Ben & Jamesa - Leadership Coaching
Overview
We started leadership coaching because we love helping organizations become better places to work. Our approach is shaped by our different backgrounds, a shared belief in the power of relationships, and a long history of work focused on helping people and communities thrive.
Our Backgrounds
Jamesa
Jamesa is a licensed professional counselor, nationally certified therapist, and owner of Blue Lotus Counseling (to learn about her counseling practice, click here). For more than 20 years, she has supported people navigating relationships, healing, and change.
Today, she brings that experience into her work with leaders and teams. She listens closely, helps people process difficult experiences, and makes room for conversations that can be hard to have. She wants people to feel understood while also helping them see where something needs to change. Jamesa holds a deep passion for understanding the brain and how it shapes our thinking and feeling patterns, and how this in turn shapes our individual and collective lives.
Jamesa grew up in the Carolinas and is a proud Gamecock. She finds hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains deeply calming, especially when she returns home to a cup of homemade tea. She loves to read, with authors Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and Alice Walker always on her bedside table. She recently spent two years living in Northern Portugal with Ben and their children, where she enjoyed walking all the cobble stone streets and remote mountain trails she could find.
Ben
Ben founded an award-winning forensic counseling practice in 2008, focused on helping people change harmful behavior. Running an organization brought him face to face with the challenges of leadership, workplace culture, and accountability. Today, he brings a direct, systems-oriented approach to helping leaders understand patterns and build workplaces where people can thrive.
Today, he speaks across North America and Europe to help leaders recognize unhealthy patterns and build workplaces where people can thrive, believing that healthier organizations contribute to healthier communities.
Originally from England, Ben found his way to the Carolinas via California, Oregon, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is on the autism spectrum, loves cooking and growing microgreens, and spends much of his free time wandering through the woods or finding somewhere outdoors to swim. His favorite authors and thinkers include James Baldwin, Elif Shafak, and Thich Nhat Hanh.
Together
We’re partners in both life and work, and reside in the mountains of Western North Carolina. We have two kids who challenge us to build a healthier world for them and their peers. As a family we greatly enjoy spending time outdoors, and around the dinner table, learning each other anew with each passing day.