insight becomes something you can use. Rather than focusing on goals and accountability, we develop practical experiments that help you test new possibilities, recognise patterns in everyday life and become more intentional about how you navigate it.
All of this is in service of understanding yourself well enough to use who you are more deliberately, so that you have more access to the energy, judgment, confidence and resourcefulness you know you have; more choice when familiar patterns appear; and more ways to move toward what matters without having to fight yourself to get there.
You don’t want to become a different person — you want more range as yourself.
So that…
… you go for the walk, get to the gym, or do the ‘thing’ you’ve been trying to make yourself do, and it feels less like a battle with yourself.
… you sit down to write the book draft, and you understand what helps you engage rather than simply blaming yourself when focus disappears.
… you apply for the role, submit the award application, send that demo reel and you know that you are aiming with everything you have, no matter what the outcome is.
… you catch yourself in a familiar interaction with your partner and instead of saying the same thing and repeating the same moves, you realise you can change the dance between you. You say or do something in another way, and this time the whole thing feels different.
… you run the meeting at work and you’re finally able to have the conversation everyone’s needed to have, because you were able to say the thing that needed saying.
… you can be more fully where you are - working when you’re working, resting when you’re resting - instead of feeling half-present in both.
… you sit down to read a new fiction novel because you allowed yourself to rest without turning rest into another thing to perform well or do strategically.
… showing up brilliantly for the things that matter doesn’t consistently mean giving the people you love whatever is left afterwards.
… you feel ambitious again, and in a way that feels like you.
… you have language for what is happening, rather than cycling through labels that ‘almost fit’ but never quite explain your experience.
And you start to notice the familiar patterns with a feeling of curiosity and excitement about what becomes possible now you’ve spotted it.
Effort: re-organised.
But I want to be clear about what experiences this work gives you access to and what it doesn’t.
The next phase is going to be effort. Real effort. You already know that, and it's precisely why the offers that promise to make it easy set off every alarm you have.
But it's effort organised differently. Not more of it, pointed harder at the same wall.
Because it doesn’t have to be effort or ease. It's both, held together: the effort of someone working with their own grain rather than against it.
I have a language for this: calibration.
“Calibration isn’t about changing less — it’s about organising change differently. You already have capacities that can help you learn, do, and achieve the thing you want. Let’s find the right way to deploy them.”
Alex’s Story
I’d like to introduce you to Alex, who had an experience of calibration in our 1:1 work together.
After two questions and one 20-minute discussion, Alex burst into tears and told me she felt more relief from our short conversation, than she’d felt in several weeks of dedicated self-discovery, practice and expert advice.
She’d approached her next phase of change as she’d approached every other in her life: with a desire to succeed that fuelled her dedication to learning the skill she knew she needed to accelerate towards her goal.
And so, she did what she always did—she dedicated time and effort to working out what she needed to achieve, comprehensively understand what she needed to do, and got advice on how to get there.
So far, so typical.
After hours of research, she had a dossier of really good advice. None of it worked.
That’s because the advice implicitly required her to be a version of herself that didn’t yet exist.
…
Imagine: you’ve been told that if you want to be an author you must sit and write every day… but every time you do, everything you write sounds worse. Not only are you not making progress, you start doubting whether success is even possible, whether you truly have what it takes, or whether you should just give up and settle for what you already do well. This was the kind of situation my client was in.
…
Every time she tried to follow the advice, implement the plan, and do the work, she became more frustrated and more and more tempted to give up.
Not only had she not developed the skill she was working towards, she also started questioning her own capabilities about whether it was even possible for her.
But she wasn’t ready to give up. The flame may have gone but an ember remained. That’s when she came to me.
In the first Discovery session, I could see that the method she was using to develop the skill she was trying so hard to master was completely counter to her natural strengths, preferences and tendencies.
It wasn’t that the advice was bad advice, it was just based on someone else’s choreography, and it didn’t fit her and what she was trying to achieve.
She felt like she was doing the right thing and failing.
I think she had the wrong assignment.
By trying to be the person she thought she needed to be, she stopped herself being who she already was. Which meant she wasn’t using the skills she had already spent years developing.
That didn’t mean she didn’t need to change; it meant that she could work on the change she wanted as the person she actually was, with the capacities she already had. This wasn’t about limiting her to what she could already do, it was about helping her feel ‘enough’, whilst she reached for ‘more’.
The insights from that session created a huge amount of relief and emotional release. But it was also the spark that re-lit the fire she’d started to lose and turned the ember back into a flame.
The reframe enabled her to begin to see new possibilities for ways she could approach her project—a way that didn’t require her to go into battle with herself daily. Where she could be inspired by others, without falling into imitation of their ways of doing it.
Working with her existing orientation to the world, including her strengths and capabilities, the output of that session was a set of experiments: activities to help her develop the skill she’d already lost hours of her life dedicated to building—but this time, using the choreography that was already familiar to her.
We also designed experiments to help her develop new choreography, using skills she already had. This helped her practice this genuinely hard thing using something she’d already made feel easy.
…
Daily writing might work wonderfully for you, for example, if your choreography contains a preference for delivering the hardest tasks through frequency. If you favour intensity, as Alex did, writing every day can feel like trying to break in new shoes on the longest, hardest hike you’ve ever done. That trek needs the comfy shoes—the ones that you can slip your feet straight into and that never give you blisters. The walk is still hard but at least your shoes fit.
…
Alex arrived feeling depleted and a bit bruised by the exertion of ‘trial and error’; she left feeling empowered, re-energised and excited to try again.
After that, her practice became so much more enjoyable and far more effective. Not only that, she also left with greater insight into how she works and she can use this self-knowledge in the future, enabling her to develop new skills more quickly and easily by working with herself, rather than against herself.
Because one of the great benefits of Adaptive Discovery Coaching is that by increasing your self-knowledge and awareness of your ways of navigating life and change, it can make other moves easier and other forms of support more effective.
Working with a personal trainer? Knowing how you prefer to show up for exercising can help you plan your work with them that sets you up for success, despite the exertion it’s certainly going to take. Considering professional career advice? Knowing how your patterns and preferences change between work and home can help you design a career that fits both versions of you. Or even just using AI to get guidance… knowing your own patterns can help you accurately provide context and interpret outputs that fit you, rather than relying on the predicted version of you provided by a model.
Knowing your choreography helps you make better use of the resources you have – whatever comes next - because you understand more about what works for you, what doesn’t, and what that depends on.
For Alex, the discovery process was transformative—but it didn’t require her to transform into someone else.
And that’s the distinction at the centre of how I work.
Don’t Transform, Calibrate.
Because, for me, there's a difference between something being transformative and something requiring the transformation of who you are.
A lot of advice implies the second – not intentionally - but through the idea of a kind of universal ‘best practice’. But there’s rarely only one right way to do something, and sometimes we need to find the way that already fits who we are and what we can do. Not as an endpoint, but as a starting one.
So, calibration is change that begins from who you already are, the resources you've gathered, the capacities you've spent years developing.
And it's aimed at things that are genuinely life-changing.
The two aren't in opposition.
You can do transformative work - reach the revenue, write the book, take the stage, change your body/your style/your surroundings, exit the partnership - as yourself, while still growing into who you're becoming. Being and becoming, at the same time. That's the whole premise.
Adaptive Discovery Coaching is an invitation to start that calibration.
It finds the pattern organising the friction you’re feeling, then designs experiments that let you read your own situations, in your actual life, from the capacities you already have.
Effort and ease, both at the same time. Change that's transformative without demanding you become someone else to earn it.
A promise I won't make. (And one that I will*).
I'm not going to tell you this approach will definitely change your life in a handful of weeks (though I won’t say it can’t, either!)
I don't know your pattern yet, and human behaviour is more complex than most people account for. Pretending otherwise is probably how you’ve been let down before (I’m an optimist about the potential for a ‘quick fix’, too!)
But I do have a hope for you about what changes when your choreography is visible (and a promise about how I’ll help you see it).
You stop solving the same problem in five different rooms.
You get to make the choices you're already making with confidence (because you finally understand what they're for).
You trust that you’ll be able to make different choices where and when you want to, because you start to see your moves and interrupt your normal routines.
You get to dance a different dance.
Or you might just decide to change the music.
The point is: the reaching itself stops feeling like a tug-of-war you’re playing against yourself.
The next book, the next milestone, the next stretch is still hard work, but it's hard work that fits. An expression of who you are and what your purpose is.
Less grinding. More curiosity.
The thing you're genuinely good at, aimed in the right direction.
If any of this feels like it resonates and you want to explore whether finding your choreography could help you, the next step is a conversation, not a commitment. We find out whether there's a fit, and whether this is the right thing for what you're reaching toward.
*The nature of the work means that it’s bespoke to you and your circumstances and that’s why it’s hard to specify or guarantee where we’ll get to through two cycles of Adaptive Discovery Coaching. However, if - by the end of the second coaching cycle - you haven’t experienced a genuinely meaningful insight, or an experiment that’s made a positive contribution to your life in some way, I’ll extend the coaching cycle at no extra cost until we find a meaningful point of impact.
And if you’re intrigued but not quite ready yet and want to keep in touch with me as things percolate, consider subscribing to my weekly newsletter: “I’ve been noticing…” https://www.nhadaptive.co.uk/newsletter
