Three factors shaped the direction which took Eva Najberg from her birth in Paris to her life in England as partner in Najberg Milne and expert executive coach. As a teenager in the ‘60s, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen and other great songsmiths of the era inspired her love of English. Then there was an early interest in theatre, acting and spirituality. Finally, marrying and becoming a young mother, Eva had today’s profound knowledge of psychology sparked by observing her son growing up, learning to speak and learning to learn.

Settling in the UK in 1979, Eva was able to sharpen her psychological insights into office dynamics, management style, workplace stress, motivation and performance at first hand working for a US stockbroker and a London adult education and IT company. But it was attending a personal development weekend at the Actor’s Institute in 1984 that brought everything into focus. Funded herself with part-time work including legal secretary, lab technician, handing out free magazines outside tube stations and selling her gastric juices, Eva took a degree course in psychology, graduating as a Bachelor of Science in 1988.  Eager to pursue the link between the mind and body that British academia was beginning to acknowledge as a fertile area for study, she was one of 11 pioneers taking the first ever Masters degree course in Health Psychology. Further training in cognitive-analytic therapy (CAT) advanced her solid understanding of not only stress and its management but other aspects of applied psychology such as facilitating reflection, working with thoughts and beliefs, and supporting behaviour change.

Though co-founding Najberg Milne in 1992 to launch her first stress management courses, for five years Eva’s professional life was focused as a psychology lecturer at the word-famous medical school attached to London’s St Bartholomew’s (Barts), the oldest hospital in Europe. She continues to work in medical education, teaching clinical communication to medical students, advancing experienced clinicians’ professional development, and teaching teachers in primary care, mostly GPs.This work at the cutting edge of the study of interpersonal communication, stress and related disciplines continues to inform and enrich her Najberg Milne courses on stress management, resilience, assertiveness, counselling and coaching.

Having trained as an executive coach at Ashridge, one of the world’s elite business schools with the rare distinction of triple accreditation (AACSB, EQUIS and AMBA), Eva is completely at home in her understanding of the modern workplace and its challenges. She brings both intellectual rigour and the soft skills of empathy, emotional intelligence and highly tuned communication to bear on the personnel, processes and problems of your business.

Developing people doesn’t simply mean enabling them to learn new behaviours, or to change behaviours that aren’t helpful. It means primarily helping them to challenge their assumptions, their beliefs, their attitudes. These are what usually holds them back, and holds the business back in the process. My job as coach and facilitator is to support people in making those psychological shifts that make the difference to the way they operate in the world.

Eva Najberg