Catherine Boddington - Human Intelligence Coach
Insight that helps you understand how your brain and body work together to intentionally shape your performance and relationships.
I'm Catherine Boddington. I've spent 25 years in high-pressure environments - first as a lawyer, then as a senior leader and Director of Organisational Development, and now as an Executive Coach.
The smartest people I work with aren't stuck because they lack ability, commitment or ambition. They're stuck because the patterns underneath the surface are hard to see when you're standing in them. That's where my work starts.
Over those years, I've collected some real gems of knowledge that help my clients see things clearly. I'm ready to share them.
A bit about my background and my career
I'm based just outside Leeds and work with executives, senior leaders and organisations across the UK and Europe - in person and online.
My work brings together executive coaching, leadership development, team coaching and organisational consulting, drawing on my neuroscience and physical intelligence to help people lead and live with more clarity, confidence and steadiness under pressure.
For clients who are leaders this means clearer thinking, better emotional regulation, wiser decision making and a sustainable way of leading and living.
For organisations I work with, this means they have more confident leaders who lead teams that work well together. The end result is better outcomes for customers, the people who work there and a healthy bottom line.
Individuals
Who I work with
I work with executives and senior leaders who are ready to do the work that change requires. You might be stepping into a bigger role and noticing the thing that got you here, won't get you there. Navigating a career or life transition. Working through a difficult stakeholder relationship that's taking up more headspace than it should. Trying to build a team that actually performs.
Or you might be quietly wondering whether the life you've built is still the one you want.
My job is to help you step back, see where you are, orientate yourself and make intelligent choices with perspective. The coaching is shaped around you. There's no fixed programme, because no two situations are the same.
Coaching and Consulting for Organisations
You've already done the obvious things.
You've invested in your people. Trained leaders. Brought in consultants. Run the engagement survey. Updated the values. Refreshed the leadership framework.
And the same conversations keep happening. Good people leaving. Promotions that don't stick. Strategic projects that stall because nobody's having the conversation that needs to happen. Teams that look agile on paper and behave like it's 2010 in practice. Leaders who can't quite step up to the level the business now needs.
It isn't a knowledge problem. It's that the patterns underneath the surface are hard to see when everyone's in them — and harder still to shift with another framework.
I work where the person and the organisation meet. That's where individuals transform and organisations evolve, and it's where I've spent most of my career.
What I do
I spent years as a Director of Talent and Organisational Development, building coaching cultures from the inside. I know what it takes to embed coaching into how a business actually works, not park it in L&D and hope. I work with organisations in four main ways:
Executive coaching for the moments where coaching has the biggest impact — stretch assignments, step-ups, transitions, complexity.
Team coaching for new teams, teams under pressure, and teams that have grown faster than their ways of working.
Building a coaching culture starting by identifying what the strategic business problem is to solve and then designing and embedding the systems, capability and behaviours that make coaching part of how the business runs.
Supporting your internal coaches through the Internal Coach Network, the membership community I founded in 2018 for coaches working inside organisations.
I work with organisations across the UK and internationally. My home patch is Leeds and the North of England.
The evidence for coaching
The numbers are worth knowing.
Organisations with strong coaching cultures deliver a median 700% return on investment.
They make organisations 2.5 times more likely to land on the Best Places to Work list.
They drive 32% improvement in delivering long-term strategy, 28% less staff turnover, and an 88% productivity gain when coaching is combined with training (versus 22% for training alone).
For individuals, one of the methodologies I use is physical intelligence coaching, measured through the Bodysmart assessment. Clients I've worked with this way show a 102% increase in energy levels, 62% improvement in thinking under pressure, 42% reduction in stress, and a 40% drop in feelings associated with burnout.
What clients actually tell me matters most is simpler. They feel like themselves again. Clearer. Steadier. Intentional. More like the leader they always suspected they could be.
What working with me is like
My job is to help you see what's really going on, and turn that insight into something you can actually do.
If you are working with me as your coach, you can expect four things:
A clearer understanding of yourself, your leaders or your teams. A practical user manual for how people actually work - how the brain, body, energy and environment shape performance, relationships and choices.
A wider view of the system. Because nobody leads, works or makes decisions in isolation, and pretending otherwise is one of the reasons leadership feels so heavy.
A practical plan. Realistic steps that fit your life, your leadership or your organisation. Not another framework to feel guilty about ignoring.
Me, alongside you. Coach, sense-maker, strategist, truth-teller and steady companion in the work. Helping you shift from feeling like a human doing, to becoming a human being.
About Catherine
I'm a bit of a geek. I'm fascinated by what makes us human - why we do what we do, what really drives brilliant performance, and why we can get stuck in patterns that no longer serve us. The more I learn, the more useful I can be.
I have 25 years experience across legal services, wealth management, investment banking, financial services and scaling tech, including time as Head of Talent and Organisational Development in a fast-growth business, Lawyer and Senior leader.
I’m now a ICF Professional Certified Coach, Certified Physical Intelligence coach, Certified EQi (Emotional Intelligence) coach, DiSC practitioner, Strengths coach, and an Engage Change coach. I’m trained in Human Centred Design.
I am also regularly voted one of the top executive coaches in the region.
Warm, thoughtful, honest, and grounded in real organisational life. I am a realist with a soft spot for people who are trying to do hard things well.
Based outside Leeds. When I'm not working, I'm in the garden, painting, practising Tai Chi or out walking.
The Internal Coach Network
Alongside my coaching and consulting work, I host the Internal Coach Network - a membership community for coaches who work inside organisations and the leaders building coaching cultures. ICN brings internal coaches together to learn, collaborate and connect across sectors, with a shared goal of raising the standard of coaching practice inside organisations.
Common questions about Executive Coaching
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Human intelligence is the way I describe coaching that works with your whole system — your brain, your body, your relationships, your environment, your history, and the world you're operating in. Most coaching focuses just on thinking. My coaching brings wider context in, because how you feel, sleep, breathe, use your time and move changes how you think, decide and lead. The world is increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, which makes it more important than ever to understand what makes us human — and how we give ourselves the best chance to lead and live well.
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Physical intelligence is one of the methodologies I draw on in my human intelligence coaching work. It's the science of how the chemicals in your body - hormones and neurotransmitters - shape your performance, your decisions and your relationships. It's not about fitness. It's about understanding why you react the way you do under pressure, and learning practical techniques to manage your own chemistry so you can think more clearly, recover more quickly and lead more steadily.
I'm a certified Physical Intelligence coach and use Bodysmart, an assessment tool that measures the impact of this work on energy, stress, burnout and thinking under pressure.
Physical intelligence sits alongside other approaches I bring to my coaching - emotional intelligence, neuroscience, organisational development experience and 25 years of leadership context.
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You'll probably feel it before you can fully articulate it. Common signs: you're trying to work out the way forward and can't quite get to the root of it. You're at a crossroads - a change of role, a shift of identity, a life transition - and you want to make choices with intention.
You've outgrown old patterns but haven't built the new ones yet.
You want to feel more like yourself again, clearer and more resilient. You're ready for change, and you want to navigate it with a thinking partner.
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Training gives you knowledge. Mentoring gives you advice from someone who's walked the path. Coaching gives you clarity, insight and lasting behavioural change tailored to you. Coaching is the right choice when you don't just want answers - you want to understand the real problem in context, build habits that last, and work at the level of mindset, identity and meaning, not just skills.
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Choosing a coach is a personal decision - you're choosing a partner for an important phase of work, not buying a service. Look for someone you can be honest with and feel safe with. Someone with real depth of experience who can navigate complexity, not just ask questions. Someone who can explain how they work and what the journey might look like. Someone who can challenge you with care. Someone you feel a genuine chemistry with. And someone who can show you evidence of impact, not just testimonials.
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A typical engagement starts with a free chemistry conversation. Then a kick-off session - for organisational clients, this often includes a three-way meeting with your manager to align on goals.
We use feedback, profiling and Bodysmart assessments to build a clear picture. Then a series of coaching sessions with practical work in between - building habits, testing approaches, iterating.
For organisational clients, we have a three-way review with your manager partway through. The work usually runs across six sessions of 90 minutes each.
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I'm based in Leeds and work with clients in person across Yorkshire and London. I work with clients across the UK and internationally online. The format we use is shaped by what works best for you.
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Pricing depends on whether you're funding the work yourself or your organisation is sponsoring it. Get in touch and we can discuss the right approach for your situation.
Ready to talk?
The first conversation is free, confidential, and has no agenda beyond seeing whether we're a good fit. Simply fill in the form below, and I’ll get in touch.
Or call 07900 244777, or email catherine@boddington-cc.co.uk
Let's Chat.
If you’d like to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you. Fill in your contact details on the form. I’ll be in touch as soon as possible.