Meet Deoné Duffy
The people I work with already know how to think. They know that their growth is deeply connected with those around them and with the environments they move in. They understand that brain and body, work and life, organisations and the systems that contain them are not separate things.
I am one of these people. I have worked inside complex organisations where choosing to live by that understanding was not straightforward. My coaching starts from that reality. Not from an assumption that you just need to think differently, but from an honest reckoning with who you are and what the system around you makes possible.
If this sounds like the thinking partner you have been looking for, get in touch.
My Story
Professional Background
I spent over a decade working inside large, complex organisations. Two Big Four professional services firms and a large multinational in between, where I worked across EMEA in a matrixed structure.
Across all of it, the thing that stayed with me was this: nothing is as simple as it seems from the outside, or even once we step inside. People have competing priorities no one has named that extend far beyond the organisational boundaries. The cultural practices are heavier than expected. The regulatory and political environments shift frequently. There are histories no one has documented that are alive in the present. And the data is often less conclusive than anyone hoped.
Once you accept the complexity of your truth, you stop looking for clean answers and start asking better questions.
I have always questioned. And in my questioning noticed that complexity can easily overwhelm people. When it does, the default is to reach for what is known, what has worked before, what feels predictable and could provide quick wins. The cost of this choice is rarely visible until it becomes significant.
That is what eventually led me into coaching: I believe that the overwhelm can be contained and a richer solution can evolve from a space where we dare to name the complexity as we see it.
What I Noticed Along The Way
Some of us working in large organisations reach a point where the stated and the lived no longer feel like the same thing. The stated values and the lived reality pull in different directions. The language of purpose and people sits alongside structures and incentives that tell a different story. Though the degree to which this bothers us varies.
In the environments I come from this comes with a particular flavour. The stakes often feel high, and the culture rewards those who absorb pressure without showing it. Month end. Year end. Audit season. Regulatory deadlines. These are real. But layered on top of them is often an additional weight that has nothing to do with the work itself. A sense of urgency gets manufactured. There are expectations that are never quite named but implicitly adopted. There is a sense that there is a right way to be and we calibrate accordingly.
As you enter this career, you are trained not just technically but also on how you should carry yourself and move in this space. At senior levels you watch how people perpetuate the culture, no longer questioning its value. Sometimes knowingly, sometimes not, often because it has become the only leadership language they know.
In the background, what happens to you is quiet and gradual. The ideas you arrived with are packed away. The questions you used to ask stop surfacing. The version of you that once felt possible gets harder to reach with every year that passes.
For leaders the cost looks different but often feels similar. The ambition that once pointed toward something that mattered finds a smaller, safer target. You are effective. You are respected. Yet, you find yourself asking, is it all worth it?
There is a reason this gap exists and it is not personal failure. Corporate life was built around a particular set of values. Additional values have been added over time as regulation and cultural expectation shifted. But the thing is, adding values to a structure not built for them creates tension. The stated and the lived pull apart in systems that are so large that no single person can see how to shift them.
Most people respond to that gap in one of two ways. They accept it and adapt, finding a version of the work they can live with. Or they exhaust themselves pushing against something too large to move alone. What I kept looking for was the third option. Not acceptance and not futile resistance. Something more deliberate. A way of operating inside the system that does not require you to pretend the gap is not there, while still finding what is possible within it.
That is what my coaching offers. Not a solution to the system. But a space for you to figure out what you can do from where you stand.
What Shapes My Coaching?
The answer to that question is not a simple one. Are we not shaped by the totality of our existence? If we allow it to be, what shapes us is far more than just our work experience, skills and qualifications. It is what life taught us along the way, it is what we noticed, questioned and experimented with.
My formative years were in Zambia, where we lived until I was seven and my first school was an international school so I had friends from everywhere. Outside of school I played with the children who lived nearest to my home and many had nothing in the way of toys or resources. We played anyway, with whatever nature provided, with balls made of shopping bags tied up with a string, with pebbles as playing pieces for games drawn in the dust.
Diversity was not a value I was taught. It was simply life. I realise now what a gift it was to have started life in this way - difference was simple then.
It didn't take very long before I was faced with another version of reality. My family moved back to South Africa, where my father spent a good deal of his time working towards racial reconciliation between South African churches. Watching him do that work shaped something in me about what integrity looks like. My father also introduced me to the value of contemplative practice. Though I have not adopted this practice in the same way and I have neglected silence for periods at a time in the past; building silence and breath into my life has become pivotal in creating my coaching practice and bringing my ideas to life.
I went on to study theology, an academic discipline that trained me to question assumptions, hold complexity, sit with uncertainty and understand that every perspective carries a context. I completed my master's and came to the UK for what was meant to be a gap year. Before joining a Big Four firm I spent three and a half years working on a private estate in remote Scotland for a high-profile client. The work was largely physical, operational and included many solitary hours. It taught me things that my academic life could not about life and myself. Eventually, I noticed that I wanted new exposures and learning experiences, and so left Scotland and worked as an Au Pair for a family in a year that would become my transition into a corporate environment.
Many leave their countries either running from what they do not like or to find something better in another place. For me, it was initially a way to reduce inputs, quiet my busy mind. One decision led to the next, and eventually I accepted a graduate scheme in England, met my husband and now have two children and a new extended family in the UK.
Motherhood challenged me in ways I did not expect and through parenting I discovered my own neurodivergence and have since been diagnosed Autistic, and with Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder, MCAS and Dysautonomia. These moments that medicalised my existence were insightful in positive and negative ways and certainly challenged me to craft the life that would support my health and energy long-term. I noticed how these labels threatened to contain me while I figured out how to integrate what was useful into my way forward.
In 2025 I supported my husband through a year of cancer treatment. Cancer is his story to tell. Yet, a year like this affects a whole family and I have become aware of how many people are facing illness in mid-life. A time in our lives when many of our systems still assume we are older and that our children must be older for us to be this kind of ill.
I completed my coaching training with Barefoot Coaching, a programme grounded in multiple psychological approaches that treats every client as a whole and capable person. Alongside my coach training sits a theology degree; over a decade of reading across psychology, neuroscience, and human systems; the lived experience of navigating the same environments my clients bring to session; exposure to practice and industry roles; and ultimately the ability to hold different perspectives as valid and even true.
If you need someone who intuitively gets the complexity, who does not need you to waste your words on sketching it out, but recognises that with all of that complexity you still want to live a life worth living, then I may be the coach for you.
