Steve's story
BOUNDLESS: Success Is a Mind Game Evolved
Late 1990s-2002 The Early Years
My work with BOUNDLESS is the culmination of a journey that began in the late 1990s during my Master’s in Change Agent Facilitation at the University of Surrey. It was later, while consulting at Senn Delaney Leadership, that I first saw how the Three Principles shape company culture and our moment to moment lives [1]
When an unsuccessful merger-related redundancy ended that dream job in 2001, yet surprisingly, I only felt grateful and appreciation, I chose to research the 3P for my dissertation. Over 18 months, I travelled to the USA to meet and learn from Sydney Banks, his ground-breaking early practitioners, and communities transformed by this understanding. During this time, I had my first life-changing insights during a 3-day 1-1 coaching intensive, with Dr. G. Pransky & Assoc. in La Connor, WA. I saw and understood clearly how my feelings had been running my life, rather than their real role as guide to the quality of my thinking.
Back in the UK, I started coaching from my insights and a clearer state of mind and ran MSc research workshops for redundant employees and saw remarkable results. This was the foundation for my subsequent individual coaching and group – team workshops in corporate and SME clients, and with sportspeople.
The latter focus evolved from a large SME client asking if I would run my ‘Clear State of Mind‘ workshop for a group of their clients, followed by a round of golf. This was a big success and sparked the beginning of what was to become my core brand, Success Is a Mind Game (SIAMG).
2002–2008: Building SIAMG Through Client Work
From 2002 onwards, I worked with leaders, managers, and teams across the UK, Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia. This was the era when SIAMG took root.
- Corporate and Organisational Clients: I was invited into companies facing restructuring, redundancy, and performance challenges. Workshops helped leaders and managers step back from stress, access clarity, and make better decisions. In numerous cases, this led to measurable commercial outcomes – improved cohesion, reduced conflict, identification of savings, and beating earning targets.
- Sports and Performance Coaching: Athletes and coaches discovered how to perform at their best under pressure. The focus was not on techniques, but on returning to a clear state of mind. This shift often translates into peak performance in high‑stakes environments.
- Leadership Development: Senior executives learned to operate from their calmest, most grounded selves. The impact was visible in their teams: greater trust, resilience, and creativity. Many also reported sleeping better, worrying less, and making decisions with more confidence.
- Workshops for Redundant Employees: Building on my dissertation research, I ran programmes for individuals who had lost jobs in the Agricultural‑Chemical sector. Postworkshop evaluations showed significant improvements in confidence, adaptability, and readiness to re‑enter the workforce.
This period demonstrated to me and my clients that the Three Principles were not just a nice idea but a practical foundation for real‑world change. The results – personal, professional, and commercial — became the basis for my first book, also called Success Is a Mind Game, published in 2009.
2008–2012: The Crash and Reset
Then came the 2008 financial crash. By 2012, the work that had sustained me was gone. I found myself in a charity telephony centre, making renewal calls just to cover living expenses. It was humbling, and it stripped life back to basics.
2012–2020: New Paths Across Asia
Just before Christmas 2012, a job ad appeared in a free London paper. I thought, “No one hires a man over 50 for this”. But I applied anyway. Three weeks later, I was in, and by spring 2013, I was in Dubai. Four months later, the office closed. Singapore was offered, I said yes and I was the only person retained. Money came, but so did the reality of an abusive, self-centered owner. I walked away.
SIAMG wouldn’t take root in Singapore. But friendships did. A wellness business welcomed my training. A finance entrepreneur I met asked me to represent him. I realised I needed to understand the money world better and agreed; for him, it was simply because I could connect with people easily. This partnership and my on-going curiosity carried me to Hong Kong, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Macau, Philippines and Thialand.
2021–2024: Foundation for BOUNDLESS
Then, a two‑week trip to Laos became permanent when COVID-19 cancelled my flight. I stayed.
In 2023, coming out of COVID, an early morning, out of the blue, insight woke me: “I’ve got to get back to my old self”. Daily walks in the gardens became more than fitness. They opened a flood of deeper experiences of presence and in life, plus more insights into the Three Principles. Not just the single breakthrough that had carried me through the early years, but a continual, lived wave of insights, creativity and clarity. Poetry, articles, and reflections poured out, many now shared on my LinkedIn profile.
My first post from this deeper understanding came in 2024, alongside a Mekong River sunset photo I had taken:
“Profound Wisdom is a natural gift we all possess.
A gift that is beyond our intellect, knowledge and experience.
We will likely have had some experiences of it occurring to us unexpectedly.
The key is to learn its true nature and learn how to access its many forms,
notice it and be guided by it in all areas of our life.
Discover the source of transformational insights, experiences and results.”
That creative flow didn’t just produce posts — it seeded new ventures.
2025-present: SharLin Leadership
In early 2025, I met a friend of a friend at a networking meeting, as co-conspirators discreetly ‘hiding’ behind a ballroom support column, both eating very tasty but hard-to-eat mini burgers. We became friends, and Lone, being curious, started enquiring about the 3P. This extended into informal explorations and coaching from the 3P perspective.
This period is what she later shared about her months of explorations:
Lone (herself a certified coach and consultant) comes from the aid and development agency world and personally experienced the dramatic and harsh changes that this sector underwent from the beginning of 2025.
One day in May 2025, I was struck by the insight that there was a unique and blindingly obvious opportunity to draw on the online transformational coaching I was already developing. In synergy with Lone’s coaching drawing on approaches from and understanding of that very context, we would be able to help so many individuals in this world who are acutely suffering and needing to make major life decisions.
I realized in May 2025 that by combining the online transformational coaching programme I was working on with Lone’s expertise and coaching background this would allow us to help many people in need of direction. At that time, this group was already in the tens of thousands, but subsequently it would ultimately leave hundreds of thousands of employees and consultants globally jobless.
Later, the name PivotiN emerged in the same ‘out of the blue’ way with the word being a play on the need to pivot or pivoting. With PivotiN as the name for an online coaching programme for this group that we could design and deliver. This programme was successfully created, marketed and delivered between October 2025 and February 2026.
During this programme, a follow-on and standalone programme and name of ThriviN for individuals and teams, also occurred to me. This will start in September 2026. In this same period, Lone also developed her own innovative and complimentary “6C Framework“, GROUNDED, based on the six aspects of Relevance, Coherence, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Impact and Sustainability.
Then in March 2026, BOUNDLESS also emerged.
The above are all recent examples of how this kind of deeper, inexhaustible and innovative wisdom and ideas surface and are available in us all. They are always fresh and relevant with ideas and solutions to the place, time, situation and challenges an individual or teams has, or is at hand in a wider field one is engaged with or aware of.
BOUNDLESS is not a rebrand.
It is the evolution of SIAMG — the same lineage, now deeper, truer, lived. Success Is a Mind Game Evolved is both a bridge and a declaration: I’ve gone further and deeper, and I coach from that place now.
Lone's story
GROUNDING: Consulting and Coaching in Synergy
1980s-1997 The Beginning
Thinking back to where my journey started in the 1980s, there were always two tracks running in parallel: On the one hand the legal/development expert that became the foundation for Lindholt Consult from which my knowledge of the 6C Framework elements[i]; and on the other hand the self-development one that would express itself under Lindholt Coaching and, ultimately, in how I would apply the framework to assist individuals, organisations, teams and business evolve and thrive – i.e., GROUNDED.
Second week into my 3rd year of law school, I walked into the auditorium, looked around – and left again, only to return four years later.
During those gap years, I worked, volunteered and experienced the flourishing Danish and international New Age and self-development environment. A certification in deep tissue body massage and a leadership role in alternative development NGO life, opened my eyes further to the world – inner and outer.
When I did return to university to finish my law degree, it coincided with the first international human rights course at the Faculty, and for the first time I had a sense that this would be my direction – as was indeed to be the case, after a PhD in African human rights law, and having my two daughters all within the span of five years.
1997-2013: The Danish Institute for Human Rights
In 1997 I joined the Danish Institute for Human Rights (DIHR) as a senior analyst and team leader in the international department. We developed and implemented, with local partners, a large portfolio of support programmes in Africa, the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Asia. Here I really learned, hand-on, the ins and outs of “project technology”, as well as connecting authentically with dedicated individuals to support their efforts. Also, research, analysis and concept development fuelled my creative and structured side.
These were exciting years, a lot of travelling, always on demand at home and on the job, experiencing both the thrill and the challenge of working in such a “driven” environment.
Also, as a team leader of equally committed and enthusiastic colleagues, I had to grow leadership skills, really from a very limited “taught” foundation. We did great work, supported civil society and public institutions in the human rights field all around the world – especially in Africa and Asia – but, looking back, I can see how much I didn’t understand about how to lead others. In fact, few of us did, as the development sector in organisations everywhere seemed to largely operate on a cocktail of commitment and creative chaos.
Not surprising, around 2008, I crashed with burn-out from stress. This meant that I had to step back, reassess my priorities, and that meant re-connecting with the self-development process that I had largely left behind in my busy life. I returned to my job with increased clarity about my own priorities and values, hammered out on a Vietnam beach. They appeared as “self-dignity”, “simplicity”, “creativity” and “gratitude”, later to be joined by “generosity”, – and these continue to serve me well even today.
By 2013, the organizational life of DIHR began to seem repetitive, and I took the opportunity for a short stint at the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Appreciating the development effort from this angle, that of the funder and donor, broadened my view on the necessity of quality assurance in programming. It was at this point that my understanding of the value of the OECD DAC criteria really started to deepen.
However, the timing was not right, as my private life was also in turbulence.
2013-2020 From employee to CEO
As a result, by the end of 2013 and for the first time in my career, I took the leap from the “safety” of being a government employee and, for the first time, being my own boss. Very different, in every aspect!
Lindholt Consult was born, and I was offering my project skills to formulations, evaluations, as well as process facilitation.
During the coming years the business gradually consolidated, and at the same time my need for a more personal growth process led me to certify, in the coming years, as a life, team and stress coach with EmpowerMind and Bjarne Toftegaard.
Looking back, this was really the time when the two “tracks”, the mainstream consulting and the more explorative coaching aspects of my practice started to move closer to one another, but still conceptually and, most importantly, in my mind, as two very different directions.
And then COVID-19 struck, the world closed… and the only solution was to shift to online working. However, at the same time I wondered what would happen, if we would ever be able to travel again… and how this would affect work opportunities. Little did I know what was to come!
At the beginning of 2020 I had won a small contract to do a programme review in Laos with Luxembourg Aid & Development (LuxDev). Contract signed, mission ticket bought – but as travel became impossible, it was done remotely. Then they invited me to apply for the position to come and run the programme – I thought about it for about 2 minutes, but “what is the worst that can happen?”
So, in February 2021 I simply packed two suitcases and moved to Laos.
2021-2024 Luxembourg and Laos
The following four years were to that I put everything I had learned in my career(s) to use. The programme designer and “implementor” had a busy time, and I enjoyed building relations with local partners, including navigating cultural and linguistic barriers. Being part of a collegial and organizational context again was also refreshing.
Maybe more important, with what I knew at this point in my life, I also became a much more constructive, clear and competent team leader than I had been at DIHR, bringing my coaching skills to daily office life.
In addition, I also embarked on an online Diploma in “Modern Journalism” (New Your University and Rolling Stone Magazine), which will enable an exciting new direction going forward, as I tell the stories harvested from my work.
2025-present: SharLin Leadership
By the end of 2024 my contract expired, and it felt to some extent liberating to return to the freedom of independent consulting. The question was more where? It would have been a natural step to move back to Denmark, closer to friends and family – but something held me back, a clear and persuasive inner voice told me to “Stay in Laos!”.
Initially it looked easy enough to pick up my consultancy work, now with the added benefit of South-East Asia context knowledge in the human rights and justice fields. However, with the abrupt withdrawal of American funding for development, our sector would change irrevocably. Assignments vanished while competition exploded – more than 100.000 of us, agency employees and consultants, facing sudden redundancy and increased competition.
In January, Steve and I met, immediately connecting and later seeing that we could create something amazing together. As I learned from his coaching, sharing and example, my own thinking got calmer and clearer.
This personal development “quantum leap” I gained undoubtedly influenced also my professional reflection as a development professional. As a result, I had a sudden insight that, as useful as the OECD DAC framework was for evaluation, retrospective, analysis, there might be a potential to apply it in a forward-looking manner – and, not simply for project design, but as a broader strategic design tool. From this thought, it was just a small step to then think that this may be useful also beyond the development sector – applicable to the coaching of individuals, organisations and teams, and even corporate business.
Steve immediately saw the huge potential and encouraged this approach, and it became the foundation for “my track” of our joint PivotiN programme. He clearly acknowledges this:
“One of Lone’s many gifts is for clearly seeing a complete flow, structure and sequence of a document, book, or project plan even from initial discussions and early drafts. She has in this way been immensely helpful to me many times, including through the formulation of our online coaching programme, PiviotiN, and in my articulation of BOUNDLESS. It is no doubt from the same rigor and valuable capacities, including ability for innovative thinking, that her “6C Framework” emerged and developed. I personally see how well it can provide a grounding and complimentary roadmap to my own BOUNDLESS coaching.” – Steve Sharpley.
So, our journey continues, as we each develop our directions, as well as in the co-creation of e.g., ThriviN (late 2026). We are enriched by each other’s perspectives and input, fulfilling the promise that brought originally us together as a strong creative and business partnership.
GROUNDING – “Make it real, make it matter!” – is both and neither Lindholt Consult and Lindholt Coaching. Instead, it has come to represent a synergy between my full scope of knowledge, skills and experience. I come “full circle”, and it allows me to be the best I can be and do to make a difference in this world.
[i] The “6C Framework” is adapted from the Organisation for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) evaluation framework, covering the six aspects of Relevance, Coherence, Effectiveness, Efficiency, Impact and Sustainability,