See GoalPOSTS™ in action and read personal change journeys.
Whatever brought you here, someone has been similarly challenged. These are their stories.
Keith built GoalPOSTS™ in 2005 to help other people move through change. For fifteen years it worked consistently in professional settings, teams, leaders, organisations navigating transitions. He didn’t anticipate using it to help himself heal.
Through 2018 and into early 2019, circumstances Keith hadn’t planned for spiralled. He ended up in A&E and then as an outpatient at a mental health recovery unit. Some of what he experienced wasn’t sufficient for his recovery, so he did what he knew how to do: he worked his own framework.
Months later, talking with a psychologist colleague, he understood what had happened. He had moved himself from surviving, through recovering, to living, using the same structure he’d been applying for others for a decade and a half.
His colleague told him to write it down. He did. That paper, “GoalPOSTS Coaching Model: Alignment with the Philosophy and Principles of the Mental Health Recovery Journey”, was shared with NHS mental health colleagues, resulting in a series of coproduction workshops with people on their own recovery journeys. These conversations confirmed something GoalPOSTS™ had always implied but never stated plainly: when you’re facing genuine difficulty, making sense of your story isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s the enabler for understanding how to stop, how to move, and in a direction which makes personal sense.
What Keith didn’t realise until afterwards was that he had run himself through every stage of the framework without naming it. He had assessed his Position honestly not the position he wished he was in, but the one he was actually in. He had used Survey to stop, observe, and take stock before acting. He had identified Options rather than assuming there was only one path through. And through it all, he had been rewriting his Story moving from a narrative of crisis toward one of deliberate recovery. The framework didn’t rescue him. He did. But the framework gave the process its shape.
Keith’s paper is available on request via the Contact Us page.
Maria was a postgraduate student at Liverpool University, a working mother of two, and a part-time accountant. She wasn't failing. She was overextended and knew that if something didn't shift, the thing that gave way would be the thing she most wanted to protect.
When she mapped where she actually was, her personal time 3/10 and health 4/10 painted an uncomfortable picture. It was also the first honest account she'd given herself of her situation. That honesty was more useful than any amount of motivation.
She asked herself what she was actually trying to protect: evenings with her two young children, Amy and Adrian, her accounting job, and grades that reflected the work she was doing. Once those were named and fixed, everything else became a question of what could move without touching them.
She found more room than she expected. Perfectionism was costing more time than it was earning marks. Her existing Excel skills could build a timetable she'd actually use. The library crèche gave her hours she hadn't known existed.
Sixty-minute deep-work blocks before the school run. Ten minutes every Sunday to note what had triggered her and what she'd got right. Financial automation utilising her accounting skill set that removed one category of mental load entirely.
Consistent marks above 65%. Two protected family evenings each week. Health and personal time scores both rising. The story she now talks about: "Mum writes early, learns fast, and is free for bedtime stories." She wrote that. It's accurate. It holds.
GoalPOSTS™ gave Maria's process its structure. Survey came first mapping where she actually was, not where she thought she should be. That honest picture of Position made it possible to see what was genuinely fixed and what could move. From there, Options opened up: not a single solution, but several realistic paths that didn't require her to sacrifice what mattered most. The Tasks she chose were small and specific, each one generating new information about what worked, and the story she wrote for herself wasn't a motivational affirmation it was a deliberate reframing of her identity. This is exactly what GoalPOSTS™ uses Story to do.
Twenty-five years. NHS and public sector programmes worth hundreds of millions. A track record Jacob had built carefully and over a long time. Then his consultancy downsized and he was out.
He knew what he was worth. The difficulty is that the job market doesn’t always agree quickly and mortgage payments don’t pause while you wait. Jacob didn’t adopt the scatter-gun approach, he got precise. A permanent project management role, £70k minimum, within 45 minutes of home, with room to mentor. Not a broad search. A defined target, with a date attached: 31 October 2025.
He noticed the thought that kept appearing on morning walks, “too old”, and named it for what it was: a story he’d started telling himself without deciding to. He replaced it with a different one: “unique experience…that’s not a consolation; it’s my positioning statement” he recounted in a conversation with Keith. The difference between the two is visible in how you write a CV and how you sit in a room.
One-page CV, built around the programmes that mattered. Ten network contacts every Wednesday. Three LinkedIn posts a week. One targeted application daily minimum and not the scatter-gun.
Re-employed faster than the market average. Family confidence maintained throughout. A personal health score that moved upward as purpose returned which is not incidental. The story he went into that process with: “A seasoned, proven PM redeploying expertise to companies that value both delivery and diversity.” He wrote it before the outcome confirmed it. That’s how it works.
Jacob’s use of GoalPOSTS™ was most visible in two places. First, in how he established Position: rather than reacting to redundancy emotionally which would have been understandable. He took an honest account of what he had, what was under pressure, and what remained strong. That grounding made everything else more purposeful. Second, in how he used Story as an active tool. The “too old” narrative wasn’t dismissed it was examined, named, and deliberately replaced with one that was both truer and more useful. In GoalPOSTS™, Story isn’t background. It’s the thread that holds the process together and Jacob’s outcome reflected that directly.
Clinical team. Senior administrative team. A patient records system that had to go live on a fixed date. A shared history of friction that had settled into assumption: we know what they prioritise, and it isn’t what we prioritise.
When both teams mapped their pressures using the same framework, something neither had expected appeared: almost every stressor scored similarly across both groups. The one exception was stakeholder management, the hardest thing for both of them. That single shared difficulty became the first real common ground they’d had.
Three go-live options were worked through together: immediate, phased by department, phased by patient type. Each was scored against risk, resource, and recovery time. The third approach came out on top and not because anyone imposed it, but because both teams could see their own expertise reflected in how it worked. Admin controlled the rollout schedule. Clinicians managed a contained patient group. Neither was sidelined.
A joint value statement on every agenda. Daily 12-minute bridge calls. Clinical and admin leads paired on every workstream. Colleagues shadowing each other, not as an exercise, but to understand the actual decisions the other person faced every day.
On time. On budget. Cross-team trust measurably improved. A governance blueprint that has outlasted the project.
“We started as two teams who didn’t speak the same language. Clinicians focused on patients in front of them; admin focused on systems that held everything together. Neither fully understood what the other was up against. By the end, we’d built something together, not just a system, but a way of working. When things went awry on go-live morning, nobody pointed fingers. We fixed it, together, in under an hour. That’s the bit we’re most proud of.”
The GoalPOSTS™ framework was applied at team level here, not individual level and it held. Survey gave both teams the same map of their situation for the first time, which is what surfaced the shared pain point around stakeholder management. That shared Position created the conditions for genuine Options work: the three go-live scenarios weren’t generated by one team and imposed on the other they were developed together, scored against shared criteria. The Tasks that followed: bridge calls, paired leads, shadow days, were small, specific, and iterative, each one generating new information about what worked, and the joint value statement was Story at an organisational level: a shared narrative that both groups could stand behind and that held the collaboration together when pressure increased.
A person rebuilding control, one small block at a time. A professional who refused to let redundancy write the next chapter. A builder who had to use his own tools under real pressure. Two groups who couldn’t move until they saw each other’s position clearly.
In each case the shift began the same way: an honest account of where they actually were. Not where they’d been. Not where they wanted to be. Where they were, right now.
The structure behind that shift, what each part of it does, and why it works is on the next page:
These stories reflect what research consistently confirms: when people connect their past, present, and future into a coherent narrative, they cope better with change, perform more effectively, and sustain progress over time: