Wiser Ways

Wiser Ways Wiser Ways offers individual & relationship counselling, & executive coaching. Please visit the website or contact us to book an appointment.

I help people realise their goals & strengths, providing them with the tools to reach their full potential. Andrew’s professional journey has been rich and diverse, shaped by experiences in private enterprise, government, coaching, and more. As a counsellor, he draws from these varied roles to support individuals in navigating personal growth and life challenges. Andrew believes that meaningful ch

ange comes from within, and his approach focuses on tapping into clients’ internal resources to help them transform their circumstances in positive ways. Having worked as a senior manager in multiple organisations, Andrew eventually felt drawn to a role that allowed him to give back to his community. His passion for helping others comes from a deep-rooted understanding of the power of self-discovery and the value of investing in personal development. Whether you’re feeling stuck, unsure of your next steps, or simply seeking clarity, Andrew provides a compassionate and respectful space for you to explore your thoughts and goals. Andrew’s extensive experience in various sectors, combined with his strength-based approach, allows him to be flexible and adaptive to each client’s unique needs. His belief in the capacity for individuals to make meaningful change is at the heart of his practice, and he takes great delight in supporting people through their journey of overcoming adversity and achieving their goals. If you’re looking to make a positive difference in your life, Andrew’s empathetic and client-centred approach may be just what you need to spark that change.

03/09/2026

Discovering new hobbies and pastimes to try can be very exciting and rewarding, but what you learn about them before beginning can have a strong impact on how much you enjoy yourself.

For many people, the first stage of trying something new is learning about it and what they can hope to accomplish through online research. This often exposes them to professional-level results that are normalised as the standard of accomplishment in this area.

Believing that you should be able to start like an expert is almost always unrealistic and sets you up for frustration and disappointment. But much of this can be avoided if you lower your standards for yourself.

Managing standards can be easiest if you don’t spend an excessive amount of time finding experts to compare yourself to so you can be happy with your beginner-level results. Remember that how you begin will be very different to how you later do something after you’ve had the opportunity to practice and gain experience.

You might even have felt very capable when you began and it’s only when reflecting after improving that you can realise how much you had to improve, but you were happy with your early results anyway.

Researching things you want to try can be fun and help you judge if it’s something you would enjoy, but it can also make it difficult to be happy with your beginner-level results.

If you struggle with accepting your mistakes and needing to improve, which are both symptoms of perfectionism, I encourage you to reach out to me. As a professional coach and counsellor I can help you manage your expectations of yourself and be happier with your best efforts and good enough.

02/09/2026

When someone gives feedback, its common for them to ask themselves if they were clear and delivered all of their points. But often what is more important than saying everything that needed shared is considering how well your message was received.

For the majority of people, receiving feedback, especially in the workplace, is more than being told logical information. It’s an emotional experience that can be interpreted in different ways depending on how the information was presented to them.

Even when feedback is strictly factual, there are still emotional factors to consider. Statements about their work can easily be taken personally and feel like interpretations of their character.

When people take feedback personally, they can become defensive as they feel the need to protect themselves, lose confidence in themselves and their abilities, and/or believe they’re being treated unfairly. None of these responses are helpful for someone you want to improve.

But if your goal is to tell someone how they can improve in a way that motivates them to try harder and make the necessary changes, it can be more likely that you will get the results you want more often.

This approach requires considering emotional responses and determining how different people will react. Some people thrive on challenges while others easily feel overwhelmed by them. One person could easily accept that missing the mark doesn’t make them useless while another would feel incompetent and need reassurance.

It can be challenging to know how people will respond to feedback, but if you have the intention of discovering this about the people you work with and incorporating it into your communication strategy, you can improve how effective you are at delivering feedback.

If you're a leader and would like to improve your communication skills, I encourage you to reach out to me. As an executive coach I can help you share your ideas and expectations more clearly and help you feel more comfortable in how you share these.

01/09/2026

Even when you disagree with others, it’s important not to disagree with how they are feeling.

Even when people are being unreasonable (and they know it) their emotions are still real to them. So if you communicate, directly or indirectly, that they shouldn’t be feeling a certain way, the conversation is unlikely to be productive. The person you’re speaking to can become defensive, aggressive, or withdrawn.

This almost always makes progressing the conversation or finding a solution difficult. Instead of being open and willing to learn from each other, you can instead be battling to have your perspective recognised and validated. But if you acknowledge what someone is feeling, even if you strongly disagree that their reaction is appropriate, the conversation can remain healthy.

While this can seem like an unnecessary and self-indulgent prerequisite for a discussion, it’s nevertheless critical for the majority of people as it makes them feel understood and their perceptive recognised, even if it isn’t shared.

If you can accept that even when you’re feeling a certain way someone else can have a completely different interpretation of the situation and both reactions are valid, you can have healthier discussions.

If you struggle with having healthy discussions, whether this is at home or in the workplace, I encourage you to reach out to me. As a professional coach I can help you identify any unhealthy communication habits you have and work with you to practice alternatives so you can more enjoyable conversations.

27/08/2026

If you want to encourage someone to be improve, it’s often best to consider how you can offer them hope.

Although they don’t always realise it, the majority of people give feedback on a regular basis. This includes critiquing colleagues as a leader or a peer, trying to help friends remain optimistic, and asking for improvements from your partner or other people you’re close with.

If you make requests or suggestions in ways that are aggressive, accusing, or even vaguely positive, they can be less effective. But when you inspire hope that the person is capable of making the changes and that life will be better once they have, there're more likely to be receptive.

Asking for changes or improvements in a way that gives hope typically involves emphasising what they can actionably change to achieve the improvements. You can acknowledge what they’ve done wrong, as this is often relevant, but ideally this is done within the context of illustrating what you want changed.

Feeling capable of taking action is often the easiest with a clear path forward. Instead of asking someone to ‘do better’ or ‘keep working on it’, be specific in what you think is lacking. If you’re unable to provide these details, share this so they’re aware that you don’t have a solution either.

By giving feedback in a manner that inspires hope, you can ideally be well received more often when you request changes and improvements from others.

If you would like to improve your communication with others, I encourage you to reach out to me. I have worked with people to improve their communication in professional and personal settings so they can have healthier and more rewarding interactions.

26/08/2026

Have you even been motivated to begin a goal and felt capable of accomplishing it, only to become increasingly discouraged the more you did to prepare?

Making a plan for how you’ll accomplish a goal, researching techniques and considering the obstacles you can expect to encounter is important as it helps you be prepared and capable of accomplishing your goal. But it can also make a goal excessively complicated.

For many types of goals, there is a seemingly endless amount of competing information and ‘experts’ claiming that their techniques are what is necessary to advance. In this type of environment, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by all this information as it adds to your plan for your goal and/or creates confusion.

So instead of thinking that the more you learn and incorporate into your plan the better it will become, especially before you’ve begun, it’s often valuable to recognise the value of simplicity.

When you adopt a simplistic approach to a goal, you give yourself the opportunity to ease into new habits and different ways of thinking. You can have the intention of incorporating the methods of others as you progress, but these can wait.

Goals that begin as simple endeavours can become needlessly complicated and unsustainable due to a plan that’s overly-complicated. But if you choose to begin when your goal is still simple, you can have a better chance of making progress.

If you have a goal you would like to advance beyond the planning stages, I encourage you to contact me. As a professional coach, I can help you identify your motivations, plan techniques that compliment your skills, and help you prepare for obstacles and slip-ups so you feel ready to begin.

25/08/2026

How often do you need to make decisions when you’re stressed? Are you typically happy with the choices you make or do they more often lead to regret?

When you have to make an important decision, especially when it’s under pressure and will affect a number of people, it can be difficult to remain reasonable and objective. Even if you stay calm, you can still prioritise the wrong things and be misunderstood. And becoming worked up makes most people even more likely to make a poor decision.

To gain insight into how you respond to stress, consider how you’ve reacted in the past. Did you quickly take action and attempt to fix the situation? Were you optimistic about the opportunities that could arise? Were you calm and reflective or more eager to act?

Consider your motivations for your reactions. Was your goal to leverage the situation to your advantage or to get out of the situation as quickly as possible? Reassure others (and possibly yourself a well) that you could handle it?

Reactions under stress can be largely instinctive, so they’re not always effectively thought out. But if you understand how you tend to react when stressed, you can better consider your actions and motivations to make better decisions.

If you frequently have to make decisions under pressure, which is common for many leadership roles, I encourage you to reach out to me. As an experienced executive coach I can help you feel mor capable of making decisions even when you’re feeling stressed.

20/08/2026

How much are you willing to compromise with yourself in order to feel successful?

Achieving things and feeling rewarded is important to being satisfied with your life. If you rarely believe that you’ve done anything worth being proud of, especially if you often try yet don’t meet your expectations of yourself, you can feel disappointed and frustrated.

Not being able to accomplish things that are important to you is almost always very upsetting. But there is usually something else you can do instead and/or a silver lining to your situations.

Considering alternatives to what you can accomplish and recognising the value of experiences that didn’t work out the way you wanted to isn’t telling yourself that you aren’t disappointed or you don’t care as this would be dishonest; it’s choosing to adopt a perspective that acknowledges anything you may have gained while considering alternatives.

If you attempted to do X but only did Y, this could still be a gain. You might have wanted A but could you feel proud of yourself for getting B? You could plan to continue striving for your original goal but also feel accomplished for what you’ve achieved so far.

If you’re flexible in what you consider to be a positive outcome, even if it’s not what you had hoped for, you can feel proud of yourself more often.

If you struggle with feeling capable and would like to improve your techniques and/or mentality, I encourage you to reach out to me. As a professional coach I can help you reframe your perspective of success and what you expect from yourself so you can feel more fulfilled.

19/08/2026

The more time you spend worrying about something, the longer it affects you.

Being worried about an upcoming challenge or difficult experience can be helpful; the discomfort can motivate you to spend more time preparing yourself so you feel better equipped than you would otherwise.

But not all worry is productive. If you’re not taking action, especially if there isn’t anything you can do that would change the outcome, such as waiting for the results of a test you already took, then you have nothing to gain from worrying.

Instead of being helpful, unproductive worries can be exhausting and distracting, leaving you with less time and attention for other important aspects of your life, including those that have the potential to make you feel calm and grateful.

If you’re worrying and not taking action, especially if there’s nothing you can do, it’s important to recognise this. Adding to your stress-levels needlessly will impact your mental health and make you feel less capable of addressing the areas of your life where you are able to make positive changes.

To reduce how worries, consider what you could do it feel less impacted. Are there ways you can prepare? Should you do something enjoyable to calm yourself? Do you have to accept a long-term uncertainty?

There are few, if any, problems that can be resolved through worrying alone, so by addressing your concerns through doing what you can to change your situation or how you feel about it, you can feel less impacted.

If you have something that is concerning you or you would like to improve how you respond to uncertainties, I encourage you to reach out to me. I’m a professional coach who can help you identify actions you can take to address concerns and suggest techniques be less impacted.

18/08/2026

Is there anyone in your life who you often feel frustrated with because they’re inflexible and unwilling to take your preferences into consideration?

Some people put their own needs and preferences before anyone else’s, potentially without realising. When you tell them that what they want doesn’t work for you and suggest alternatives, they can refuse to compromise because they feel that this is the same as being told no, which can make finding a resolution challenging.

To find a solution with people who have these types of mentalities, you may need to take more time explaining what is possible and the benefits of the different options while emphasising the ways that they can get what they expect.

Telling people no if they refuse to compromise can also be valuable to protecting your own mental health. If you’ve told someone that you can’t or won’t do something and they don’t want to accept this, you might not be able to avoid upsetting them.

People who rarely consider the wants and needs of other people can be difficult to work or have relationships with, especially while protecting your own mental health. But if you adapt your communication style to emphasise what they want so they feel recognised while stating that you have your own needs and capabilities to consider as well, it’s possible that they can be willing to be more flexible.

If you’re having struggles with productive communication, with someone difficult or in general, I encourage you to reach out to me. As a professional coach, I can work with you to develop techniques that can help you feel more comfortable asserting yourself when you have to tell someone no.

13/08/2026

Some people like to find motivation to attempt something challenging by learning about others who have done the same. This can be helpful, but to truly be motivated you need to take action to prove to yourself what you’re capable of.

Learning about others who have accomplished the same goal or made a similar change to what you’re contemplating can help increase your motivation and give you valuable insight. But this alone won’t necessarily give you enough confidence to begin.

You might not feel as capable as the people you learn about. If they have access to far more resources than you do, you could even tell yourself that their story is evidence that you’re not capable of what they accomplished because what you’re lacking, such as time, money or education.

But if you decide to take action, even if you’re not certain you’ll be successful or if you have enough motivation to stay committed long-term, you can build your belief in yourself and eventually accomplish your goal.

When you take action to progress a goal, even if you begin with incredibly small changes, you demonstrate to yourself that you're capable of making progress. This can be motivating and give you the confidence you need to take bigger steps that will bring you closer to accomplishing your goal.

You might not compare favourably to the people you learned about for inspiration, but this doesn’t mean that you aren’t accomplishing something you deserve to be proud of.

If you’re in the planning stages of making a change and would like to feel better prepared, I encourage you to reach out to me. As a professional coach who has helped people accomplish their goals and break unhealthy habits in the past, I can work with you to develop a plan for your goal so you can feel ready to get started.

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