Who is Chris Taylor?
Chris Taylor is a mindset coach and author based in New Zealand, specializing in personal, business, leadership, and team coaching. He emphasizes self-awareness, authenticity, and courageous living as foundational elements for personal and professional growth.
Personal Brand
Diverse Background: Originally trained as a chemical and environmental engineer, Chris transitioned into coaching after emigrating to New Zealand in 2003. His diverse career and life experiences inform his empathetic and practical coaching style.
Mindset-Centric Coaching: Chris identifies as a mindset coach, focusing on how individuals think and perceive their challenges. He employs a narrative style of inquiry, avoiding problem-centric discussions and instead fostering solutions and future-focused conversations.
Holistic Approach: His coaching integrates various tools and modalities, including team diagnostics and emotional intelligence assessments, to tailor strategies that address both personal and organizational needs.
Authenticity and Courage: Chris advocates for living courageously and staying true to one’s values. He believes in confronting fears and embracing challenges as pathways to transformation.
What are his core values?
1. Courageous Authenticity
Chris champions being real over being perfect. Whether in his coaching, book (Avoiding Propeller Blades), or personal story, he encourages clients to face their truth—flaws and all. He believes genuine transformation only happens when we confront our internal narratives with bravery and honesty.
“The real you is more powerful than the version you pretend to be.” – Chris Taylor
2. Self-Leadership
At the heart of his work is the belief that leading others starts with leading yourself. Chris emphasizes personal responsibility, inner dialogue mastery, and emotional intelligence. His coaching equips people to take control of their mindset, decisions, and behavior—even in the face of fear or uncertainty.
“It’s not the external circumstances that shape you, but the story you tell yourself about them.” – Chris Taylor
3. Growth Through Challenge
Chris doesn’t sugarcoat the process of growth. He sees challenge as a catalyst—not a barrier. His coaching encourages clients to embrace discomfort, reframe adversity, and view setbacks as necessary for deeper resilience and success.
“Avoiding the propeller blades means learning to fly through the storm, not around it.” – Chris Taylor
These values are not only what Chris teaches—they’re what he lives. They shape his unique coaching style: practical, empowering, and deeply human.
A quite unexpected author
Chris’s first book, Avoiding Propeller Blades – Self Leadership Strategies to Empower and Transform Your Life (Aviva Publishing New York, 2023), navigates true life stories connecting with themes of courage and empowerment in the face of challenges, rejection and family breakdown. Originally intended as a family memoir for his children, the book became a memoir with a message. See: https://avoidingpropellerblades.com
In 2025 he completed Eric’s Evolution. This book explores the theme of teenagers and smartphone addiction through the lens of Eric, a hapless fifteen year old boy in love with Mandy.
Through the keyhole..
Born in Newcastle upon-Tyne, North East England in 1970 to an architect father and social worker mother, Chris was schooled at an all boys school where he excelled at rugby and cricket, and being recalcitrant. Leaving school in 1988, he elected to study engineering, firstly in London and then in his home city. He worked in UK for Japanese and US based firms in the industrial water and wastewater sector until 2003 whereupon he emigrated to New Zealand.
A hallmark of Chris’s life is bold yet instinctive choices, from emigrating aged thirty three, to career transition in his early forties to the odd extreme physical challenges. For example in 2022, Everesting for over eleven hours straight on a stair climber raising funds for charity. The decade of his fifties sees more challenges and opportunities in learning guitar and improvised comedy.
Sport and movement has and is a large part of Chris’s life. From playing senior cricket for near thirty years, cricket coaching through to golf, hockey, snooker and latterly mountain biking. Chris believes in exercise to feed the brain and soul with the vitality of movement, acute today in a device and screen obsessed world.
Somewhat of a social altruist, he has dedicated time to community projects, charities and initiatives including working with YMCA Education, Graeme Dingle Foundation Project K, Age Concern and a tenure as General Manager for a men’s support charity.
Married with four daughters he supports his professional working partner and is grateful of the opportunity somewhat later in life to spend quality time with his young children who endearingly refer to him as the old man.
A social connector, Chris is typically the centre of social groups with friends, from organizing mountain bike rides and weekend adventures through to a dads group at his children’s school.
Growth through education is a lifeblood for Chris and in recent years he completed Te Whāinga o te Ao Tikanga (Te Kaupae 3) through Te Wānanga o Aotearoa; a Post Graduate Certificate in Counselling Psychology, PGCert(Couns), through University of Canterbury (2020/1). He is currently training in Team Coaching.
