Bespoke Compass was birthed and built from the burnt-out spaces of my own life and of the people I have helped for 30 years. I decided to leave a secure job halfway through an empty international flight from Dublin to St. Louis in August 2020, at the height of the first COVID lockdowns.

My father had died in Ireland, and I had agreed several years before to be the minister who would officiate at his funeral. Three days of social distancing, a funeral at the graveside in the rain, and now an empty international flight with a mask and a face shield. I was almost fifty, had a wife and son, lived in a comfortable middle-class neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri, yet the sense that it was time to launch a business felt overwhelmingly obvious.

Over the previous quarter-century, I had developed a series of unusual methods and training models. I'd use them within the teams and organizations I led, but hadn't moved beyond that. On that flight, I decided it was time to build a place to apply everything I had learned over a lifetime of reading people.

I didn't find these methods in any research study or academic setting. I found them growing up on the streets of war-torn Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 80s. The ability to read between the lines of how people think, to read the room to capture how everyone feels, and to do the deeper reading of the rationalizations people make from deep within their psyche — all take time, talent, and tenacity to master. But more than ability, there is a need to prioritize these abilities. My pressure was basic survival, but I've found people like me with radically different origin stories.

Whether it is a blind spot in thinking, feeling, or rationalizing, successful people must seek help to see these blind spots outside their sphere of success. That conviction is what Bespoke Compass was built on — and it's shared by every coach who works with us.

What I learned to do by instinct on the streets of Ballymena, science had known for decades. The ability to read a room before anyone speaks — neuroscience calls that interoception, the body's capacity to detect signals before conscious thought catches up (Craig, 2002; Damasio, 1994).

The split-second judgment about who is dangerous and who is safe — cognitive science calls this pattern recognition: the shift from slow calculation to automatic categorization that separates novices from experts (Kahneman, 2011; Klein, 1993). The way successful people rationalize their blind spots using the very intelligence that made them successful — researchers call that the bias blind spot, and it gets worse, not better, with cognitive ability (Stanovich et al., 2012).

I didn't know any of this terminology when I was learning to survive. But when I later studied the research, I recognized every finding. The science confirmed what the streets had taught me — and it gave me a framework to teach others what took me decades to learn.

Most people walk through life unaware of how their subconscious shapes their thinking, or are distracted by a noisy world, unable to fully pay attention to the somatic cues that litter every situation they enter. Harder by far than awareness and attention is agency — the ability to read the deep rationalizations we make to justify what we do.

Everything I've built at Bespoke Compass exists to help successful people see themselves and others more clearly. The three series — My Success, My Instincts, and My Mastery — each go after one of those blind spots.

My Success is where most people start. It shows you how you think, lead, and make decisions — and where your thinking has become so automatic you can no longer see it. The invisible patterns running your leadership. That's what we make visible.

My Instincts goes deeper. Your body processes information faster than your conscious mind, yet most executive development programs ignore that entirely. We don't teach meditation. We teach you to feel the storm while being okay within it.

My Mastery is the hardest territory. The distortions in choice, conflict, and crisis that even the most self-aware leaders struggle to overcome. The deepest rationalizations aren't logical errors. They're stories you've told yourself so many times they've become load-bearing walls in how you function. Dismantling them requires more than insight. It requires skill.

The frameworks we use are grounded in established research across cognitive psychology, affective neuroscience, and developmental science. But they didn't start in a laboratory. They started in the same place every real skill starts — under pressure, with consequences.

To explore how each of our coaches works, click Coaches. To find the program that fits where you are right now, click Self-Guided. To go deeper into the origin story, start with the Irish Chronicle.