You know the feeling.
A board presentation in two weeks, and you’re not ready.
A team that’s talented, but not pulling in the same direction.
Everyone in the room can feel something is wrong, and nobody will say it out loud.
I’ve spent most of my life watching senior leaders live inside that feeling, and it’s what I built my life’s work around.
It started with a teacher. Our biology teacher had just been fired, we didn’t care, we found the subject tedious anyway. Then our new teacher walked in, tall, strong, instant presence. Miss Knight threw her battered leather bag across the room, looked at us with fierce eyes, and said… “Let’s learn!”. Same subject. Same curriculum. Same textbook. The only difference was her.
It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.
I saw that gap everywhere after that, at university, then in corporate life: the emptiness in the words people used, the dullness of the meetings, the ritual of presentations nobody remembered.
I see it over and over again. A leader, about to open a masterclass I was going to deliver. Beforehand, they were alive, expressive, excited about the day. Then they stepped up to the lectern with their notes, and it was like watching a personality change happen in real time. They became formal, tight, and the music went out of their voice. I watched the energy in the room collapse, and I wanted to grab them afterwards and say: please, just be yourself.
That’s the gap I built a method to close: diagnose, design, deliver. Understand the audience before a word is written. Build a message that holds attention. Deliver it like it matters, because it does.
Everyone is using AI to communicate now, and it still doesn’t solve this. AI can write the scripts. AI can package the content cleanly, build the stories and the metaphors. But the experience is still delivered by humans, and that’s the part nobody can outsource.
I spent fifteen years developing this before it became a business. My co-founder, Erica Bagshaw, pointed out that our clients already had a name for it, they called it The Colin James Method. I didn’t even know it had a brand value. But that’s what we called it.
Fourteen years on, that’s grown into a cohort of facilitators working across the world. Close to a million people have come through this work in some form.
The methodology has grown into something of its own, beyond me, beyond any one person.
That’s why we are changing our name. No longer The Colin James Method. Collectively, we are CJM.
Position has never made anyone a leader. Followership does, people choosing to get behind you, to trust you, to want what you’re building.
We help senior leaders say what they mean, land what they say, and lead in a way people remember.
Titles no longer intimidate me.
Most people—including leaders—are doing the very best they can with the knowledge and experience they currently have.
We’re all simply trying to create value.
CJM: Creating leaders others follow.
If you recognised yourself at the start of this, that board presentation, that team pulling in different directions, that’s exactly who we built it for.
