Claud is a multifaceted individual who has many roles including coaching and consulting.
He also founded a portfolio of businesses, perhaps the most well-known being Dream Nation – a personal development brand tailored for the 21st century.
A growing and successful company, Dream Nation was founded back in 2013 and is aimed at inspiring and coaching individuals to become practical dreamers.💫
It’s clear Claud knows how to grow a business and run it well. With years of experience and formal education in the field, Claud will be dropping some gems for readers in this interview.
After reading you'll:
Learn more about Claud's inspiring journey 💡
Learn more about Dream Nation method to taking control of your life
Learn why we could all do with a helping hand from a coach 💡
Learn how and why you should set intentional goals 💡
Who is Claud? 🤔
As an NHS board member for the Camden and Islington NHS Foundation Trust, various teams such as the executive team and chief medical officer report back to Claud who ensures they make sensible decisions and are held accountable for their actions.
Quite a serious role!
Claud is also a consultant for Birkbeck University where he runs the business incubator, helping graduates start and scale their businesses.
In the careers team, he plays a job similar to his coaching roles.
As well as this, he is an ambassador for the British Dyslexic Association to get the message out there about diversity and helping ensure individuals get the help and support they need.
Claud is now also a board member and non-executive director for Hexagon Housing based in South London, where he is involved with holding the executive team accountable! Claud is also responsible for helping these large organisations to create their long term and short term strategies!
With governance responsibility for more than 2,000 members of staff, 45,000 service users and customers, and with £180m in revenue and £1bn in assets, Claud is someone you want on your side! 🏆
Last but certainly not least, Claud is an entrepreneur. Perhaps most famously, he founded the personal development platform Dream Nation.
Dream Nation
Created to prevent human potential from being wasted, Dream Nation is aimed at coaching individuals to build upon their potential, by equipping and providing them with the tools needed to be their best in their professional or personal lives.
The approach the organisation takes to help users focuses on four key areas:
1️⃣ The first is emotional intelligence. 🧠
This is where the coach helps develop a stronger control or management over one’s own emotions. But also to be better able to understand and influence the emotions of others.
2️⃣ The next area is productivity. 📝
Here, the coaches go through strategies and time management methods to help individuals get closer to their goals. Through improving your productivity, your efficiency is increased, allowing you to reach your goals in a shorter timeframe than otherwise.
3️⃣ Financial literacy is the next area of development. 💸
This helps people make more informed and effective decisions with your financial assets and resources. This includes skills such as budgeting and investing.
4️⃣ The final area of development is physical health.
If you are able to be at your optimum physically, you are more able to increase your productivity in other parts of your life, such as work and hobbies!
Dream Nation follow this four-step approach by creating events and programmes to help people apply their personal development principles much more easily.
By focusing on making lessons culturally relevant, they are able to make lessons engaging and useful, giving individuals the tools to implement changes from their very first lesson!
Childhood
After finding that his twin sister was able to seamlessly progress through the education system while he was having problems with speaking clearly, reading and writing, Claud was diagnosed with dyslexia.
Despite the well-known disadvantages of dyslexia, Claud chose to focus on the advantages.
This gave him a unique perspective on life.
Through experimentation, Claud began to enjoy subjects like science.
Through giving him an outlet to express his creativity, Claud enjoyed telling stories and having an artistic eye.🖼
Basketball 🏀
Claud started out coaching basketball.
At school, Claud loved the sport and learned many lessons from the experience, which he carries with him to this day.
One experience which particularly impacted Claud was when his school team lost the county finals, and he didn't get to play at all.
The loss drove Claud to practise throughout that summer to end up being one of the better players on the team!
After that, the team didn’t lose another match for the next two years!🤯
Claud's earlier failures taught him the harder you work, the more control you have over your own life.
College🏫
It was during college that Claud was introduced to business.
After a knee injury Claud was told to not continue with basketball. However, still determined, Claud started his own basketball tournament!
At the time, Claud's sister was running her own business. Starting his own basketball tournament showed her what he was capable of, and she started mentoring him!
Claud says the most impactful thing his sister did was buy him Richard Branson’s autobiography, which showed him a world he hadn’t seen before. 📚
After attending university, and graduating, Claud opened a multi-media studio in London and developed a marketing and media agency.
His agency did well, landing the University of Loughborough as their biggest client.
Upon reading the biographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, Claude was inspired to think bigger about his life.
This is where Dream Nation was born.
And then, of course, the pandemic hit.
It was Claud's senior coach who encouraged him to get formal qualification and training.
After Claude started receiving formal training in coaching from the MOE Foundation, he noticed the way he was coaching improved significantly. 📈
The quality of the coaching he was giving improved massively and was much more helpful and effective.
Claud says not all platforms are built the same, but with the MOE Foundation, you had to complete coursework and complete an assessment.
This helped make the course more interactive and more useful to learn from.
Regular Patterns that Come up in Coaching
Claud describes two main categories of people he coaches – people who want to improve their personal brand or themselves, and entrepreneurs.
For entrepreneurs, a lot of the coaching they receive revolves around clarity.
This can come in many forms, including helping understand marketing strategy and finance models to help improve how they run their businesses more effectively.
They help with getting new customers, but the overall focus is on improving income by “seeing what impacts their bottom line”.
For these individuals, the best advice that can be given is to speak to customers directly.
It is so important to not just sit behind your screen and send emails or messages all day virtually. 💻
Instead, it is better to have a call or meeting with people to really find out what their needs are - "The most consistent thing I can say to entrepreneurs is they need to get up and talk to customers".
For others – the general advice given is very varied. But overall, it is important to remember that people are more similar than you think.
So, for people who come to improve their confidence, a solution is often to work out regularly and progress in their career.
Identify what the main problem is.
Once this has been highlighted, it is important to be very clear what you are struggling with and what you want to accomplish.
Outlining your goals like this will give you perspective and will better allow you to see the most suitable course of action to rectify it.
Not everyone can afford coaching, though. Financial constraints can have a significant impact on an individual’s ability to receive formal coaching to promote personal and career development. For these people, Claud says that there will be a book out there on that particular issue if you cannot afford coaching.
If you are clear and direct and there are resources out there that can help you with whatever you are struggling with something.
The enormous variety of resources out there can be overwhelming, what advice would you give?
There is such a thing as having too much choice when it comes to resources.
This can, naturally, be overwhelming when trying to locate the specific resources that are of the most value to you and your needs.
This is actually part of new technology Dream Nation is currently developing. Claud says that you should "Ask yourself the most pertinent questions." This is because "the clarity of the questions you ask will have such a huge impact on the clarity of the answers you find."
Being direct and specific in the answers you wish to find will help you narrow down the resources to the ones you need.
You should also take the time to write things down – this is because seeing things written down make it much easier to be direct in the approach you wish to take and get the answers you need.
If you speak to people around you, you can use different perspectives to find some of the answers you need.
In terms of simplifying things, do one thing at a time.
According to Claud, multitasking isn’t possible to do effectively - "Multitasking is one of the biggest myths that our generation has bought into".
Instead, it is better and more effective to find the biggest problem you are having and to go after that relentlessly until you develop a solution.
Claud also says, even if you cannot get a coach, try to get a mentor or someone who can give you time to expand your thinking and improve your clarity. This doesn’t have to be someone who you hire to help you, but it can be anyone who you find useful to speak to who helps you understand what you should do.
Being intentional and goal orientated in life and business
You have to be intentional about what's best for you. By being goal-orientated and less focussed on what other people are doing and what is happening elsewhere, you can prioritise yourself and what you need to do to improve yourself.
Ask yourself what matters most to you. And go after that.
And this also applies to things that won't just help the business or goal.
Ask yourself "Who is best for my soul?"
Who you let into your life and who you allow to have access to you will have an impact on who you are as a person.
Making a plan where you get the goals you need met first, and prioritising things in a list will give you focus so you can start with the things that are the most urgent.
What is Coaching and what is the nature of it?
Claud says that “those who have coaches will always outperform those who don't.”
There are coaches for every aspect of life, from business to career to finance.
Claud says he has a various coaches for different aspects of his life, which helps him improve the way he lives his life to maximise his potential. For him, every area he has a coach, that area of life has flourished. 🪴
This is because having a coach gives you the necessary accountability to follow through with any plans you have in store. But in addition to this, you also get so much experience and wisdom that would take normally take years to develop otherwise without a coach.
For those interested in becoming personal development coaches, Claud has said that he has never found anything more rewarding than coaching people and seeing development in individuals.
The progression you see with this profession is inspiring and humbling.
Overall…
With Dream Nation growing and developing constantly, Claud has done an amazing job of overseeing this organisation flourish!
He has given us plenty of wisdom so we can follow in his footsteps to be the best version of ourselves that we can be. 😆
Be sure to use the tips and advice from the interview to implement changes in your personal and professional life, and good luck with your future endeavours!