Same discipline, two different roads.

Charlotte Howorth works with what a leader can sense about their team but can't quite name — and brings it into the open, where it can be dealt with.

She came to the work by an unusual route. After a degree in cell and molecular biology at King's College London, she spent her early career as a science journalist and documentary producer and director — years spent learning to draw out a story and hear what someone is really telling you — before retraining as a psychotherapist.

What she trained in was Focusing, the discipline developed by the psychologist Eugene Gendlin for paying attention to the felt, half-formed sense a person has of a situation before they have words for it. She led the International Focusing Institute's two-year Focusing-Oriented Therapy certification for twelve years — a role personally entrusted to her by Mary Hendricks, Gendlin's wife and the Institute's former director — and continued teaching it privately for six more. She is on the faculty of the Relational Focusing-Oriented Psychotherapy program in New York, teaches for FORGE, NYC, and has led workshops internationally for the past seventeen years.

She listens not just to what is being said, but to what lies beneath it.

Alongside three decades of clinical practice with individuals, couples and groups, Charlotte has worked for the last fifteen years as an organizational psychologist. She has been a Lecturer in Social Work at Columbia University, is a Certified C-IQ (Conversational Intelligence) and Emergent Essentials coach working with organizations and leaders, and serves as lead faculty of the Advanced Coaching Program for Interactualizer. She is former Clinical Director and current Clinical Consultant at the Center for Human Development and Family Services in New York.

With Rod, she co-developed the Focusing-Oriented Coaching model at the center of the Howorth Francis approach.

Rod Francis knows the thing most leaders get wrong about change: you can't will it from the top. You work with what's underneath.

He learned it the hard way. Growing up in Australia, he took the road none of his peers did — into the performing arts, training at the national academy of the Australian Ballet and then working on stages and screens around the world for well over a decade. It was his first real taste of doing something he was made for.

When that career timed out, as every dancer's does, the years that followed led somewhere far darker — into addiction and mental-health struggle. He came through it. "For the lucky ones," he says, "it can be the very crucible of a new life." The long work of recovery — therapy, developmental work, some very tough years — was the remaking of him, and it is the ground everything since has been built on. Rod is, by his own description, an open book about it, because the work he now does with others begins in exactly that territory.

He rebuilt from there: college and university, then entrepreneurship and a design-led business in London. It succeeded — offices, staff, national press — and still felt hollow, missing the meaning and purpose that had driven his earliest work. Recognizing that gap is what led him to coaching.

When you're in a hole, don't keep digging!

More than two decades on, he has spent much of the last fifteen years developing and leading coach-training programs across Europe and the United States, training over two thousand professionals and working with thousands of coaching clients. He is credentialed with the International Coach Federation, completed Gottman relationship training, and is a Certified Focusing Professional and Focusing Teacher with the International Focusing Institute. A CFM-qualified Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction teacher through the original Center for Mindfulness at UMass, he has kept a personal meditation practice for over forty years. He founded the Emergent Coaching program, publishes peer-reviewed work on coaching and human development, is writing a book, and speaks regularly to professional groups and at conferences.

With Charlotte, he co-developed the Focusing-Oriented Coaching model at the center of the Howorth Francis approach.