About Dr. Neil Wilkie

Neil brings an unusual combination of life experience and professional training to his work with couples. After a successful business career spanning CEO roles, fundraising, and leading multiple management buyouts, he made a significant life change at fifty. He left the boardroom behind to pursue his real passion: helping people build better relationships and making a genuine difference to their lives.

That decision led him to create Duo Coaching over fifteen years ago. Frustrated by his own unsatisfactory experiences with traditional relationship counselling during an earlier marriage, Neil developed something different—a more outcome-focused, supportive approach that actually works. He has since worked with hundreds of couples, helping them move from places of despair and disconnection to closeness and harmony.

Neil is a Visiting Fellow at Middlesex University, where he completed his Doctorate on ‘The Phenomenology of Relationships’ in 2024. This autoethnographic investigation explored the lived experience of relationships and love, offered a critique of existing relationship therapies and psychotherapeutic modalities, and examined the theoretical foundations of his two frameworks: The Relationship Paradigm and Duo Coaching. He is currently writing three books on relationships for the publishers Routledge.

As a relationship expert and qualified psychotherapist, Neil created the Relationship Paradigm Model and the online couples therapy platform www.relationshipparadigm.com. His writing on relationships has appeared in national and international publications, reaching an audience of over 4.8 million print readers and billions online. The Sun calls him ‘The Relationship Guru’; The Times, The Independent, The Mail and others refer to him as ‘The Relationship Expert’.

Neil’s training spans Counselling, Life Coaching, Business Coaching,Clinical Hypnotherapy, Family Constellations, Systemic Constellations, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Clean Space and Language, Symbolic Modelling, and he is a Master Practitioner in NLP. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and a member of The Association of Coaching and the Association of NLP.

Beyond the therapy room, Neil is a keen sailor. He has completed two Transatlantics and countless races and cruises on boats ranging from 12 to 200 feet. He and his wife Gwen are currently sailing their boat, Moon River, slowly down towards the Mediterranean—a week at a time. When on dry land, he cycles, walks, and continues to explore.

Neil has also learned from his own relationships, having been married, widowed, and now happily married again. He has two adopted daughters.

He believes we should never stop learning—allowing ourselves to learn from the past while moving purposefully towards the future we want. He loves his work alongside Maria and feels genuinely privileged to be invited into couples’ lives, helping to facilitate real, positive and lasting change.

Working with Neil and Maria

Neil and Maria bring different backgrounds and styles to their partnership, but they share core values and a common approach. They have found working together to be a remarkably effective way of supporting couples through relationship challenges. The fact that they are business partners rather than life partners is an advantage—they bring their own distinct experiences and perspectives into sessions without presenting themselves as an ‘idealised’ couple.

Come and work with Neil and Maria at Duo Coaching