A man seated on a wooden chair with one foot raised on a small wooden step stool, wearing a navy blazer, orange tie, white shirt, blue pants, and sneakers, against a dark, plain background.

I’m a barrister, a coach, a teacher, and a writer.

At the peak of my legal career — prize-winning barrister, recently appointed KC— I collapsed on a train.

Outwardly, I was exceptionally good by the profession's measures of what that means. Inwardly, I was a complete mess. I personified the invisible suffering of many professionals.

The light bulb moment was understanding there was a relationship between my upbringing, my personal dynamics, and the way I was doing my work. It sounds obvious now. At the time it was a complete revelation.

And when I saw this, and attended to it, things shifted. I came back to the bar. I started doing the work I love again.

That’s what I help people do.

I work with people in the helping professions, often lawyers and consultants. People whose job is to offer their expertise in service of someone else.

The dynamics that get activated in that kind of relationship tend to be quite similar, whatever the industry. The surface pattern is: I’ll give you my expertise in return for money. The underlying pattern is something more personal — and that's where the real work is.

My work bridges the space between the personal and the professional, attending to both so that clients can prosper.

I’m trained as a coach in the conventional sense — forward-looking, working on challenges and objectives and what's possible. But there’s more.

I’m also trained in systemic therapy, with a particular specialism in systemic constellations — a body of work focused on how family systems and transgenerational dynamics shape the patterns we carry into our adult lives.

I now teach this work at the Centre for Systemic Constellations, the foundational school that brought this work to the UK. I teach alongside senior psychotherapists, primarily to counsellors and therapists who want to learn the approach. I trained in it myself because I saw first hand how uniquely effective it was in helping me in my time of need.

This depth of working gives me something particular: an understanding of personal and family weight, of ties to culture and history, and how these surface in professional life. This gives insights into unseen dynamics happening in a boardroom, a client relationship, or a team. It enables us to work from the roots up.

I’ve never forgotten the feeling of helplessness; the loneliness of not knowing where to go for help. Having come through the journey myself, I know fundamentally that no matter how low somebody is, with the right help, and if they wish it, they have the capacity to bring themselves back.

If you’ve found your way here, have a look around. Read something. And when the time feels right, get in touch.

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A man in a suit speaking at a podium with the words 'Royal College of Physicians' engraved on it, in a conference room. A projected slide behind him shows his name, James Pereira QC, along with his titles and affiliation, and a Twitter handle '@James
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