About Us

Neil believes that one of the greatest gifts in life is a loving and fulfilling relationship with another person.

But who teaches us how to have great relationships?
If we are lucky our parents had a great relationship, and we can model that. I learned by trial and error and with lots and lots of errors!

Neil has a wide range of life experiences and training that enables him to deal quickly and effectively with relationship issues. He has had a long and successful business career during which time he also spent many years doing voluntary counselling. He decided, many years ago to move on from business to his real passion of helping people have better relationships and making a real difference to their lives.

Neil developed the unique concept of Duo Coaching 15 years ago. After unsatisfactory experiences with traditional relationship counselling during an earlier marriage Neil developed a more outcome focused and supportive approach.

Neil is an author, relationship expert and qualified psychotherapist. He has worked with hundreds of couples over the last fifteen years to help them move from a place of despair and unhappiness to one of closeness and harmony. He created the Relationship Paradigm Model, an online couples therapy platform, www.relationshipparadigm.com and has written two books on relationships. In the two years, Neil has written over 370 articles on Relationships for national and international newspapers and publications. He has reached an audience of over 2.6 million print readers and 2.8 billion online readers.

The Sun newspaper calls him ‘The Relationship Guru’ and The Times, The Independent, The Mail and others call him ‘The Relationship Expert’.

Outside of work Neil is a keen sailor, having done two Transatlantic’s and many races and cruises on boats from 12’ to 200’. He and his wife Gwen are now sailing their boat slowly, a week a month, down to the Mediterranean. When on dry land he also flies, climbs, cycles and walks.

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

Neil has a wide variety of training, in Counselling, Life Coaching, Business Coaching, Clinical Hypnotherapy, Family Constellations, Systemic Constellations, Gestalt, Transactional Analysis, Clean Space and Language, Symbolic Modelling and is a Master Practitioner in NLP.
His Doctorate on ‘The Phenomenology of Relationships’ is an autoethnographic investigation into the world of relationships and love; a critique of relationship therapies and psychotherapeutic modalities and review of his two frameworks; The Relationship Paradigm and Duo Coaching.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts. member of The Association of Coaching, Association of NLP and has organisational membership of BACP, The British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy.

Neil believes that we should never stop learning and should allow ourselves to learn from the past but move on quickly to the future that we want to be having. He loves his work with Maria and feels very privileged to be invited into couple’s lives and able to help facilitate real, positive and lasting change.

Neil and Maria have different backgrounds and styles, but they share values and approaches. They have found working together to be a remarkably effective way of working with couples together to help resolve relationship issues. The fact that they are business (and not life) partners is great as they bring their own approaches and experiences into the sessions with clients and do not present themselves as an ‘idealised’ couple.

Come and work with Neil and Maria at Duo Coaching, in Hampshire.

Maria is committed to providing support and motivation to couples and individuals, using her empathic, caring and calm nature she enables clients to build confidence and self-awareness.  Qualifying as a Counsellor in 1998, Maria initially worked with individuals and groups through career transition as a Redundancy Counsellor providing Career Management Programmes.  Her work within a Human Resource Consultancy also included recruitment and assessment centres.

Maria is a Member of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, has a BA (Hons) in Counselling and Psychotherapy and a Post Graduate Certificate in Relationship Counselling through her work as a Relationship Counsellor with Relate.  Her life and work experience combine to help clients explore what interferes with their happiness in relationships to achieve their relationship goals.  She is inspired to help couples through negative patterns of relating to achieve a deeper connection and renewed sense of commitment.

Maria is excited to be working with Neil in Duo Coaching which adds an extra dimension to couple’s work.

Based in the New Forest she takes advantage of what it has to offer either through walking her dog or cycling the trails.  She is also a keen swimmer and participates in the Charity Pier to Pier swim.