Gayle Tong

Senior Coach Practitioner - European Mentoring and Coaching Council

I am passionate about working with managers and leaders who want to be the best, confident, authentic version of themselves. 

I love unpicking and breaking down challenges with my clients to help them gain perspective and clear direction.

Working with leaders across different businesses and roles, who each bring their own unique challenges to coaching, I am solutions-based and actions focused.  I’ve realised that my 20 years of working in a retail environment has made me the pragmatic, realistic coach I am today!

I’m a big believer in taking small courageous actions that move you forward to achieving your goals.  And as your coach, I will always encourage you to be more courageous and to take action, because without action nothing changes.

My style of coaching is informal, its conversational and it’s about you.  I’m not all about models and theory, although I do believe they have their time & place and can often support a tricky challenge by separating the logic and the emotion.

Whilst all coaching session are different depending on the goal of the individual, common themes I work on with my clients include:

  • Confidently communicating with impact all levels across businesses

  • Building self-awareness, profile and presence

  • Understanding and building confidence in professional lives

  • Career progression & development, helping my clients to navigate their roles and responsibilities

Gayle Testimonials

“Gayle's coaching helped me understand and reframe some of my biggest challenges and goals. After each session I felt invigorated and energised to improve every challenge we'd spoken about.

Gayle allows you to guide the sessions; providing insight and asking key questions that allow you to see situations from different perspectives. This helped me find the answers and create plans of action to resolve issues. I found this incredibly helpful and was naturally more motivated and empowered to succeed following a plan I'd created.

Gayle has a really positive approach to her coaching, and it provides a friendly and encouraging space to open up and dive deep into the root cause of issues or worries.”

JH, Commercial Director

“Gayle’s coaching style is a perfect blend of conversational and informal, yet profoundly challenging when needed. She’s able to create a comfortable space for open dialogue, making it easy to dive deep into personal and professional matters.

Her insightful questions and active listening skills encouraged me to think critically and introspectively, leading to meaningful breakthroughs in our sessions. My thoughts and concerns were treated with the utmost respect and discretion, fostering a trusting environment where I could be open and honest without fear of judgement.”

AB, Marketing Manager

“Gayle really helped me to finally work out what my career goals are now, if they've changed since returning to work, why they've changed etc.....

Importantly as a full time working mum life can feel incredibly hard and stressful, Gayle was incredible at working through this topic in particular and creating a plan with me to manage the tough times better so I don't miss the good times!”

Strategic Account Executive, Media

“I would recommend Gayle as a coach to anyone who needs coaching. Her honesty, simplicity and authenticity was what I liked the most in our interactions. I also quickly found many options to reach my goals quite effortlessly thanks to her.””

TS, Retail, UK and International

“Gayle is a fantastic coach and has successfully supported and coached many colleagues across our business. Gayle’s approach is definitely collaborative, both listening to understand and questioning to challenge. She is very output driven, asking you to really dig deep and find the right solution for you to take a big step forward, however unfamiliar or uncomfortable that might be! I would highly recommend Gayle; she will absolutely help you achieve clarity and confidence, and in this unstable world, who wouldn’t want that!”

KB, HR Director, Retail, UK

Areas of Expertise:

  • Developing a successful leadership approach

  • Understanding and building confidence in personal and professional lives

  • Career progression and development, exploring options, working through redundancy and preparing for a new role

  • Handling the maternity transition

  • Building profile, presence and self-awareness

  • Communication styles with teams, peers and leaders; relationship building

Professional Background:

I started my career in retail management working my way up to managing a top 20 turnover store for a high street retailer.  I’d always had a passion for learning & development, so I moved into retail training.  Over the course of 11 years, I worked my way up from training officer to Learning & Development Partner with responsibility for learning & development across the business. 

This was not a traditional L&D role and as part of the Senior Leadership Team, I was involved in lots of projects from e-learning to People Values to Strategy workshops as well as developing, delivering & facilitating management & leadership development.  It was here that I developed my passion for coaching and achieved my qualification & accreditation.

Recent Assignments:

  • Introduction of a coaching programme supporting Line Managers at all levels

  • 1:1 coaching for Senior Leaders including 360 feedback and PRISM Brain Mapping for all clients

  • Coaching mediation for senior leaders 

  • Development and delivery of confidence workshops

  • Facilitation of People Values workshops for a board-level group of leaders 

Accreditation and Training:

  • EMCC Senior Coach Practitioner

  • Member of the EMCC

  • Everything DiSC Facilitator

  • NLP Practitioner

  • Mental Health First Aider

  • CIPD Certificate in Organisational Coaching & Mentoring

  • BSc (Hons) Retail Management

  • Brené Brown – Dare to Lead for Coaches Trained