David Lloyd

I spent years in finance before I did any of this. Good living, learned a lot, but it was never really about people, and I knew I wanted something that was.

The clue had been there a while. I started karate at 11, the year Bruce Lee died and every channel was showing his films, and I never really stopped. I competed for England from 1984, and years later I coached the national squad.

The part I enjoyed most was never the winning. It was being alongside someone while they worked out what they were actually capable of. I was good at it. It took me longer to notice that I cared about it.

What finally decided it was a television programme. I was watching In Treatment, a series that follows a therapist through his sessions week by week, and something clicked.

I remember thinking, that's what I want to do.

Not the most dramatic origin story, but it's the truth. So at forty-five I went back to university and trained while I carried on working. I loved it. The theory, the reading, even the role-plays everyone else groaned about.

There is a domestic version of all that, too. I'm a father of five, with grown-up children and young ones still at home, so I've done the sleepless end of family life and the letting-go end of it, and I'm still doing both.

How I work

I don't work in one fixed way. My training covered psychodynamic, person-centred and cognitive behavioural approaches, and I've added hypnotherapy, neuro-linguistic programming, mindfulness and life coaching since. What that means in practice is that I won't try to fit you into a model.

I learned that somewhere unlikely. Years ago our squad was given a coach who wanted all of us to fight the same way. Same stance, same movement, same techniques.

It didn't work, and it couldn't have, because every one of us had built our game around our own strengths and weaknesses. To his credit he listened, and he changed how he ran the sessions. I've never forgotten it.

You'll bring something into the room nobody else would have brought. So we work in whatever way suits you, your situation, and what you actually want out of it.

My hope is you leave feeling listened to and understood, and that it felt personal, because it was.