About One Life Coaching

One Life Coaching is built on a simple belief: you have one life, and you spend almost a third of it working – so how you use that time matters!

We’re Dr Neil McLatchie and Alison May, co-founders of One Life Coaching and a husband-and-wife team, combining academic insight with real-world leadership experience. Before starting the business, Neil was an academic and Experimental Psychologist, teaching and researching at a top 10 UK university, and Alison spent over a decade in leadership roles within the NHS, leading complex programmes and developing leaders in practice.

We came to coaching from different worlds, but with a shared interest in the same question:
How do people do meaningful work, perform well, and actually enjoy it?

What We Do

Leadership Coaching and Development
We work with leaders and teams across healthcare, academia and growing organisations through workshops, programmes and one-to-one coaching. Our focus is on helping people think clearly, communicate effectively and lead with confidence in complex environments. We also have particular experience supporting neurodivergent professionals, helping them build insight, structure and sustainable ways of performing at their best.

CMI Level 5 Coaching Training
As an registered CMI Centre, we deliver the Level 5 Certificate in Professional Coaching Practice for managers, L&D professionals and internal coaches. Our programmes are delivered live online in small cohorts and focus on real coaching practice, observed sessions and supervision, not just coursework.

Our Approach

Our work combines academic rigour with real-world leadership experience. We don’t just share ideas, we help people apply them.

That means supporting clients to:
– build effective structures and habits
– strengthen self-awareness and emotional regulation
– navigate complexity and competing demands
– follow through on what matters most

At its core, our approach is simple:
Better conversations lead to better leadership and better outcomes.

One Life

The name reflects how we see the work. Your career matters – but so do your wellbeing, your enjoyment, and your sense of fulfilment and our role is to help you achieve meaningful goals and feel good doing it.

If you’re exploring leadership development or coaching training, we’d be happy to talk.