Heart iQ began, for me, as a question about why professional success on paper wasn't enough. I trained as a chiropractor in 2002, one of the youngest to qualify from the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic. The practice was thriving, the income was good, the clients were happy, and by most measures I had exactly what people say they want: freedom, a beautiful place to live, and work that made a difference. And still there was a kind of soul itch that wouldn't settle. It wasn't discontent for its own sake. It was a sense that there was something else out there that I hadn't yet found.
From private practice to group work
That itch eventually led me into a very public test of a different way of working. In 2009 I took part in a coaching competition called Britain's Next Top Coach, where the final challenge was to coach a client one-to-one, bring them to resolution within ten minutes, in a single take, with the footage then put online for public vote. The video reached viewers across ninety-two countries and I won with over half the vote. It was a strange kind of validation, recognition for a short example of my coaching, though a public vote is not evidence of a lasting outcome. But even then I knew the real power of the method wasn't in the one-to-one at all. It was in the group.
Bringing different kinds of attention together
Heart iQ draws on my experience of coaching, group work, spiritual practice and embodied expression. I am interested in how thinking, feeling, movement and relationships interact. The four-key lock is an image I use for bringing those areas of attention together.
I often use the example of health to make this concrete. A dietician can spend a career studying the perfect balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates, and be entirely right about the value of eating well, and still preside over an unhealthy system if exercise, environment, relationships and stress are ignored. Diet matters. It just isn't the whole picture. Heart iQ works the same way: it isn't only about emotions, or the body, or spiritual awakening, or clearing the past. It needs all of it present together.
As in circle, as in life
The other thing that makes Heart iQ different is that it isn't designed to be done one-to-one. It happens in a group, in circle, because something happens in a group that can't be manufactured through individual coaching or reading a book. When we're in a room with other people, our defence mechanisms surface. Our resistance, our shadows, the parts of us that keep us from real intimacy with a partner, a child, or ourselves, all of it shows up in circle. We have a saying for it: as in circle, as in life. Watching the dynamics play out in a group becomes a kind of live map of what's happening in someone's wider world, and that's where the deepest work gets done, safely, together, rather than alone.
The HEART framework
I've built a rough acronym to hold the shape of what Heart iQ aims to do, spelling HEART: healing your past, expanding your range, awakening your divinity, relationship bliss, and trusting life. Healing the past means working with the neglect or harm that shut so many of us down, without treating that history as the whole story. Expanding your range means growing not from a place of rejecting where you are now, but from loving it, because growth pushed from struggle feels very different to growth that's received and celebrated. Awakening your divinity, for me, has nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the felt experience of being connected to something larger than the individual body you're in. Relationship bliss isn't only about romantic partnership; it's the practice of communicating from feeling and vulnerability rather than defence and positioning, so you can actually be met by another person. And trusting life is the piece that underlies all the others: spending time in circle, watching its strange perfection play out again and again, tends to build a felt trust that carries into how you meet the rest of your life.
Joy as the orientation
If I had to reduce all of that to a single sentence, I'd say Heart iQ is the art of finding, connecting to, and opening to joy. Everything else, the healing, the expanding, the awakening, the relationships, the trust, is in service of that. I believe goodness is present in everyone, that nobody arrives rotten at the core, but that over time disconnection and self-doubt build up until we mistake ourselves for our unworthiness and stop feeling our own goodness. What circle offers is a way to meet that pain together rather than alone, and to discover that joy, rather than being something we have to manufacture, might actually be closer to our default state, waiting for us to stop holding such a small vessel up to catch it.
The HEART Framework
- Healing your past
- Expanding your range
- Awakening your divinity
- Relationship bliss
- Trusting life
