What’s in a Name?

I haven't posted as much this week as I'd have liked. Türkiye is coming, Turin and Montpellier just happened, and life has been moving faster than my LinkedIn feed. I'll get back on track. But there is one thing that has been sitting with me, and it felt right to bring it here first: I am rebranding. Creative Coaching is becoming VMH Consulting.

This is not the first time I've changed my name — professionally, at least.

Left Luggage

My first website, born in 2009, was called Left Luggage Creative Training and Facilitation.

I loved the metaphor. The work I do is often about helping people put down what they've been carrying — old roles, old stories, things that no longer serve them — and discover what's left when the excess baggage is gone.

The trouble was, nobody outside Britain understood it. And to make matters worse, I was endlessly followed around the internet by luggage companies. The digital world of 2009 was a very different place, and Left Luggage, for all its meaning to me, was a name that meant nothing to anyone else.

Creative Coaching

Creative Coaching came next. By then, I'd been coaching for ten years before I ever earned the Diploma that made it official. The name was about coming out of the shadows — finally announcing, after a decade of doing the work quietly, that I was a coach.

It didn't quite land the way I hoped.

I came to recognise, particularly around last September, that "creative" is a word that excites some people and puts off just as many others. It can sound soft, or vague, or simply optional — not the language a financial services leader or an NGO director reaches for when looking for serious support.

What I Really Mean by "Creative"

Here is what I actually meant by it.

Left Luggage's strapline was unpack your creative genius — and I meant that for everyone, not just artists.

Creativity, in my experience, is not about painting or performing. It is the capacity for original thought. For finding a new way through a problem that has resisted every old way.

Some of the most creative people I have ever worked with would never describe themselves that way. Roboticists. Nuclear disarmament scientists. Scientists campaigning against animal testing. Climate activists. NHS leaders holding impossible systems together.

None of them think of themselves as creative.

Most of them are among the most creative people I know.

But "creative" gets heard as "artistic," and artistic gets heard as "not for me." The word I chose to open a door ended up closing several others.

Why the Change?

Despite being highly qualified and deeply experienced, the website became something of a cul-de-sac. My real work came through people who already knew me — referrals, Gallup, and Cleaver Company International, with whom I've been allied since 2012.

The website itself brought almost nothing.

VMH Consulting is, in some ways, a much simpler decision than the names before it.

I wanted a website address that was short and easy to remember. I wanted a word that represented the breadth of what I actually do — not just coaching, but the facilitation work I love most, now alongside more than a decade of coaching and mentoring practice.

Consulting does that.

Quietly.

Without asking anyone to feel a certain way about creativity first.