How Monkey Puzzle Training are Making a Difference in Business

Monkey Puzzle Training has been nominated in the NLP in Business category for the NLP Awards. The business was founded in 2007 by Karen Meager and John McLachan. The aim was to blend their extensive business experience in retail and financial services with a deep understanding of people and to help businesses maximise the skills and talents of their people and grow their businesses at the same time. John is a qualified Clinical Hypnotherapist and Karen is a UKCP registered Psychotherapist. Both are NLP Master Trainers and are actively involved in the NLP world.

Working with their clients Karen and John’s aim is to become a valuable part of their client’s support team and are respected for their integrity, the quality of the coaching and training they provide and long-term impact of their work. With their business backgrounds, it is no surprise they have always had a business element to their work and that has grown consistently since setting up the company. Their work is based on the belief that businesses that focus on supporting their people can be both healthy and commercially successful. Karen and John’s mission is to provide businesses with quality training, coaching and business strategy programmes that allow people to be themselves and to work effectively and efficiently whilst maintaining their own personality and mental health.

They also aim to bring about positive social change by supporting businesses to become healthier. Rather than doing this by providing direct mental health services, mental health is woven into every training and development programme they run.

Their first book Real Leaders for the Real World was an IBA Finalist in 2016 and nominated the CMI book of the year 2016. It is based on the principles of NLP and how to use them to develop successful and authentic leaders. It will be published in China in 2018.

Their second book Time Mastery; Banish Time Management Forever adapted NLP approaches to make them specific to managing time, reducing everyday stress levels in business and becoming more productive. Time Mastery was nominated for the CMI book of the year in 2017 and has been regularly in the Amazon top 10 for time management books.

Karen and John won two awards at the Mental Health Awards in 2017 in recognition of their contribution to mental health in the business world – ‘Best for Business-Focused Mental Health Services – UK’ and ‘Excellence Award for Business Training : Time Mastery’. In an interview about the award Karen said “The focus of our work is in businesses where the leaders are professional or technical experts who also require the skills to run their business and lead people. Examples include tech companies, financial services, architects, lawyers, accountants, marketing and also the creative industries. Our aim is to make personal and professional growth real, useful and practical through a blend of training, one to one work and business strategy events.” The article in full is here.

Karen & John are regular contributors to the business press. Examples of their articles can be found at this link. Karen has also been asked to judge at the UK Employee Experience Awards in March 2018.

Monkey Puzzle Training include Local Authorities, Manufacturers, Retailers, Insurance and Financial Services Companies and the NHS in their roster of clients. There is a list of some of their clients on this link.

The NLP Awards shortlists have been put together from nominations by an independent judging panel. The International NLP Conference takes place on Friday to Sunday 18th – 20th May at the Park Inn by Radisson at Heathrow, London.

The NLP Awards will be presented at a Gala Dinner on Saturday 19th May at the same location. More details of the categories and shortlisted nominees can be found here.