I know this territory from the inside.
For more than 20 years, I worked in marketing, strategy, websites and communication. The usual mixture of ideas, deadlines, client calls, analytics dashboards and “quick tweaks” that quietly consume an afternoon.
I was good at it. I still am.
But I never felt entirely at home in cultures where growth was always good, more was usually better and a person’s value could become tangled up with how useful or productive they appeared to be.
It’s easy to become fluent in that world. You learn the language, build the role and create an identity that helps you earn, belong and keep life moving.
The capable one. The creative one. The reliable one.
An identity can serve you well for years. Then the life built around it continues to function, but something in you has stopped agreeing.
For me, an ayahuasca ceremony became a catalyst.
It didn’t hand me a perfect answer or tell me to abandon the life I had built. It made the distance between a life that worked on paper and one that felt more authentic much harder to ignore.
The change didn’t happen overnight. Real change rarely does.
It unfolded alongside a meditation practice stretching back 30 years, as well as fasting, cold water, movement, sound, nature and other spiritual practices. Each offered a different way to notice what gets buried beneath habit, responsibility and the noise of everyday life.
Over time, coaching began to feel less like a dramatic career change and more like an honest continuation of what I had already been moving towards: helping people recognise what no longer fits and find their own way into what comes next.
Not by escaping ordinary life, but by living it more truthfully.
I’m still a husband, a dad and a working person in Brighton. There are bills, school runs, deadlines, dinner to make and the occasional existential wobble between emails.
The deeper questions don’t happen somewhere beyond real life. They happen right in the middle of it.
I haven’t rejected marketing. It’s simply no longer the centre of my work.
Marketing taught me to listen closely, notice patterns and understand how language shapes what people see. It also taught me how easily the story presented on the outside can drift away from what’s happening underneath.
Businesses do this. People do too.
We learn to perform identities that once helped us succeed, stay safe or feel accepted. The difficulty comes when the performance continues long after it has stopped feeling true.
The skills I developed still come with me: listening, language, pattern recognition, strategy and the ability to notice when the stated problem may not be the real one.
My attention has shifted from helping brands sound more human to helping people feel less trapped inside roles they may have outgrown.
I’m drawn to transpersonal coaching because it makes room for more of the person.
Not only goals, habits and performance, but identity, body awareness, imagination, creativity, meaning, relationships and inner experience.
It can also make space for spiritual or non-ordinary experiences without exaggerating them, dismissing them or treating them as automatic sources of truth.
But depth still needs to come back to earth.
The conversation. The boundary. The decision. The rest. The next honest step.
I’m not there to tell you who you should become or claim authority over your life. My role is to create a grounded space in which you can hear yourself more clearly, question inherited assumptions and decide what deserves to change.
Sometimes the work is reflective. Sometimes it’s practical. Often it’s both.
I’ve spent more than 25 years DJing, producing music and exploring how sound changes attention, energy and our sense of connection.
That isn’t a colourful side note to the coaching. It’s part of how I understand people.
Long before I trained as a coach, music showed me that change doesn’t happen through words alone. A shift in rhythm, atmosphere or attention can alter what becomes available to us.
I’m interested in how sound can support meditation, reflection and integration. It informs the binaural beats, downloads and supporting material around my work.
I don’t present sound as a cure or shortcut. I see it as another doorway: a way of creating enough inner space for something quieter to be noticed.
I’m training in transpersonal coaching psychology through Alef Trust and working towards accreditation with IACTM.
That training gives a professional frame to work I had already been moving towards for years. It brings together coaching practice, transpersonal psychology, ethics, presence, self-awareness and grounded integration.
My personal experience of ayahuasca, psychedelics and plant medicine informs how I listen, but it doesn’t make me the authority on someone else’s experience.
When my work touches psychedelics, the focus is preparation and integration. The psychedelic experience itself sits outside my service.
This is coaching, not therapy. It doesn’t diagnose or treat mental health conditions and isn’t a replacement for counselling, psychotherapy, trauma treatment, psychiatric care, medical support or crisis services.
Those boundaries aren’t defensive small print. They’re part of creating a space that is both open and responsibly held.
Transpersonal coaching is now at the centre of my work. It’s the broad route for people navigating identity change, burnout, uncertainty, creativity, meaning or a wider life transition.
Explore transpersonal coaching
I also offer psychedelic preparation + integration coaching for people preparing for or making sense of an independently arranged psychedelic, plant medicine or non-ordinary experience.
Explore psychedelic integration coaching
I’m developing psychedelic.house as a growing resource for grounded thinking around psychedelic experience and integration.
I continue to undertake selected marketing projects where there’s a strong fit, particularly around positioning, websites, content and digital strategy.
Visit Steve Linney Marketing
These strands may look different from the outside. To me, they’re connected by the same question — “How do we create the conditions for something more honest to emerge?”
