Sally-Anne Airey credits her 25 years’ service in the Royal Navy, her mindfulness practice and living in the French Alps for her highly successful leadership coaching approach. Liz Hall reports
The first time I met leadership coach, mindfulness practitioner and former Royal Navy commander Sally-Anne Airey nearly 25 years ago, I was struck by her calmness, poise, warmth, sense of purpose and gentle authority.
It’s no surprise that she’s dedicated decades to supporting other leaders to develop qualities such as these, through her business, Skilful Leaders. Over the years, she’s honed a leadership approach she calls ‘Mindful Command’ (the title of her 2023 book), drawing from influences and experiences including a 23-year Naval career, mindfulness meditation, and living in the French Alps.
“[When I trained as a coach] there were all sorts of tools, models and frameworks I enjoyed, and which helped me immensely to get started. But I came to realise that the reason people wanted to work with me was because of me. Something to do with what I was bringing into the space that made people want to work with me rather than someone else, right?
“So, what is this thing that people see? And if mindfulness meditation is immensely important to me, if my Naval career also was a deep influence, if the mountains speak to me, and all of these are embodied in this person that comes forward, how do I bring that into my coaching?
“And that’s how Mindful Command was born. And I know this wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t been living in the mountains.”
Airey and her husband decided to move to the French Alps in 2010, from Eastern Europe, where they’d spent nine years. They renovated an old farmhouse into their home and eventually a leadership retreat centre, thus fulfilling a long-held dream of Airey’s. She’s been running her Evolving Leaders nine-month programme, combining coaching and mindfulness, and including two retreats, for eight years.
Although they’re now moving back to the UK, they’re keeping a foothold in the Alps and continuing to run retreats there.
With Mindful Command, there’s a “sense of playing with two ideas and bringing them together,” Airey explains.
“Mindful Command is the combination of mindfulness and the Navy’s leadership – mission, command and commander’s intent. It’s the juxtaposition of two apparently crazily opposing ideas but in their polarity, there’s a meeting.”
Airey is comfortable in the realms of polarity and apparent contradictions.
She views the cultures of Ukraine and Russia as full of contradictions and difference, including very hot summers and very cold winters.
“[Living there] was deeply formative. There’s a kind of a fatalism, a stoicism, this sort of sense of, ‘what are you going to do? This is life. What have you got left?’ The belief that everything will be okay, that we will get through this, that it’s just another cycle.
“I felt that really helped me a lot, and also [I had] a huge admiration for the resourcefulness of the people I met, particularly the women. I was very humbled, actually, in my experience of living there, particularly in Ukraine.
“In relationships, realising that trust was very felt. If you didn’t look a person in the eye, if they didn’t feel a connection with you, they weren’t going to do business. So the sense of the importance of connection.
“When you first enter those countries, what you get met with at the airport are completely inscrutable faces, unfriendly, unwelcoming on the whole, particularly in Moscow, less so in Kyiv. You’d think there was no connection at all, but that’s what you have to get through. And behind that is immense warmth.
“When you connect with the warmth, then you’re doing business.”
Personally, too, she’s a mixture of what some might see as polarities. A deep reflector, she’s also practical and action-orientated. She takes things seriously, yet easily embraces lightness and joy. She can be highly structured and organised, yet loves to approach life and work emergently.
“I like to think about things, but I’m not a fan of positioning, of planning to [do something] specific… I like to have a broad direction and then see what happens. It’s pretty much how I work these days.”
This applies to collaborations too, in which for her [it’s about] “collaborating with other people who have a similar way of looking at things, so that it becomes this kind of exciting co-creative space. I do find myself turning away from anyone who seems fixed in their view of the world. It’s not necessarily a bad thing – maybe it’s helpful – but it’s not me. It’s not how I like to look at things.
“And it’s an interesting dichotomy, isn’t it, between that kind of emergence, and yet, in my experience, the helpfulness of having a clear vision…and… that vision might change. There might be all sorts of things along the way that become clearer, that couldn’t have been clear at the beginning. And so I suppose that’s why the emergent path is so exciting.”
Having been somewhat of an outsider and a daydreamer at school, when Airey joined the Navy from university, she says: “It was just what I needed at that time, because it was very, very practical. I found, much to my surprise, actually, having been in this rather in-my-head, rather philosophical, detached kind of posture, that I’m also quite action-orientated. The Navy brought out that side of me, and I thrived again.
“I found when I went through officer training that I just was able to tick all the boxes. My experience of officer training was that if there’s a flaw, the training officers really want to dig into that and figure out what’s going on. And I didn’t have any of that. I kind of sailed through. And I just loved the environment for 23 years.”
In the Navy, she had “some marvelous jobs, including working with the US Navy training their officers. Just a series of fabulous opportunities that I drifted into.
“And in 1991, when the political decision was made for women to be combatant and to be able to stay in the Navy once you were pregnant, rather than leaving, I became the first pregnant serving officer in the Navy.
“I came back with twin boys. Even that was a joke, because everyone said, ‘typical of you, getting it out of the way in one go’ – all that stuff. But that’s how I was seen. I just fitted in.”
Fitting in was certainly not the experience of the younger Airey at school:
“I remember spending long periods of time looking out the window when I was probably supposed to be listening to the teacher. I remember everyone being very surprised that I passed the 11 plus [examination]. [Being in] another world as a child, I suppose meant that [while] I didn’t connect very well with other kids, I connected in a different way. I had different ways of thinking.”
“I’ve massively adapted over the years, and I have functioned well for a long time, but it was the sense that I didn’t quite fit the so-called social norms, for which I’m immensely grateful, because I think there were so many other gifts to that, and I almost seek out people who are different, because I find them more interesting.”
Two other formative experiences were the death of her father when she was only 10, and he was 42, and then having her stepfather in her life.
“Thank goodness my stepfather came into our lives as he relieved us from four years of what felt like continual chaos, with my mother stretched with the two businesses she’d inherited, two young children and difficult times. So, surviving and transitioning through all of that, almost being thrown out of school because I was playing truant, and turning it around and being successful academically thanks to my stepfather.”
Airey frequently seeks out opportunities to be grateful and to find any gifts that may have come about from difficult experiences.
“I’m immensely grateful that I grew up in an era without social media. I think it could have been a lot worse. And looking back now with all the distance and removal from the pain of it, I’m almost grateful [for her experience at school]. I think [that experience] does influence my sense of self, which [is also] informed by meditation, particularly mindfulness meditation – simply tuning into what’s there in any moment.”
Showing her deep-thinking side, she reflects on how “the self is really quite a nebulous concept.”
“It seems to me that, in the end, the self is the observer of the experience. So when it comes to self-development, what does that even mean? What are we developing exactly? Our sense of who we are? It’s a tricky one.
“So I quite like the philosopher Rupert Spira [with] his sense of the direct line to awareness. This feeling of a field of awareness in which we play our part…and… tuning into the universality of the human condition. This sense of whatever this is [Airey points to herself], showing up in the world and in relationship to the world and to others.
“And when I’m able to tune into that, I think it just brings a great sense of compassion and gratitude for playing a part in that, and figuring out what that is…And in working with other people in relationship, in coaching relationships, [it’s] about the work as the gift and the privilege of listening to [clients’] sense of self, however, that may show up, however sorted it may seem to be. We’re all struggling to find our way, right?”
Conscious acts
Seeking out difference has been a thread throughout Airey’s life. For example, she deliberately chose to attend what she saw as a progressive university.
“I chose the University of Leicester, a context which was entirely different to the one I’d been brought up in. I’d been brought up by the sea, and I’d been to a junior convent school, then an all-girls grammar school.
“Other than my dad dying, and the experience that followed, contextually, I was in a very sheltered environment. So when I visited various universities, with anything that smacked of the traditional, I ran in the opposite direction. I wanted to open and broaden my horizons. It was a pull towards more diversity, towards understanding things, I think.
“[At university] I was exposed to all kinds of behaviours that I’d not encountered before. I’m so glad as I started to get a broader sense of what it is to be human and all the different choices, backgrounds, cultures and beliefs. I’m so grateful for that. It was an immensely diverse environment in those days – we’re talking late 70s here. And if that’s what I’d signed up for, then I better get on with it, right?” she laughs.
Then, in her first year at university, Airey received some challenging indirect feedback.
“I overheard a conversation discussing my weirdness… [The other students] had had a few drinks, and they were having a good old gossip about my choices. And it was deeply upsetting, but very helpful. So that was the turning point. And heaven knows how many other conversations there’d been that I hadn’t overheard, but this one, I did.
“The feedback was brutal, but it did wake me up a bit to how other people were seeing me. And I made a decision to make some changes.”
Gifts within suffering
“It’s the gift in the suffering, isn’t it? Whenever something’s difficult, it’s not that I go, ‘oh, goody, this is hard’. It’s just that I’m always curious about what it’s telling me. Will it be in
some way helpful? I just welcome it – ‘this is immensely hard…and…what’s going on?’
“I think perhaps the principal gift, is that I can honestly say, with all the different people I coach and work with and have conversations with, and this has been the case for a long time now, that there’s nothing that I don’t understand. There’s never a moment where I go ‘that’s weird’.
“I think what all of that gave me was a sense of deep humanity. I’m never shocked by whatever anyone brings. It’s almost as if my heart gets bigger, as if I expand in hearing people struggle, and I can relate to it.
“Now, of course, I haven’t been in certain situations. I haven’t been bombarded. I haven’t been in at the heart of war. I don’t know what it’s like to see the building a few 100 metres down the road being hit by a bomb, which was the direct experience of a client I was in conversation with last week, who’s in Kyiv. And yet, when she describes to me how she’s feeling, I’ve been there in some form.
“So I think all that suffering has given me a deep understanding of the human condition and what it is to be human, and a capacity to be present and hold space for people who are finding it all very hard. I think that was the gift in it all, that’s at least my experience of the work I do today.”
Identity crisis
After more than two decades in the Navy, Airey started having a “niggly feeling that there was something else, I wasn’t sure what.”
She went through “a very difficult period of divorcing my first husband, remarrying and leaving the Navy and the country, all in the space of about a year. It was too much and I went into some kind of identity crisis after that, spiralling out.
“I feel that I overestimated my own resilience. I’d never stopped to really consider the impact of any choice on my capacity to cope with it. In my adult working life, I’d just got on
with stuff.
“But I think this was the pause I needed, and anyway, whether I needed it or not, I had this pause. Everything changed all at once. There was very much a felt sense of the direction without really knowing where it was leading, so losing a sense of clear direction a sense of purpose, of being held, after leaving the Navy.”
There was also a backdrop of transition in Ukraine where she’d moved to.
“In 2005, Ukraine had just emerged from the Orange Revolution. It was a period of huge transition in that country’s history. Obviously, it’s desperately sad now, but at the time, it felt hugely optimistic. There was a lot of investment coming in from NATO and European countries.”
When Airey and her husband – who at the time was the defence attaché working in the British Embassy – arrived in Kyiv after a difficult year, she went as a trailing spouse.
“I was thoroughly looking forward to it. I thought, ‘How marvelous just to do lunch and coffee.’ But I very quickly realised that didn’t suit me one bit. Whether this was [due to] habit energy of purpose and action, it was hard to know. But it was less of a joy of space, and more of a terrible vacuum.
After a while, she offered assistance at her sons’ school, in various capacities. After helping out with mathematics, even though it wasn’t her strength, word travelled about her former career and she was brought into the board of governors. Then when the school quadrupled in size in one year, and needed a business manager, “everyone looked at me!”
“I didn’t know how to run a school, or the business of a school, but I stepped into it. In hindsight, I probably shouldn’t have – I probably over-estimated my own capability. Anyway, I did it for a year, learned a lot, had a department of about 60 Ukrainians working for me. It was a massively informative time – also quite stressful.”
She left but was then invited back onto the board of governors, becoming responsible for the small team who recruited a new director for the school.
And it was through the school that she got into coaching, by chance.
Getting into coaching
When someone in Kyiv asked Airey to coach one of his leaders, although she told them she wasn’t a coach, she “accepted his invitation because it seemed like there was no one else who could help this guy in that context. So I tried to figure out what I was doing, and then I started reading, then trained with the OCM around 20 years ago.
“So I thank the school and my boys, for giving me the opening that then led me into coaching.”
She started to ask herself questions such as what is coaching, what is behavioural change, how does that happen?
“[I thought] if I’m going to coach, what do I need to understand better about the human condition? Coaching just opened my mind to all these things that I’d struggled with for a long time. I was now in a position of helping others and I felt I jolly well needed to get my head around what it means to be human. So years of exploration around all of that led to Mindful Command.”
In her bid to understand, she delved into books from people such as Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning, 1985), which has been the most significant for her. “Reading his work was immensely influential and was like a step change. It was the moment I realised that it’s not the experience, issue, challenge itself, it’s how we relate to it. I thought to myself, if he can come through something as horrific as his experience, and still believe in humankind and want to be of service, then who am I not to do that? It’s as if he was pointing a path, and it’s almost selfish not to, right? If [Frankl] can believe in the goodness of humankind despite all of that, then so must I.
“[There was] this sense that change is possible… We now know about the neuroplasticity of the brain but when I first read [Frankl] all those years ago, and he said, there’s this space between stimulus and response, I realised that’s the space of our choice, our development, our learning. That’s how we do it, that’s how we change your behaviours, creating the space to choose. It’s extremely difficult, and it takes a lot of courage, consistency and practice, but it’s possible.”
She’s also appreciated [Internal Family Systems creator] Richard Schwartz’ work: “It was part of realising how the mind works, attending to the different parts with compassion and understanding, realising that when it comes to being authentic, what does that even mean? Because we’re made of so many different parts, and all of them are true. His work was immensely helpful in understanding that, or at least me making sense of it.”
She also found Marshall Rosenberg’s work on nonviolent communication very helpful, particularly around needs – understanding what is meant by the difference between having needs and being needy.
Another influence has been working on emotional intelligence with Geetu Bharwaney, founding director of EI World and getting trained by the HeartMath Institute, exploring “the intelligence of the heart.”
Conversations while on retreat have also been an influence. She writes in her book about an Italian monk she was in conversation with.
“He said something that deeply resonated, and was just what I needed at the time, clearly. It was about, if you don’t know what to do about something, almost forget it, keep to your practice, and when the time comes, you’ll know what to do. I’ve just found that to be the true sense of knowing that comes from spending time with yourself.”
Airey has been also strongly influenced by the work of [the late Buddhist monk] Thich Nhat Hahn.
“The gift of mindfulness meditation. It’s not that that’s the aim, but this wonderful feeling of comfort in sitting quietly and just listening to what’s there, realising that that’s not who I am. It’s just stuff. I find that immensely reassuring.
“I think the peace comes from that, and from the greater understanding that that’s the human condition right there we’re grappling with. And then there’s this place where all we’re doing is observing it and listening to it, detaching from it, so we’re able to stand back and see it for what it is: the human struggle.
“I think the distancing from it helps us to be more self-compassionate, because we realise if we get caught up in it, it can be extremely painful. But if we step back from it, we can take a more compassionate, holistic view, and realise it’s just what happens, just life.
“All the years of practising quiet, silence, have been [transformational], bringing me home to something deeper that now feels accessible. That’s a gift I’m very grateful for.
“So over the years I’ve looked in my coaching for ways of sharing that so people who are crazily busy, as I once was [can access it]. How do you find that space when you don’t know which way to turn?”
The pause
“This is why I came up with this idea of the pause tool, the mindful moment, although I’m not pretending this is original. It’s just the idea of a simple, three-step process I can teach people that makes a difference in their lives, that gives them the sense of creating space in the moment to choose.
“The pause tool is central to everything I do, because without that, nothing’s going to change, in my experience….I call it the gateway to Mindful Command. It’s the way in for people to make the change they want to make, if, if they want to make it. Without space, forget it.
“Leaders need to know how to pause. Pause is a word that these days is bandied about a lot. What I mean by pause is [being able to] create space in any moment, to come home to yourself, to have the inner power to do that. In our increasingly accelerated world, that becomes even more important. And through the pause, finding your inner ground, your
inner poise.
“From that place, you can move in any direction, and it’s not scattered. It’s a sense of being able to hold yourself – not tightly – command yourself, in that sense of self-command, in any moment, regardless of what’s happening.
“And as a leader, that’s essential. I believe you hold that space for yourself so you can hold it for others. It has to come from the inside out, otherwise it simply doesn’t work, and everyone feels it. That’s where trust comes from.”
Next steps
Airey is expanding her Evolving Leadership programme, and participants will go the Alps for two retreats. She rents the farmhouse for the June retreat, and a more open space for the October retreat “so that the group experiences being more held, and then more open as we move through towards the end of the programme. There’s a metaphor in the spaces that we’ve chosen.
Airey is now feeling particularly drawn to working with leaders of the future: “emerging leaders.”
“I have a sense I can share and teach some of these simple tools and practices such as the pause that I’ve experienced to be so helpful to me and people I’ve worked with over the years. The hope is that it’ll help these young leaders feel more resourceful, to make sense of things at an earlier stage, and make their working lives that little
bit easier.
Airey has almost finished designing a 90-day online group programme: Emerging Leaders in Authority. “Using that word ‘authority’ is kind of a double meaning,” she explains.
The programme features a series of six 90-minute online sessions, and monthly group check-ins with the option of one-to-one.
Airey has employed a coach to hold her accountable “with some very tough conversations about how to position all this stuff, which is always tricky when you’re close to it, to make it super relevant for what people need today”.
Airey is also looking at using the tools and practices of Mindful Command to help former Evolving Leader programme participants take Mindful Command to their teams.
“I’m looking at how to expand the work and make it more easily embedded in how leaders lead. It’s looking super practical because in the end, what matters is that people do it.”
Airey will continue to share her work on social media – she has a presence on Instagram and LinkedIn, and has videos on YouTube (Skilful Leaders). She also has a podcast called Fearless Forward.
She has no plans to retire any time soon: “I want to continue doing [this work] as long as I can.
“It just feels so important for leaders to take responsibility for what they’re there to do, and to really take it seriously, and think about it, and about how they want to show up every day for the people they lead and love.
References and further info
- Airey, S. A., & Takeaways, K. (2023). Mindful Command. Mint Associates Limited.
- Frankl, V. E. (1985). Man’s search for meaning. Simon & Schuster.
- Skilful Leaders: https://skilfulleaders.com