In this Business Insights Series article, I sat down with Kevin Watson, a coach, facilitator, and business consultant with over two decades of experience helping individuals and teams navigate complexity. Kevin’s journey, from leading operations at Selfridges to founding three businesses, reveals how diverse experiences can converge into one clear goal: helping people see their options more clearly and act on them with confidence.
Kevin runs three interlinked ventures. My Own Coach is a self-serve coaching platform packed with guides, e-books, and goal-setting tools. It includes a 5-day challenge, coaching templates, and downloadable resources designed to help people move from hesitation to action.
Facilitators Cafe is a thriving online community for facilitators who want to learn, share, and experiment together. The platform offers curated facilitation tools, virtual sessions, and collaborative spaces where members explore how AI can support deeper engagement and more dynamic experiences. And Acema supports small businesses in automating customer engagement using AI, while preserving human connection.
In our conversation, Kevin offered a series of grounded insights, drawn from years of listening, poking at assumptions, and inviting people to think for themselves. His focus leaned away from polished frameworks and toward surfacing the real questions that drive change. This article covers five themes that emerged from that conversation: seeing the whole system, finding energy in variety, using AI to sharpen awareness, honouring belief without dogma, and coaching through genuine dialogue.
Integration as practice
Kevin’s way of working spans three initiatives, but he doesn’t see them as separate.
“I see them as quite connected in many ways.”
To him, coaching, facilitation, and automation all support the same goal: helping people get unstuck. These initiatives extend beyond standard service lines, creating conditions where people can choose how to engage and grow.
My Own Coach offers a structured environment where individuals can develop direction through self-guided resources: mini courses, templates, and exercises designed to move them from stuckness to momentum. Rather than simply focusing on skill-building, the emphasis is on designing structures that cultivate rhythm, reflection, and self-directed growth in tandem. The platform blends self-paced learning with practical templates that encourage discernment through action.
Facilitators Cafe functions as more than a hub for knowledge exchange; it cultivates a culture of experimentation. Whether it’s a live session or a curated resource drop, the focus is always on designing more meaningful group interactions. And Acema complements both by ensuring that the systems supporting those interactions: like customer onboarding or ongoing engagement, don’t undermine the human element but enhance it. Each initiative reflects Kevin’s conviction that structure, when paired with presence, can be liberating.
Each initiative flows from the same underlying practice: meeting people where they are and supporting meaningful movement forward.
While others try to label him as “coach,” “consultant,” “facilitator,” he focuses instead on offering what the situation needs. One week he may lean into one area, the next week another. His work is sustained by a consistent thread of intention that weaves through diverse modes of practice, allowing coherence without demanding uniformity.
The challenge, he admits, is messaging. People want a clear label. But real work often resists easy categories. That’s something we’ve also seen at Serenichron: when businesses operate across systems (tech, people, strategy), they need flexible, not formulaic, support. Kevin’s approach reinforces that lesson: integration often matters more than identity.
Kevin’s multidisciplinary approach echoes findings from systemic coaching research, which show that “a systemically integrated approach to systemic coaching combines multiple approaches and seeks to engage a system in a more direct way.” This insight supports Kevin’s perspective that his work doesn’t live in silos but it exists as a cohesive, living practice that adapts to the needs of the whole.
Clarity in the midst of variety
Kevin thrives on variety. He finds that doing only coaching or only facilitation would leave him restless. The energy comes from how the work overlaps and feeds itself. Each day offers a different kind of challenge: from a 1:1 coaching call to designing automation workflows, to leading a dialogue at the Facilitators Cafe. It’s that interplay between modes of working: solo reflection, group engagement, and systems thinking that keeps things fresh.
“If I could only do coaching, that would bore me silly after a while.”
Kevin’s wide-ranging focus generates a steady cross-pollination of ideas, offering insight and agility across his work. Insights that emerge during a coaching session often evolve into structured tools for My Own Coach. Patterns noticed during a Facilitators Cafe session can inform how he builds automation for clients through Acema. He’s constantly cycling between immediate human experience and broader systems design.
This back-and-forth flow sharpens his sensitivity to context. Coaching helps him understand individual blockers. Facilitation reveals group dynamics. Automation shows him what scale and consistency require. That integrated awareness helps him choose when to go deep, when to go wide, and when to step back altogether.
And he resists the urge to package himself too neatly. That freedom allows for evolution, but it also complicates visibility. Kevin isn’t building a traditional business empire. He’s not seeking scale for its own sake. What he’s cultivating are relationships, conversations, and moments of insight, one by one, and always in real time.
AI as a mirror, not a machine
Before we dive deeper into Kevin’s personal approach, it’s worth noting a relevant insight from Stanford research on reflective practices: AI tools can prompt deeper reflection by encouraging users to externalize their thinking and engage in conversational exploration. These tools help articulate inner reasoning rather than just deliver output; an approach that mirrors how Kevin integrates AI into his work: as a partner in inquiry, not just a processor of tasks.
Kevin doesn’t use AI to automate everything. He uses it to think more clearly and to think more deeply.
“The better I get at prompting, the more I think more consciously about the questions I may ask someone.”
Kevin views AI as a reflective surface: one that reveals gaps in thinking and invites deeper awareness, rather than merely serving as a machine to execute tasks. It reflects the gaps in our reasoning, the deletions in our sentences, the assumptions embedded in our thoughts. He draws from his NLP training and notes how much we leave out in everyday speech, deletions that AI can expose if used with care. This opens up new possibilities, refining prompts, deepening mental discernment, and nurturing more intentional reflective practices.
Kevin describes using AI as a conversation partner in philosophical exploration, once using it to reflect on the concept of infinity after watching a documentary. That dialogue prompted new insights into time, mortality, and presence, ideas that eventually shaped the way he works with clients.
Kevin approaches AI as a tool to uncover the often-overlooked patterns in our thinking,shaping a practice of reflection that enhances, rather than shortcuts, awareness. It becomes a mirror reflecting our blind spots,a tool for self-awareness rather than mere output. He doesn’t frame it as a shortcut, but as a slow, steady method for tuning into our own cognitive habits. What assumptions are hiding in your questions? Where are your words quietly distorting your thoughts? Can a well-crafted prompt become the start of a better inquiry?
These are the questions that animate Kevin’s use of AI. His experience, rooted in decades of coaching and facilitation, allows him to spot patterns others might miss. Kevin’s use of AI centers on cultivating sharper awareness,employing it as a reflective partner in deepening thought, not as a path to predetermined answers. For him, the value of AI lies in its ability to challenge, not confirm. In Kevin’s hands, AI becomes a collaborator in inquiry,a resource that nudges thinking forward by revealing what’s left unsaid, unexplored, or unquestioned.
Belief, ritual, and trust
Kevin’s approach to coaching and healing modalities is both curious and detached. Kevin doesn’t limit himself to a single doctrine or methodology. He moves fluidly among frameworks,energy healing, NLP, hypnotherapy,because they offer practical entry points that resonate with the people he works with. His aim is to meet individuals within their own belief systems, using methods that are meaningful to them, regardless of their universal validity.
“I don’t need to believe in it. I need to believe that you believe in it,and that it has power for you.”
To Kevin, these approaches function more like expressive forms,languages people speak as they navigate change. Rather than rigid instructions, these methods serve as adaptable tools,responding to the unique context and evolving needs of each person.
They’re practical methods that land differently depending on who’s using them and why. He sees techniques as rituals that help people orient themselves, anchor their intentions, and move through change. What gives a ritual its impact is how deeply it connects with the person using it,how well it aligns with their beliefs, emotions, and context. This view allows him to engage with spiritual, cognitive, and somatic tools without being bound by them.
He emphasizes that transformation often depends less on the tool itself and more on the quality of relationship,the trust, intention, and presence that frames its use. “If the intention is aligned, the rest is just ritual,” he says. And it’s in this space,where ritual meets relationship,that change becomes possible.
This attitude does more than allow for flexibility. It challenges the common binary of belief versus skepticism. Kevin invites a third path: trust without dogma, presence without performance. In an age increasingly drawn to rigid systems and identities, his way of working feels both uncommon and quietly subversive.
Coaching through dialogue, not performance
Kevin resists the idea of being an expert. He prefers being present, being curious, and holding space for people to navigate their own thinking with more focus and intention. His approach is not rooted in authority, but in attentive facilitation,responding in real time to what people bring into the room.
“Coaching, you can pretty much do coaching if you know these four words: it’s not about you.”
That phrase,it’s not about you,shapes Kevin’s approach to coaching. It reflects his preference for listening over leading and underscores a commitment to creating space for others to explore their own direction. Also, it guides his listening, shapes his presence, and defines the way he holds space for others to find their own direction.
It defines how Kevin listens, how he questions, and how he intervenes. He avoids centering himself,not because he lacks expertise, but because he trusts that real transformation comes when people feel heard, not managed.
His approach to selling centers on honest dialogue. In facilitation, he draws out insight through inquiry rather than applying fixed frameworks. His connections are grounded in presence, not performance. As one client told him, “You put yourself in uncomfortable situations just to stretch yourself and connect with others.”
Kevin’s method challenges the standard performance model of coaching,the one where confidence is often confused with control. His style is deliberately vulnerable, deliberately relational. Surface-level polish doesn’t drive Kevin’s work,authenticity does. And in that realness, something rare becomes possible: change that starts from the inside, not from external pressure.
Conversation creates clarity
How would your business change if you focused less on perfecting your message and more on sparking better conversations? Could growth emerge not from predictable funnels, but from an ongoing exchange shaped by meaning? And instead of viewing clarity as something to hand over, what if it emerged through shared inquiry,one thoughtful question at a time?
Kevin Watson’s work points in that direction. He doesn’t reduce complexity to a slogan,he meets it with presence. Through platforms like My Own Coach and Facilitators Cafe, he helps people see more of what’s possible without having to pretend they have all the answers. He trusts that the space between question and response is where the most honest kind of work happens.
Perhaps the challenge has less to do with strategy and more to do with showing up,being present, open, and responsive to what people actually need. More curious. and more grounded. That’s where trust starts. That’s how real insight starts to take shape.
If that sounds like the kind of clarity you’d like to build into your own work, let’s talk.
About the Author
Vlad writes about automation, operations, and the little tweaks that make a big difference in how businesses run. A former game designer turned founder, he now helps teams fix broken workflows and spot the revenue leaks hiding in plain sight.
About Serenichron
Helping businesses grow by simplifying strategy, streamlining systems, and making tech actually work for people. We bring clarity to chaos with practical tools, honest guidance, and just enough curiosity to question the default way of doing things.