Lee Gittings

Former Sales Director for UK and Ireland at Boehringer Ingelheim

“As well as my responsibility for a team of senior managers, I was also the national Wellbeing Lead during my time at Boehringer. And one of the biggest challenges I saw facing people in my teams was just the sheer volume of work – they all had so many tasks and so many meetings that it was very difficult to focus and devote proper thought and quality time to the different people and projects they were managing. So I was really thinking through ways to help people focus better and become more productive, without adding to their stress or detracting from the quality of their work.

So when I came across Sarah in her role as a senior business coach with Clarity Leadership and realised how much expertise and experience she had in that area, it seemed like a great fit. She suggested running a one-day session on resilience, with a focus on mindfulness and positive psychology insights, for all the members of my national leadership team – an idea that I loved.

The session was hugely successful and people found it very valuable, and I had people feeding back to me even the next day about some really practical things they had already been able to put into place. For example Sarah’s tools dramatically affected the quality, efficiency, and effectiveness of our meetings – people started doing proper preparation so their ability to engage was better, we learned to minimise distractions, and the quality of healthy debate when there was disagreement or different perspectives was amazing. We were able to reach good decisions much more quickly, and so we all actually looked forward to meetings because we knew how useful and productive they would be!

We also put into practice Sarah’s tips for better sharing our personal lives, which helped each of us to understand more of what made those around us tick and brought us closer together. It really helped people be more patient and understanding with one another and feel more positive about the work we were achieving together, which in turn helped to stop work from becoming overpowering and overwhelming for people.

For me personally one thing that really stuck was the breathing exercises she taught us to do before speaking or leading a meeting – so simple, but they have really helped me focus and relax, and now my presentations are definitely more impactful.

Sarah was also brilliant about following up, and several weeks after the workshop she came along to a leadership team meeting to see how we were progressing and gave us great feedback and made even more suggestions for how to continue to improve our working habits and processes going forward. She was just generally great about being available for informal support and conversations to help us put all that we had learned into practice and sustain it over the long term.

Throughout Sarah’s time working with us I was so impressed by the way she combined immense knowledge and expertise with an ability to articulate ideas simply and make advice tangible and doable. She doesn’t leave people feeling overwhelmed, but keeps her techniques and tools straightforward and memorable, making it easy to embed them into daily working practices. I would absolutely give her the highest recommendation.”