THE WORK
The way we lead, the cultures we build, the reasons behind the decisions we make, or avoid, none of these emerge from nowhere. They are conditioned by the stories we have absorbed throughout our lives. The stories about how to lead, about who leads and who doesn't, about what success requires, about who belongs and on what terms. Those stories operate through us long before we become conscious of them. They shape what we notice, what we question, and what we assume doesn't need questioning at all.
This is true for individual leaders. It is equally true for organisations whose cultures, power structures, and blind spots are held in place not by policy but by the narratives running beneath them. This is true for the moments we are living through — a time of exceptional complexity in which ideas about leadership, identity, and belonging are under pressure from every direction.
The work, whether that is one-to-one coaching, leadership development, or keynote speaking — is always the same at its core: to open a door to a different way of being, and then to guide people and organisations through it. The capacity to see differently, think differently, and lead differently is present in all individuals and organisations. What this work creates is the conditions, the challenge, and the sustained practice that allow it to emerge.
WHO I AM
I am Dr Matt Jacobs. For 30 years, I've supported senior leaders and teams across Professional Services, Public Sector Authorities, the NHS, and Higher Education. My journey has taken me from working directly with marginalized communities in Bristol's most disadvantaged areas through strategic roles leading programmes worth over £25 million to keynote talks, leadership development programmes and one-to-one coaching that transform leadership for individuals and organisations.
Outside of work, I'm a single father of two now fully grown daughters. I love a fine red wine, good music, kitchen dancing, and cooking ambitious versions of things I've seen on Great British Menu — often simultaneously. I'm a committed urbanist and drawn to places I know little about and immersing myself in their coffee-shop culture. If I can get there on my motorbike, all the better.
My Credentials
ACC — Associate Certified Coach, International Coach Federation.
ILM Level 7 — Senior Practitioner in Executive Coaching.
PhD in Sociology — University of Bristol (2016-2022).
MSc Ethnicity and Multiculturalism (Distinction) — University of Bristol (2015-2016).
BA (Hons) Business Administration (First Class) — University of the West of England.
WHY AM I HERE?
It's a fair question, and the honest answer begins in remote West Wales in the 1970s and ends somewhere I'm still travelling towards.
The short version: a teenage experience of sustained xenophobia gave me a small understanding of what it feels like to be on the wrong side of belonging, and a passion to fight that feeling for everyone. Thirty years of working, parenting, studying identity, paying attention, and taking responsibility for my own awareness did the rest. At the heart of these processes grew the understanding that we are all conditioned, and so constrained, by the narratives of the world around us.
These may be those narratives that seek to tell us how we should be us, or they may be those that tell us who belongs and who doesn't - these aren't actually separate narratives - but they seek to impose a sense of self onto us that we have not consciously chosen. They may be narratives that emerge from family, community, or culture; they maybe narratives that we are taught through education and the media; and they maybe narratives that hail from religious or political ideology. They are all narratives we are rarely given the space to critically examine and decide which ones we truly believe, which values they promote we truly agree with. More usually, we simply absorb the ones in our socio-cultural contexts as we grow, learn, work, and live. Creating space for these examinations is the work I do.
What most of us don't realise is that as much of all this is carried in our minds, in our consciousness, it is also carried on our bodies. Our bodies hold memories in our postures and how we move, they hold narratives and stories about how to be us that affect the way we present ourselves physically. They also hold past, present, and future intelligences that we are rarely tuned into. Infact, we are trained to ignore this intelligence, even though it is every present. Accessing, releasing, and utilising this somatic intelligence in authentic and powerful forms is key to this work.
WHERE I'M AT
I approach this work as a White, middle-class, cisgender, heterosexual man — and I name that because my awareness of my positionality shapes my practice, just as my awareness of the narratives that mark me with that positionality also shapes my work.
My doctoral research examined how White middle-class men navigate their identities when the social conditions that support the assumptions behind them shift. I am one of those men too.
The same conditioning forces I studied — the narratives about who leads, who belongs, and what success looks like — shaped my own sense of self. My understanding of those processes created the conditions for my own critical self-examination. That ongoing work is as formative to this practice as the PhD.
I am not outside the system I work with. I am subject to it, and I know what it takes to examine it honestly from the inside. I also know that this system and its narratives play out in and are written onto my body but that the same system has disconnected me from what my body is telling me. I understand that through somatic practice and approaches that bring the mind into closer connection with the body, my awareness of my 'self', the system that seeks to condition me, and the agency I have to self-author myself grows each day.
That understanding shapes every engagement — whether I am working with a leader on the relationship between their identity and how they lead, or with an organisation on the conditions it is or isn't creating to allow the leadership this time demands to emerge
