Executive Leadership & Team Coach

I work with leaders and teams who want to lead and work together with greater clarity, intention and impact.

My philosophy

Pause.

Gain insight.

Lead intentionally.

This is the invitation at the heart of every conversation I have.

The power of the pause

I believe in the power of the pause.

Not the kind where you stop and do nothing. The kind where you step out of the noise of leadership, really step out, and give yourself the space to think.

That’s where the most important work happens. Not in the next meeting. Not in the next decision. In the moment when you finally see the patterns shaping everything.

That’s what I create space for. That’s what coaching makes possible.

Leadership Coaching

Leadership is demanding and often lonely. The expectations are high, the decisions are complex, and the space to think clearly is rare.

I work with leaders who want to stop reacting and start leading with intention. People who want to understand the patterns in their own behaviour, get honest about what’s working and what isn’t, and build the kind of leadership that creates real impact.

I help leaders grow their awareness, expand their choices and lead with greater clarity.

For Coaching

A team is more than the sum of its people. When it works well, something remarkable happens, different perspectives combine, trust runs deep, and the team becomes genuinely greater than any individual within it, or any circumstance, event or challenge it faces.

But most teams aren’t quite there. Unspoken tensions, misaligned priorities, meetings that drain rather than energise, these are the things that quietly limit what a team can do.

I help teams face reality, strengthen relationships, and create the conditions for high performance.

What coaching makes possible

For leaders.

The shifts I see most often in the leaders I work with.

From

Operating cautiously in high stakes

Leading with grounded confidence and steady presence

From

Hesitating to delegate or address conflict

Engaging with care, clarity and respectful candour

From

Driving performance through pressure

Mobilising people through inclusion and shared ownership

From

Operating in the detail

Leading with strategic perspective and systemic awareness

From

Reacting under pressure

Responding with composure and intentionality

What coaching makes possible

For teams.

The shifts I see most often in the teams I work with.

From

Avoiding difficult conversations

Addressing issues directly and constructively

From

Competing priorities and silos

Acting with shared direction and collective accountability

From

Operating in functional silos

Acting as one leadership team in service of the whole

From

Invisible dynamics

Working with agreed norms and holding each other accountable

From

Struggling to execute strategy

Clear direction, disciplined co-ordinated action

In their words

She is the key that unlocks potential you had no idea was sitting within you.

Rebecca Sebelebele

Chief Mine Planner, Gold Fields

At the outset of my coaching journey, I was admittedly sceptical. After completing six sessions with Vandena, my perspective shifted significantly. Her thoughtful and non-judgmental approach created a safe space for reflection and helped me approach challenges with clarity and confidence.

Shaakira Dalvie

Finance Manager, Old Mutual

A little about me

A little about me.

I’ve spent most of my professional life in rooms where the stakes were high and the pressure was real.

Before I became a coach, I spent more than fifteen years in senior leadership roles in financial services. I started out as a chemical engineer, studied for an MBA at UCT’s Graduate School of Business, moved into management consulting, and eventually into leadership. So when a leader tells me about the complexity they’re navigating, the competing demands, the politics, the loneliness of the decisions – I don’t just understand it intellectually. I’ve lived it.

That lived experience is part of what I bring to my coaching. But so is the rigorous professional training that followed, in leadership and team coaching, in assessments like the Leadership Circle Profile, and in practices like Thinking Environments and Mental Fitness.

I coach because I believe that when leaders grow and teams strengthen, the benefits ripple outward through entire organisations, through culture, through performance, through the people those organisations serve. That matters to me. Deeply.

You may know me as Be More Coaching.

If you’ve worked with me before, or found your way here through a referral to ‘Be More Coaching Services’ – welcome. You’re in the right place.

I’ve always operated under the name Be More Coaching Services. The practice continues. I’m simply stepping forward under my own name now, because the work has always been personal, and I am the instrument through which the work is offered.

Coaching you to be more.

Pause. · Gain Insight. · Lead Intentionally.