So what makes John special? First he understands human nature: “booze, coffee and excess are all part of corporate life, so you have to look at the individual physically, chemically and emotionally. It is not useful to blame people who are exhausted, stressed or simply have no understanding of what healthy behaviour looks like. I try to give people strategies to improve their health that are not always about exercise routines. For example if somebody over-uses their fight or flight nervous system and have poor sleep patterns, it is important to equip them with new routines that will steady them and increase sleep before they can start getting fit.”

After completing a sporting degree at Loughborough, John followed his natural inclination to play professional rugby and joined Racing Club in Paris. He returned to London in 1995 to work  with sports stars who wanted to get back to fitness after back surgery, as well as executives wanting to change their lifestyle and fitness levels.

John keeps adding to his knowledge of fitness and balance: he is a member of the CHEK institute, a body of elite sports coaches from California as well as a teacher of Body Control Pilates. He is also a certified Golf Biomechanic – which means that he helps with both golf-specific fitness and the healing of related injuries.

Katie looks after the whole team and is also the first point of contact for our clients. In addition she drives a number of internal projects, from looking after our IT infrastructure to finance, marketing and PR. In other words she basically runs the business… She brings nine years of experience dealing with customers, office systems, procurement, and negotiating partnerships.

She is a native Londoner and holds a BA in Archaeology from UCL. Archaeology has remained one of her passions and she can often be found pottering around the British Museum or, equipped with her customary trowel and brush, volunteering at one of many of London’s excavation sites…

Having started out in a multinational, and working globally, she spent many years of her professional life in communication – managing worldwide Communications for a multinational, then moving into the media agency world to become a director of several agencies and a London College of Arts tutor. Latterly, she operated as an executive director (on an all male board) for a communications agency

Helen came to coaching later. She now coaches those at the top of their profession and senior women.

Helen brings her strong business background, linked with her passion for gender diversity, to her own highly practical version of coaching individuals. Having been a women manager in a multinational from the late 1980s and an executive director of an all-male board, she brings a wealth of experience to her coaching of senior women.

She co-wrote Coaching Women to Lead, and has been instrumental in the development of the White Water Women Career Planning Programme.

Helen is married with two daughters – one at Art School and the other finishing her secondary education.

Brought up in Paris, he gained his degrees in Canada: first Ottawa (marketing research and information systems), followed by an MBA at McGill University (strategy and policy). He is also a Master Practitioner of Neuro Linguistic Programming.

He spent five years in electronics-to-music group Thorn EMI and earned his spurs as a strategy consultant with Boston-based boutique the MAC Group. He joined Coopers & Lybrand Consulting/PwC (now IBM) in 1994 and rapidly rose from consultant to Director in charge of e-business strategy for Europe Middle East and Africa.

He co-founded White Water in 2002, initially focusing on professional services clients. His consulting work focuses on corporate strategy as well as robust business case making for Gender Diversity and Talent Management. He also works one-to-one in a strategy advisory role with senior leaders.

His current research focuses on the Leadership Cliff, or how to attract and develop new leaders in the next 10 years. He also tutors on executive education programmes, including Oxford University’s Strategic Leadership Programme. François also teaches at the London School of Economics and McGill University.

She gained her degrees at Strathclyde and Glasgow Universities and proceeded to set up and run new psychology services for the National Health Service before joining the commercial world in 1981. Her first venture was a firm specialising in transforming performance through better self and people management. Her work initially focused on stress, handling difficult people, communications, etc. She also developed a new approach to coach senior management in behaving like coaches themselves at companies like Polaroid, HP, Unilever and Reuters.

Shortly after co-founding the White Water Group, she noticed that most of her clients were men – simply because there were so few women in senior corporate roles. She has been working to redress the balance ever since…

She is a major contributor of psychological insight to radio, newspapers, magazines and television. Averil has written five books on executive coaching and related psychology. She is also the joint editor of The Essential Coaching Series for academic publisher Routledge. She was voted one of the UK’s Top 10 coaches by the Independent on Sunday.