I'm Sophie. I trained as an actor, taught as a Head of Drama and LAMDA examiner, and have spent my career on the three things that decide whether people get heard: voice, nerves and delivery. Now I coach founders, senior leaders and professionals to sound as sharp as they think — in the room in London, or online.
Accredited
LAMDA examiner in speech and communication
Where I came from
Mountview
Foundation in Acting
Goldsmiths, University of London
BA (Hons) English and Drama
The rehearsal room
Directing, rehearsing, teaching
Head of Drama
Leading a department
LAMDA examiner
Speech and communication
Coaching, today
Professionals, founders and senior leaders
I trained as an actor — a foundation at Mountview — then read English and Drama at Goldsmiths. English and Drama turned out to be the two halves of this job: what you say, and how you say it. I spent the years afterwards directing, rehearsing and teaching. Far less glamorous than it sounds, and far more useful than it looks.
Rehearsal is the practice of doing a difficult thing repeatedly, under pressure, until it holds.
I went on to lead a drama department, and to examine speech and communication for LAMDA, assessing speakers against a formal national standard. That is where I learned to name precisely what makes one person compelling and another easy to talk over, and how to teach the difference rather than simply describe it.
Somewhere along the way, professionals started asking for the same help. Board-level people. Founders about to pitch. Brilliant specialists who kept being passed over for whoever spoke first and loudest.
So I took a craft that has trained performers for four hundred years and built it into coaching for the rooms you actually walk into: the board update, the pitch, the hostile Q&A, the meeting you have been quiet in for two years.
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Years of craft
Actors have been taught to hold a room for four centuries. Almost none of that ever reaches the people who need it on a Tuesday morning, in a meeting that decides their career. That is the gap I work in.
What I actually believe
Being watched sets off the same alarm as a genuine threat. Adrenaline floods in, your breath goes shallow, and your hands shake because your body is preparing to run. It's doing what it evolved to do. It has simply picked the wrong emergency.
You cannot reason yourself calm in the ninety seconds before you stand up. You can change how you're breathing, and that changes everything downstream: the shaking, the thin voice, the thoughts arriving too fast to catch.
You can read every book on public speaking and be no better at it. It changes when you do it out loud, badly at first, with someone telling you precisely what to adjust. That's why you'll be speaking in every session I run.
The training behind it
Assessing how people speak is part of my working life, against a recognised national standard. It means I can hear what's happening in your voice within about a minute of meeting you, and tell you specifically what to do about it.
Years of teaching people who were convinced they couldn't do it. Most of my adult clients are that same person, twenty years on, in better clothes, with far more at stake.
I trained as a teacher, not only as a practitioner. There is a real difference between somebody who can do the thing and somebody who can teach you to do it, and most coaching sits on the wrong side of that line.
The two halves of the job, as it turns out. English is what you say: structure, argument, the words that actually land. Drama is how you say it: voice, presence, nerve. Most speaking advice only ever covers one of the two.
Who I work with
Professionals, founders and senior leaders. People with a keynote, a pitch, a board presentation or an interview coming up, and people with no single event at all, just a long-running sense that they are better than they sound.
Some come to me because something is in the diary. Some come because they are tired of watching opportunities go to people who are simply louder. Both are good reasons.
I work one-to-one, in small-group courses, and with teams. In person in London, or online.
Book a free twenty-minute call. Tell me what's coming up, or what's been quietly holding you back, and I'll show you exactly how we'd work on it. Pick a time that suits you.
In person in London, or online.