Phillippa Mole
Senior leaders are judged on composure under load, and most have never been taught the mechanics of it. The pressure shows up in how they hold a board meeting, a pitch, or a difficult conversation, not in their strategy decks. Closing that gap requires specific behavioural craft, not motivation.
Phillippa Mole is a performance coach who works with senior leaders on the behavioural mechanics of composure, influence and executive presence under pressure.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Phillippa Mole
- She brings the practical content of executive presence into the room: how leaders hold themselves in a pitch, a board meeting, or a difficult conversation, taught as craft rather than as personality.
- Her coaching combines elite-sport performance psychology with certified executive coaching credentials, including Association for Coaching Master Executive Coach and ICF PCC accreditation, giving the work a defensible technical base.
- She is the first UK qualified practitioner of Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories techniques for post-traumatic stress, which gives her unusual range when working with leaders carrying real career or personal load.
- Her broadcast background, including BBC and GMTV presenting, sharpens the work on how senior people communicate when the stakes and the camera are both live.
- Clients have included Deloitte, Dell, Sandtoft and Wienerberger, with applications spanning bid pitches, capital raises and senior team development.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of Fresh Air Coaching, established 2007.
- Master Executive Coach (Association for Coaching) and ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC).
- NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer; first UK practitioner certified in Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories for PTSS.
- MSc Sport Science and Performance Psychology, Loughborough University.
- Former lecturer in Performance Psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University.
- Former BBC and GMTV network broadcaster and Sunday Telegraph columnist.
Biography
Composure is rarely the line item in a leadership development plan, but it is what senior people are actually judged on when the room turns difficult. Phillippa Mole’s coaching practice is built around that observation. Fresh Air Coaching, the firm she founded in 2007, works with senior leaders and teams on the behavioural mechanics of presence, influence and decision-making under pressure.
The technical base is unusual. She holds an MSc in Sport Science and Performance Psychology from Loughborough and lectured in performance psychology at Manchester Metropolitan University before moving into executive coaching full time. Her certifications run from Association for Coaching Master Executive Coach to ICF PCC, with NLP Master Practitioner and Trainer status alongside. She is named as the first UK practitioner certified in Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories techniques for post-traumatic stress, which extends her range into work that touches genuine personal load.
Before coaching, she competed in sprint hurdles for the South of England and represented Great Britain in bobsleigh, then spent years in front of a camera as a network broadcaster for the BBC and GMTV, including coverage of the Commonwealth Games, and as a Sunday Telegraph columnist. That background informs the way she teaches presence: the work is granular and physical, closer to a directing note than a leadership homily.
Named clients include Deloitte, Dell, Sandtoft and Wienerberger, with engagements on bid pitches, capital raising and senior team performance. Buyers describe her as a “secret weapon” in those high-stakes settings, language that reflects what the work actually does, which is to make a small set of senior people materially better at the moments their reputation rests on.
Key speaking topics
- Executive presence and influence
- Self-leadership under pressure
- Emotional intelligence in senior teams
- Performance psychology applied to business
- Communication and persuasion craft
- Resilience and recovery for senior leaders
Ideal for
- CEOs, managing partners and board members preparing for high-stakes pitches, capital raises or contested set-pieces
- Senior leadership teams investing in presence, influence and team performance ahead of restructure or growth
- Newly promoted executives stepping into roles where credibility is judged in moments rather than over months
- HR directors and L&D leads commissioning behavioural development for the top layer rather than generic wellbeing content
Audience outcomes
- A clearer, behaviourally specific picture of what executive presence is and how to build it
- Practical methods for holding composure in pitches, boardrooms and difficult conversations
- A working model for using emotional intelligence to read a room and shift a dynamic in real time
- Language for naming and addressing the pressure points that quietly reduce senior performance
- Renewed personal confidence in the moments where reputation is actually decided
Talks
A talk on how senior people move others without force, set out as observable behavioural craft.
Key takeaways:
- The structural difference between persuasion, pressure and influence
- Patterns that quietly cost leaders authority in a room
- Specific behavioural moves for high-stakes conversations
A talk that treats the senior individual as the asset to be managed, with composure, attention and recovery as the core variables.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of self-leadership under load
- Practical routines drawn from elite sport psychology
- Where most senior leaders lose performance and why
A talk on the practical content of emotional intelligence in senior teams, focused on accuracy rather than empathy as a slogan.
Key takeaways:
- How to read intention and emotion in real time
- Why most leadership feedback misses the actual signal
- A method for using EI as a decision-making input