Executive Coaching With Psychological Depth, for LGBTQ+ Founders and Leaders
Most executive coaching addresses what you do: your habits, your calendar, your presentation style.
I work with who you are, and the systemic pressures that shaped you.
The Identity Tax
Many LGBTQ+ leaders carry what I call the Identity Tax: the ongoing, invisible labour of deciding how much of yourself to reveal in rooms that were not built with you in mind. It shows up as hypervigilance before difficult meetings, over-preparation to pre-empt questions nobody should be asking, and a specific kind of exhaustion that a good holiday does not fix.
Standard leadership development rarely names this cost, let alone addresses it. I built my coaching practice because I saw senior LGBTQ+ professionals doing excellent, high-pressure work while quietly managing a second job: managing their own visibility.
Who I Work With
I mostly work with founders, leaders, and executives, many of them LGBTQ+, who are highly capable and still feel something is not resolved.
You may recognise the signs: success that does not feel like relief, decisions made from old survival patterns rather than present judgement, or a nagging sense that your professional self and your actual self are not the same person.
How This Is Different
I trained as a psychotherapist before I trained as a coach. That order matters.
Instead of a toolkit of leadership frameworks, we work with the actual mechanics of how you think, decide, and relate under pressure, then apply that understanding directly to your leadership.
This is coaching with clinical depth behind it, not borrowing therapy language for effect.
Credentials
I am an EMCC accredited Senior Practitioner coach, a Senior Accredited psychotherapist with the BACP (MBACP Snr Accred) and and a UKCP registered psychotherapist. Behind every session I bring:
15 years of working with people
Over 10,000 hours
Stay Connected
I write regularly on leadership, identity, and the psychology of high performance. Sign up for Executive Depth, my newsletter, for new articles before they go anywhere else.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Justin Clark offers executive and leadership coaching for founders, executives and senior leaders, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ leaders. He is a UK-based coach and psychotherapist: an EMCC Senior Practitioner, BACP Senior Accredited, and a UKCP accredited Integrative Psychotherapist.
His main offer is ongoing one-to-one coaching that works with how you lead and with the pressures that shaped it, including code-switching and identity labour (the constant, often invisible effort of managing how you are seen at work).
Coaching begins with a free, no-obligation Strategy Session. For executives who want an expert read on one specific issue, the System Diagnostic is a single 90-minute session (£375). It names a recurring pattern in your leadership, and within 48 hours you receive a written Diagnostic Map with one or two concrete next steps.
Alongside coaching, Justin offers psychotherapy, clinical supervision for psychotherapists and counsellors, and an LGBTQIA+ supervision group. He also writes Executive Depth, a newsletter on leadership, identity and the psychology of high performance. -
A coach with psychotherapy training can work with the patterns underneath behaviour as well as the behaviour itself. Many capable leaders already know what they would like to do differently. What gets in the way tends to be older: over-functioning (taking on more than your share so nothing can go wrong), a strong need for control, or the effort of managing how others see you.
A psychotherapist-coach can recognise these patterns, name them and work with them safely. Psychotherapy training also brings rigorous ethical standards, regular clinical supervision and a clear sense of where coaching ends and therapy begins. So the coach can tell when something needs a different kind of support, and say so.
Justin Clark is both an executive coach and a UKCP and BACP accredited psychotherapist, so his coaching combines practical leadership work with that depth.
For LGBTQ+ executives, it also creates room to explore how identity and visibility at work shape leadership choices.You can read more about the benefits of working with a psychotherapy trained coach here.
-
Start with credentials. Accreditation from a recognised professional body, such as the EMCC (European Mentoring and Coaching Council) or the ICF, means the coach has been assessed against an international standard and follows a code of ethics. It is also worth asking whether they are in regular supervision, where an experienced peer reviews their work.
Next, look at relevant experience. Has the coach worked with leaders at your level, in situations like yours? Some coaches specialise in founders, senior transitions or LGBTQ+ executives, and that specialism can save a great deal of explaining.
Then consider approach. Some coaching concentrates on skills and goals, while other coaching also works with the patterns behind how you lead. Each suits different needs, so be clear about which you are looking for.
Finally, fit matters. A first conversation should leave you feeling understood and able to speak openly. With Justin Clark, an EMCC Senior Practitioner and UKCP and BACP accredited psychotherapist, that first step is a free Strategy Session.