About Sian Carlisle 

For fifteen years I led change for a living — proposition launches, post-buyout transformation, regulatory change — inside organisations including IBM, RBS and AXA. I was good at it. I understood how change works on paper: the plans, the phases, the communications cascade.

Then, eight years ago, my husband died. Our daughters were small. And I learned the difference between leading change and living it — that there is no communications cascade for a Tuesday morning when the future you’d planned has gone, and that capability and confidence are not the same thing when the ground moves under you.

I stepped back from corporate life, raised my girls, and slowly worked out what came next. Part of the answer was retraining: I qualified as a professional coach in 2023, and I’ve since coached more than 500 hours — senior leaders up to CEO level, and people in the middle of their own turning points.
That’s what I bring to coaching: the frameworks change leaders use, and the lived knowledge of what change actually asks of a person. I needed both. My clients get both.

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How I Coach

 

• Supportive without being soft. I’ll ask the question under the question, and I won’t pretend the hard bit isn’t hard — but you’ll never feel judged for it.

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• You are not a project to optimise. You’re not broken and you don’t need fixing. Coaching helps you see yourself clearly at a moment when the view keeps moving.

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• Insight that turns into action. Clients tell me they leave sessions with practical actions and a clearer head — and that the answers turn out to be theirs, which is why they stick.

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• Commercially fluent, humanly grounded. Fifteen years in organisations means I understand restructures, politics and pressure from the inside — useful whether your change is happening in a boardroom or a kitchen.

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The words clients use most about working with me: calm, warm, perceptive — and clarity, usually with a next step attached.​

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Who I Work With 

 

Two kinds of people, mostly — and they overlap more than you’d think:

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• People in the middle of a plot twist — a career pivot, a divorce, a bereavement, children leaving, a next chapter that won’t write itself. Often women in mid-life, standing on ground that’s still moving.

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• Leaders and organisations in motion — senior leaders and managers handling restructure, growth or uncertainty, often while something significant shifts at home too. Change rarely stays in its lane.

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Credentials

 

• ICF-accredited professional coach (ACC), qualified 2023

• Level 2 Professional Coach Diploma, Optimus Coach Academy

• 500 hours of professional coaching

• 15 years in change, marketing and proposition development — IBM, RBS, AXA, Kensington Mortgages and fintech scale-ups

• Coaching panel member at MoreHappi; clients include World Central Kitchen, Rightmove, The Hoxton, Dock & Bay, MOO, HelloFresh, The School of Life and The University of Reading

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Life Beyond Coaching

 

I live in North London with my two teenage daughters and two unimpressed cats. Away from the coaching room you’ll find me on long London walks — where I do my best thinking — watching women’s football, or lost down a genealogy rabbit hole, chasing the stories of people who lived through their own plot twists a century or two before me. History, strong coffee, and a good view: preferably all three at once.

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