Perform at your best when the pressure is real.
Performance, speaking, presence and relationships. Coaching for leaders and entrepreneurs who have to deliver when it matters, at work and in life.
You already have the capability.
The problem is reaching it consistently when the stakes are high.
Most people who come to me are already good. They know their material. They have the seniority, the track record and the intelligence. And then the board walks in, the camera goes live, the difficult conversation starts, and something in them changes shape.
Knowing what to say is not the same as being able to say it. That gap is not a knowledge problem or a confidence slogan problem. It is a performance problem, and performance is trainable.
It also does not stay at work. The pattern that makes you go quiet in a board meeting is usually the same one running in the conversation you keep putting off at home. People arrive here for the presentation and stay for that.
How you land, in the room and outside it.
Executive communication
Saying the difficult thing clearly, to the people who need to hear it.
Public speaking and presence
Keynotes, panels, all hands, investor rooms and camera work.
Confidence under pressure
Access to your own ability when the temperature rises.
Emotional resilience
Recovering fast, holding your ground, staying usable after a hard week.
Performance psychology
The patterns underneath the behaviour, and how to interrupt them.
High stakes conversations
Negotiation, conflict, bad news, pushing back on someone senior.
Relationships and connection
How you land with the people who matter. Colleagues, clients, partners, family.
Breathwork
The regulator underneath everything else. What decides whether the rest of you is available in the moment.
Visualisation
Rehearsing the room before you are in it, so the real thing is a repeat rather than a first attempt.
Nervous system regulation
Practical work with breath, body and voice, before and during the moment.
Leadership presence
How other people experience you, and what to change to shift that.
There isn't a one size fits all programme.
We start with you, the situation you are facing and what you want to change.
Performance, communication and leadership
For founders, executives, leaders and entrepreneurs who know they have more to give but cannot always reach it when the pressure is on.
Speaking and presentation coaching
For the keynote, the investor pitch, the board meeting or the presentation you have been dreading for weeks.
Stress, anxiety and mindset
Mindset coaching, NLP, hypnotherapy, breathwork and performance techniques, for when your mind never quite switches off. Delivered by a qualified clinical hypnotherapist.
Confidence, presence and relationships
The meeting where you do not speak. The boundary you do not set. The conversation you keep avoiding.
Keynotes and conference speaking
30 to 60 minutes with live demonstration, or a 90 minute interactive session. Also available to host, chair or sit on a panel.
Corporate and team programmes
Bespoke workshops, leadership programmes and executive coaching, with Session and Mara alongside where it helps.
I spent eighteen years learning how to perform under pressure. I now use those principles to help leaders do the same.
ICOP works from the inside out. What happens internally decides how your nervous system responds, which decides how you think and regulate, which decides how you communicate, which decides how other people experience you.
Most communication training starts at the last link in that chain. It teaches you what to say and how to stand. That is why it stops working the moment the pressure is real.
What changes.
The most powerful coaching I've done. Usually I can't stick with it, but this approach has changed so much so quickly, I can't believe it.
I discovered where the lack of confidence was coming from, worked on personal and professional issues I was having, and learned voice skills to support my communication and my accent.
Since working with Jade I've spent less time worrying and more time doing, kicked some unhealthy habits, started prioritising friends and family again, built confidence at work and achieved a promotion.
Jade Matthew.
Performance psychologist and communication specialist. Award winning actress. Clinical hypnotherapist and Master NLP Practitioner. Lecturer at LAMDA. Creator of the ICOP Method.
Eighteen years performing professionally under real pressure, and eighteen years working out why capable people lose access to themselves at exactly the wrong moment. The coaching sits where those two things meet.
Mara.
The interactive performance coach for high stakes communication.
I built Mara so the work does not stop when the session ends. Camera on, you run the real thing, and you are scored live across six areas. Then you reset, run it again and watch the difference on the recording.
An absolute game changer in how I show up with prospects, customers and the C suite. It reads my wording, breathing, pauses, posture and tonality, and shows me exactly where to improve.
Session.
The technology that brings the ICOP Method to life.
Session is the company and the platform. Mara lives inside it, alongside the corporate programmes and the free tools. Individual leaders use it on their own. Organisations license it for their teams.
One methodology, four ways to reach it.
The person, the authority and the practitioner.
The intellectual property. Eighteen years of performance, psychology and communication work in one framework.
The human work. Private programmes, keynotes and corporate delivery.
The platform that carries the method beyond the room.
The interactive coach inside SESSION, where people practise between sessions.
Tell me about the room you have to walk into.
Coaching starts with a conversation. Twenty minutes, no charge, and a straight answer about whether I am the right person.
There isn't a one size fits all coaching programme.
We start with you, the situation you are facing and what you want to change. The programmes below are built around the challenges I work with most often. Your coaching is always tailored to you.
Performance, communication and leadership
Become the person you know you can be in the room.
For founders, executives, leaders, entrepreneurs and ambitious professionals who know they have more to give, but cannot always reach it when the pressure is on.
Maybe you are stepping into a bigger role. Maybe you are leading people for the first time. Maybe you are constantly in meetings, presenting, pitching, negotiating or deciding, and your communication is not reflecting your actual capability.
Or maybe you simply want to be more powerful, clear and confident in the way you show up.
We look at what is happening underneath your behaviour, then work on the external skills that change how people experience you.
We can work on
Your coaching might include
Mindset work
Understanding and changing the internal patterns that hold you back.
Performance training
Techniques from professional acting and performance to build presence, focus and control.
Communication coaching
Making your message clearer, more compelling and easier for people to hear.
Rehearsal
Practising the actual meeting, pitch, presentation or conversation you are facing.
Feedback
Understanding what you communicate through your voice, body, energy and behaviour.
Regulation
Managing your state before and during high pressure situations.
The goal is not a polished version of you. It is to make the real you more powerful, more deliberate and more accessible under pressure.
I started communication and confidence coaching with Jade and it was an amazing experience. I discovered where the lack of confidence was coming from, worked on personal and professional issues I was having, and learned voice skills to support my communication and my accent.
Speaking and presentation coaching
Do not just prepare the presentation. Prepare yourself.
For founders, executives, experts, speakers and professionals who need to communicate something important, and want to be certain they can deliver it.
A keynote. An investor pitch. A conference presentation. A board meeting. A panel. A media appearance. Or a presentation you have been dreading for weeks.
We take you from knowing what you want to say to owning the room while you say it.
What performers do before they go on
We work on the whole performance
Message
What are you actually trying to make your audience think, feel or do?
Structure
How to make your message land clearly and memorably.
Voice
Pace, pitch, tone, resonance, emphasis, pauses and vocal variety.
Body
Posture, movement, eye contact, grounding and physical presence.
Energy
How to create energy without forcing it, and how to control it when nerves take over.
Confidence
How to stay connected to yourself when everyone is watching.
Audience connection
Reading the room, adapting, and creating genuine connection rather than delivering information.
Pressure
We do not practise comfortably. We introduce pressure deliberately, so you can perform when things are not perfect.
You do not practise until you know it. You practise until you can deliver it.
The public speaking coaching has changed my career and my life. I have won huge pitches and felt totally confident in high pressured situations where I used to get extremely nervous. Working with Jade to get rid of my fear, work out where it came from and then learn better speaking skills has been the most valuable coaching experience I have had. I cannot recommend this highly enough.
Stress, anxiety and mindset
Learn to manage your internal state instead of being managed by it.
For people whose mind and body feel like they are constantly operating under pressure. Hypnotherapy, NLP and breathwork can help relieve anxiety and build practical ways of responding to it.
Maybe you overthink everything. Maybe your mind never switches off. Maybe you feel overwhelmed even when things are going well. Maybe pressure is changing how you communicate, sleep, work or relate to people. Maybe you know logically that you are fine, but your body does not seem to have received the message.
Or perhaps you simply want a stronger set of mental skills for dealing with pressure, uncertainty and change.
This programme brings together mindset coaching, NLP, hypnotherapy, breathwork and performance techniques so you can understand your patterns and build practical ways of responding differently.
We might work on
The tools
NLP
Practical techniques for identifying and changing unhelpful thought and behavioural patterns.
Hypnotherapy
Focused relaxation and therapeutic techniques for working with deeply embedded patterns and responses. I am a qualified clinical hypnotherapist.
Breathwork
Simple breathing techniques that influence your physiological state before and during pressured situations.
Mindset coaching
The beliefs, assumptions and internal narratives that shape how you respond.
Performance psychology
How high performers prepare, regulate and recover when the stakes are high.
Practical regulation
Tools for real life. Before the meeting, after the difficult conversation, when your thoughts start racing.
This is not about removing every uncomfortable feeling. It is about developing the skills to handle yourself when life gets uncomfortable.
So you think more clearly. Respond rather than react. Recover more quickly. And feel more in control of yourself.
She allows time for me to share without losing focus on the goals I have, specifically workplace communication and negotiation, and building healthy routines. Since working with Jade I've spent less time worrying and more time doing, managed to kick some unhealthy habits, started prioritising friends and family again, built confidence at work and achieved a promotion.
This is coaching and hypnotherapy, not medical treatment. If you are dealing with a diagnosed condition, please speak to your GP or a mental health professional. I am happy to work alongside them.
Confidence, presence and relationships
Change the way you experience yourself, and the way other people experience you.
Confidence is not just about standing on a stage.
It shows up in the meeting where you do not speak. The boundary you do not set. The conversation you keep avoiding. The relationship where you keep second guessing yourself. The moment someone challenges you and suddenly you lose your voice.
This programme is for people who want to feel more secure, confident, expressive and connected in the way they move through the world.
Real confidence is not performance. It is the ability to stay connected to yourself while you are being seen.
Self confidence
Building trust in your own judgement, ability and voice.
Presence
Being fully present rather than disappearing into your thoughts.
Charisma
The behaviours that create warmth, confidence, connection and impact.
Boundaries
Communicating what you need clearly without becoming aggressive, defensive or apologetic.
Difficult conversations
Staying grounded when emotions are high.
Listening
Becoming more present and responsive rather than planning your next answer.
Emotional regulation
Staying connected to yourself when someone else's behaviour activates you.
Body language
What your body communicates before you say a word.
Voice
Using your voice with greater confidence, warmth and authority.
Relationships
The recurring patterns in how you connect, communicate and respond to other people.
Not to turn you into someone else. Not to give you a script for how a confident person behaves. To help you feel more comfortable being fully yourself.
Four stages. The ICOP Method.
The aim is not insight for its own sake. The aim is change you can feel and act on in the real world, when it counts.
Understand what is actually happening
Work on the patterns, beliefs and responses getting in your way
Build practical tools to deliberately change your state and behaviour
Practise it in the situations that actually matter
Not sure which one fits?
Most people are not. Tell me the situation and I will tell you where to start, or whether I am the right person at all.
A keynote about the gap between knowing and doing.
Everyone in your audience already knows they should communicate better. They have read the books. The talk is about why that changes nothing, and what does.
Four keynotes.
Perform when it is real
Why capable people lose access to their own ability under pressure, and what actually restores it. The core talk.
The performance gap
The distance between what you intend to do and what you actually do when the temperature rises. How to close it deliberately.
What performers know
Eighteen years of professional performance training, translated into business communication that holds up in the room.
Presence is a system, not a personality
Presence broken into trainable parts, so it stops being something people either have or do not have.
Every talk is adapted to your audience and your event. If none of these is quite right, tell me the theme and I will build one.
Sized to the event
- Keynote · 30 to 60 minutes, with live demonstration
- Interactive session · 90 minutes, audience on their feet
- Fireside, panel or host · trained voice and broadcast experience
- Keynote plus breakout workshop on the same day
Something they can use this week
- A clear explanation of why they freeze, rush or shrink
- A regulation technique they can use before their next meeting
- A shared vocabulary the organisation can keep using afterwards
- A route to continue, through Session and Mara or through coaching
I do not talk about performing under pressure. I do it for a living.
I am a working actor and voice artist with eighteen years of credits across the BBC, HBO, Netflix and Channel 4, and a BBC Audio Drama Award. I lecture at LAMDA. I have coached more than five hundred senior leaders, including individuals from Netflix, Deutsche Bank, Channel 4, Vodafone and Sky.
Which means the demonstration is live. I can show an audience the difference between a person speaking and a person landing, in real time, using someone from the room.
- Conferences and industry events
- Leadership offsites and away days
- All hands and company kick offs
- Employee network and development weeks
- Client and partner events
A talk changes the temperature in a room for a day. If you want it to change behaviour, the keynote works best as the opening of a programme.
The same methodology, brought into your organisation.
Bespoke workshops, leadership programmes, executive coaching and keynote speaking. Built around the situations your people actually face rather than generic scenarios.
Eleven areas.
Four ways to run it.
Conference and event speaking
30 to 60 minutes with live demonstration, or a 90 minute interactive session with the audience on their feet. Also available to host, facilitate or chair a panel.
Half day or full day
Practical small group work on one focus area. The lowest risk way to prove the method inside your organisation before committing to a programme.
Leadership or team programme
Structured delivery across a cohort, with practice between sessions rather than a gap between them. Confidential one to one work available alongside for the people who need it.
Session and Mara across the organisation
Where appropriate, the work continues between sessions through Session and Mara. Camera on practice, scored across six areas, so progress is visible across a cohort rather than assumed.
The full brochure.
The ICOP Method, the rooms with live demonstrations, the curricula, the six scored dimensions, and how Mara compares to everything else on the market. Read it in the browser or download the PDF to circulate internally.
The ICOP Method
A framework for performance under pressure, developed across eighteen years of professional performance, clinical practice and coaching more than five hundred people.
Inner to outer, in that order.
Most training starts at the end of the chain, with words and posture. ICOP starts where the behaviour is actually produced and works forward.
Identify
Find the actual pattern. Not the story about the pattern. What happens, when, in which rooms, and what it costs you.
Clear
Interrupt what is producing it. Clinical hypnotherapy and NLP applied precisely, so the pattern stops running underneath everything else.
Own
Build practical tools to deliberately change your state and behaviour. Breath, body, voice, attention and mind, trained as a system you can enter on purpose.
Perform
Practise it in the situations that actually matter. Repetition under real pressure until it holds in the rooms that count, not only in the safe ones.
Presence broken into parts you can train.
Presence is treated as something people either have or do not have. It is not. It is five systems working together, and each one can be assessed, trained and rebuilt.
Breath
The regulator. What decides whether the rest of the system is available to you.
Body
The instrument. Posture, grounding and the physical signals other people read first.
Voice
The carrier. Pace, range, resonance and the authority the room hears before the content.
Mind
The narrator. Attention, meaning and what you are telling yourself while you speak.
Impact
The result. How other people actually experience you, measured rather than assumed.
Six tools, applied to the specific problem.
Nothing here is a package. The tool is chosen for what is actually producing the pattern.
Breathwork
The fastest route into the state you need. Trained until you can reach it in the ninety seconds before you speak, not just in a quiet room.
Visualisation
Rehearsing the room in detail before you walk into it. Standard practice for performers and athletes, rare in business, and it changes what your body expects.
Clinical hypnotherapy
For the pattern that keeps running underneath the effort. Precise work on what is producing the behaviour rather than managing it.
NLP
Language, meaning and the internal narrative. How you talk to yourself while you are speaking to everyone else.
Voice and body work
Eighteen years of professional performance training. Pace, range, resonance, grounding and stillness, trained as an instrument.
Rehearsal under pressure
Deliberate practice in conditions that resemble the real room, in person with me or on camera with Mara.
In the room, and between the rooms.
I deliver ICOP directly through coaching, workshops and keynotes. SESSION carries the same method into the days between, so people practise the moment before they have to live it.
That combination is the point. Human work changes the pattern. Practice makes the change survive contact with a real room.
And the method does not stop at the office door. The last link in the chain is how other people experience you, which is another way of saying your relationships. Leaders who fix this at work usually notice it first at home.
Session and Mara.
I built Session so the method could reach people on the days I am not in the room. Mara is the interactive performance coach inside it.
Record. Reveal. Rehearse again.
Record
Camera on, mic on. A pitch, a board presentation, a difficult conversation. Mara sets up a realistic simulation and listens without interrupting.
Reveal
What your delivery actually did, measured rather than guessed. Mara shows you the moment your state shifted, and why the room felt it.
Rehearse again
A physical reset, one specific technique, then a second run. Watch both recordings back to back. That visible difference is what you take into the real room.
Every run is scored across six areas.
Mara has completely changed how I communicate and has become my go to communication coach.
Unlimited sessions · cancel any time
The company that carries the method.
For individuals
Mara on your own device, whenever you need it. Every mode, every scenario, and the free tools alongside it. The route people take when they want to practise daily or are not ready for private coaching.
- Practice · structured runs with a scored debrief
- Coaching · the full method, voice, body and ICOP
- ESL Leaders · for leading in a second language
For organisations
Corporate training and team programmes, with Mara licensed alongside so people practise between the sessions I deliver. Priced separately from the individual product.
- Live delivery from me, keynote, workshop or programme
- Mara licences for the teams that need daily practice
- Progress visible across a cohort rather than assumed
Work with me, or practise with Mara.
Work with Jade
Private coaching, speaking and corporate delivery. The human work, with me in the room. Inner work to clear the pattern, outer work to build presence that holds. Mara included.
Practise with Mara
Start immediately, on your own, from £29 a month. Unlimited sessions, cancel any time, and the same methodology used with leaders from Netflix, Deutsche Bank and Channel 4.
I have spent my working life performing under pressure.
Performance, speaking and presence coach. Actor, voice artist and audio director. Clinical hypnotherapist, Master NLP Practitioner and breathwork practitioner. Lecturer at LAMDA. Founder of Session. I work with leaders and entrepreneurs on how they perform, speak and connect, at work and in life.
I trained as an actor and worked professionally in television, film, radio and voice for eighteen years, across the BBC, HBO, Netflix and Channel 4. Performance under pressure was not a topic I studied. It was the job.
Alongside that I qualified as a clinical hypnotherapist and Master NLP Practitioner, because the interesting question was never how to stand or where to look. It was why capable people lose access to themselves at exactly the wrong moment.
Those two threads became the ICOP Method. Over the last eighteen years I have used it with more than five hundred people, from actors and students at LAMDA to founders, executives and leaders who have to walk into rooms that decide things.
SESSION is the most recent part of it. I built the platform myself so the method could reach people between sessions, and so the practice could keep happening on the days I am not there.
Performance
Screen and radio credits across the BBC, HBO, Netflix and Channel 4. BBC Audio Drama Award winner.
Voice
Voice artist and audio director. Clients including Google, Adidas, BMW and UEFA.
Teaching
Lecturer at LAMDA. Course design, assessment and coaching across multiple cohorts.
Clinical
Clinical hypnotherapist and Master NLP Practitioner.
Coaching
More than five hundred clients across performance, communication and resilience.
Building
Founder of SESSION and creator of Mara. Also runs Slowdance Productions, a corporate podcast and audio production company.
Book a 20 minute discovery call.
Tell me what you have to walk into. No charge, no pitch, and a straight answer about whether I am the right person for it.
What happens on the call
- You describe the situation, the room or the deadline
- I tell you what I think is actually going on
- If I can help, I explain how and what it would involve
- If I cannot, I say so and point you somewhere better