Executive coaching for senior leaders carrying real weight.
True Momentum is an executive coaching practice for senior leaders carrying real weight.
The work is rooted in emotional intelligence, behavioural change, and twenty-five years inside commercial leadership. ICF-accredited. Talogy EIP3 practitioner. Confidential, considered, and direct.Twenty-five years inside enterprise leadership. Now working one-to-one with the people sitting in the seat.If you'd like to explore whether working together makes sense, get in touch.
What We Do
Senior leadership at scale is a compression job. Time compresses. Attention compresses. The distance between a decision and its consequence compresses. What used to be manageable in a full week now has to happen in an hour, and the cost of getting it wrong has gone up by an order of magnitude.Most of what breaks under that pressure is not strategy or capability. It is judgement, regulation, and clarity of thought — the interior architecture that decides how well a leader operates when the stakes are real.This is where the coaching sits.The work is direct, evidence-based, and confidential. It uses the Talogy EIP3 emotional intelligence framework as a diagnostic and a compass. It draws on Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence, Robert Kegan's on adult development, and Michael Watkins' on transition leadership. It is delivered inside an ICF-accredited coaching frame, one-to-one, over engagements typically running three to six months.There is no motivational content. No frameworks for the sake of frameworks. No performative empathy. The work is closer to deliberate practice for how you think, decide, and lead under load — slow, structured, and measured against real change in real behaviour.
Where we focus
Organisational Behaviour & Leadership Development
Strategy fails without the right behaviours.
Operating systems fail when leaders do not lead differently inside them.
Alongside building strategy and execution systems, we work with founders and leadership teams on the behavioural shifts required to make those systems work in practice.
This includes decision-making under pressure, role clarity, accountability, leadership transitions, and how teams operate as complexity increases.
This work is practical and embedded in the business, not theoretical or therapeutic. It underpins everything we do. Without the right behaviours, execution degrades. With them, performance compounds.
About me
I am John Phelan. I spent twenty-five years in enterprise commercial leadership before this - at Microsoft EMEA, Oracle EMEA, and most recently as Senior Director of Business Development at PCH International, where I built and led revenue functions across Europe, the US, and Asia.I know what it costs to sit in the seat. I have carried numbers, run teams under pressure, delivered inside boardrooms, and made the kinds of decisions the people I now coach are sitting with. That experience is the foundation the coaching is built on. It is why my clients tend to be senior - CEOs, MDs, founders, executives inside scaling businesses - and why the conversation moves quickly to what actually matters.The credentials underneath the practice are as follows. ICF-accredited diploma in executive coaching. Talogy EIP3 emotional intelligence practitioner. Continuous professional development inside the frameworks of Goleman, Kegan, and Watkins. Based in Dublin, Ireland. Engagements international.I take on a small number of clients at any one time. Every engagement begins with a private conversation to establish whether there is genuine fit - and I say so directly if there isn't.
The common thread is practical judgement, not theory.
Get in touch if you’d like to explore whether working together would be a good fit.
