This is the first post on the Colmcille Coaching blog. It feels important to start by being honest about a few things.
I am writing this from Argyll, on the west coast of Scotland, where I live and just before I travel down to London for the NLP International Conference taking place this weekend on 16th and 17th May 2026.
I am a professional coach. I am also, alongside the coaching practice, in full-time employment elsewhere — work I cannot name here in detail, but which is my stability anchor and which pays the bills while I build this. That is a deliberate position, not an accidental one.
Colmcille Coaching exists. The website you are reading is real. The Calendly link works, the discovery sessions are genuine, the practice is open. But the practice is being built carefully and deliberately, by someone who has thought about pacing.
I want to tell you what to expect.
Posts will appear twice a month, roughly. Sometimes more often, sometimes less. I am writing in the evenings and at weekends, and I have decided not to chase a daily or weekly cadence I cannot honestly sustain. Two posts a month is the rhythm I can hold while doing the work properly — meaning reading widely, drafting carefully, and not publishing anything I would be embarrassed to stand behind a year from now.
Discovery sessions are bookable through Calendly, with slots that match my actual availability — evenings, some weekends, occasional daytime slots when my schedule permits. This is not because I am hiding from work. It is because the coaching I do is best when I arrive fully present, and arriving fully present requires not running on empty. The slots are real and they are honest. If none of them suit you, write to me anyway. I will try to find a time that works.
The blog will draw on three streams of material. Coaching ideas and methodology — the things I am learning, testing, working with clients on, and reflecting on. Stories from a life that has not, on balance, taken a straight line — three Caminos, eighteen years of community-building in the Gaelic language, a number of crossroads that did not look like crossroads at the time. And occasional reflections rooted in Celtic wisdom and the landscape I now live in. The three streams are not as separate as they sound. The Camino taught me something I now use in coaching. The Gaelic activism taught me something else. The Argyll hills teach me something almost every morning. Coaching is, among other things, the work of finding the through-line in someone else’s apparently scattered life — and I cannot do that for clients if I am not willing to do it for my own.
I will not pretend to know more than I do. Coaching has a long history of writers who arrive on the page as if they have already worked everything out. I have not. I will share what I have learned and what I am still learning. Where I am confident, I will be direct. Where I am uncertain, I will say so. This is a practice, not a finished product.
There is a Scottish Gaelic proverb that has sat at the top of this website’s home page since the day it went live: Cha d’ dhùin dorus nach d’fhosgail dorus. No door closes without opening another door.
I have lived a version of this many times. The university degree that didn’t finish, the project that didn’t get funded, the door that didn’t open the first time I knocked. Each time, what came after was not what I would have planned — but it was, in retrospect, what I needed. The Camino taught me the same lesson in physical form. You walk a road you did not entirely choose, you cannot see what is around the next bend, and you arrive somewhere you could not have anticipated when you set out.
I am on a journey just like you are.
One day, somewhere down the road, I will stand at my own crossroads — the one where the stability anchor either gets cut loose deliberately or the practice grows quietly into something that can carry the weight on its own. I don’t know when that will be. I am not in a rush. The point of building carefully is to arrive at the crossroads as the version of yourself who can actually make the decision well, rather than the version forced into a decision by circumstance.
In the meantime, I will write here, I will coach clients, and I will keep walking.
If you are at your own crossroads — large or small, public or quiet — I am genuinely glad you have found your way to this page. Come back when the next post is up. Or, if the work is more pressing than that, the discovery sessions are right there.
Is obair làtha toiseachadh...ach ‘s e obair bheatha crìochnachadh!
A beginning is a good day’s work…but finishing is a life’s work
Jamie Wallace is a professional coach and the founder of Colmcille Coaching, based in Argyll. He writes about transitions, the active form of resilience, and what Celtic wisdom and modern coaching practice can teach each other.