Kate Brassington

Kate is a Coaching Psychologist, Trauma-Informed specialist, and British Psychological Society Graduate Member (GMBPsS). She actively destigmatises real mental health, and brings practical wisdom from the field of trauma to life. She helps leaders and managers faced with delivering sustained high-performance under pressure to achieve goals – but not “at all costs”.

Kate helps people understand how the human nervous system is like background programming that only has one setting. Our nervous system runs the same program in safety (high thriving and performance) and in danger (when the perceived threat becomes too much and overwhelm, burnout, toxic leadership, absenteeism, anxiety or breakdown may ensue). Fine tuning ways to improve this balance is critical to thriving. Then, even under intense pressure, we can unlock creativity, problem solving, and give rise to high levels of engagement, satisfaction, meaning and purpose.

Unlike many coaches, Kate has learnt to work WITH trauma, because she knows whether acknowledged or not, it is present all around us. Trauma isn’t what most people think it is (the event, such as battlefield or car crash), but is instead a reaction (what happens inside of us). The World Health Organisation estimated (2016, before the pandemic) that 70% of adults worldwide have been exposed to a traumatic event, yet of those only around 9% get a diagnosis of mental injury leading to treatment. This leaves a huge delta of people in our teams, families, and communities that may be dealing in some way with the negative impacts of trauma, and perhaps not even know it. And this doesn’t fully consider the background traumas faced every day by people in minority groups, who are at higher risk of trauma exposure; or neuro-divergent people, who can be more vulnerable to traumatisation.

Kate began working life as a British Army Logistics officer, her first command age 21 was of 50 people. She has since worked in public and commercial sectors, and as an Expert Witness on Employability after injury. Her own trauma occurred giving birth to her first child and sparked a career change into positive psychology and traumatology that she will never regret. She runs her private practice from Luxembourg, working with 1:1 clients worldwide.

Trauma is not sector-specific, and neither is Kate; she has worked with leaders across law, medicine, military, government, security & risk, banking, insurance, as well as Veterans charities and with first responders. She speaks passionately on how Trauma-Informed leadership is key to successfully overcoming and thriving in the face of business challenges.