Aryanne Oade
Welcome to my website. This page will tell you how I work with clients, and about some of the principles that are important to me in my coaching and writing.
I specialise in the area of handling challenging workplace dynamics. Many of my clients are already successful, performing complex senior-level roles. They work with me because they are looking for fresh ideas, constructive challenge, and an empathic guide. I have been combining business psychology and professional acting in coaching programmes since I set up my business in 1994. Since then, I have worked with senior-level clients from over forty-five organisations in fourteen sectors based across the UK, Europe and North America.
The combination of business psychology and professional acting enables me to work with my client’s intra-personal world – their values, character and personality as they relate to the workplace – and with their inter-personal behaviour: the skills, strategies and tactics they employ with their colleagues and clients. This method enables rapid progress against coaching goals and creates sustained behaviour change.
Each coaching process is bespoke. I successfully work from the premise that the additional resources you seek are already within you. By applying the learning from your coaching programme to your day-to-day work, you will achieve more in less time with less personal wear and tear, and enjoy greater influence over the factors which create success for you in your workplace. My aim is to provide you with opportunities to practise and digest powerful learning. I want you to leave coaching having achieved your specific goals for the programme, as well as with enhanced self-belief and self-confidence, improved resilience, greater self-awareness and a more comprehensive behavioural toolkit.
I have written a suite of five books on handling challenging workplace dynamics (Palgrave Macmillan), a niche book for coaches (Little, Brown), and two self-published books on tackling workplace bullying, one of which was a bestseller in print and e. Trigger Publishing is producing new and updated versions of both of these books in 2024 along with an e-learning programme on bully-proofing (Trigger Hub).
I have put material about recovery from workplace bullying and developing a bully-proof mindset onto social media which you can access using the links at the bottom of the page. You can also access many articles, as well as an audio presentation Recovery from Workplace Bullying, via the downloads link below. Other links will take you to my books, e-learning programme and an audio download about the themes from Building Influence in the Workplace: How to Gain and Retain Influence at Work.
I am grateful to a number of publications which have published articles I’ve written: IOD’s Director, theHRDIRECTOR, HRMagazine, Nursing Times, Safety and Health Practitioner and SHP Online. My work on enabling recovery from bullying and bully-proofing has been featured in The Independent, The Guardian, Psychologies, Irish Independent (Sunday), Marie Claire, Good Housekeeping, Belfast Telegraph and Midwives, and Responding to an Incident of Bullying at Work: An Opportunity to Create Zero-Tolerance Culture was published by the American Psychological Association in 2018. I have also appeared on Channel 4 and BBC Radio, and spoken at the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Building Influence in the Workplace
Qualifications and Memberships
I qualified as a chartered psychologist in 1991 and am an Associate Fellow of the BPS. I have an M.Sc. in Occupational Psychology from University of Sheffield, and am accredited to use Myers-Briggs, FIRO-B, EQ-i 2.0 and EQ 360. I hold qualifications as an AAMET Certified Level 2 EFT practitioner.
I hold the BPS Certificate of Competence in Occupational Testing for Level A and Level B Intermediate, and the European Test User Certificate (Level 2) for Work and Organisational Assessment.
Roleplay Coaching and Oade Associates’ Actors
I design most coaching programmes so that, part-way through the process, clients benefit from roleplay coaching with professional actors taking the part your most demanding workplace contacts. Professional actors realistically enact scenarios from your working life, re-creating the exact dynamics which you experience as challenging to handle. By placing yourself in a professionally enacted recreation of the most challenging scenarios you face, but in the safety of a coaching environment, you can re-visit the very circumstances in which you lost credibility or influence, used well-intentioned but ineffective behaviour, or didn’t achieve your goals and learn how to handle these dynamics straightforwardly an simply.
Roleplay coaching meetings will enable you to improve your handling of complex inter-personal dynamics and challenging characters, assimilate new strategies and skills, and return to the workplace ready to apply your new approaches straight away. The learning is often so deep that you can handle previously challenging characters and situations simply and straightforwardly from that point onwards.
I work with a small pool of professional actors each of whom is able at portraying a range of convincing senior business characters, and at providing developmental feedback.