Our Story

It was while on the road as a Marketing Manager for consumer brands such as Pizza Hut, Jammie Dodgers and Jacob’s Creek that, in 2005, Dee Clayton had a life-changing car accident in which she suffered significant injuries. Dee was keen to get something positive out of a negative situation, so she employed a life coach to help with her recovery and set her on the path to a more fulfilled future. This life coach used the Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) process, which fascinated Dee from the start.

Inspired by this experience, Dee founded Simply Amazing Training in 2007. Her goal was to help professionals like herself to overcome any blockers to success. But it wasn’t just about teaching them the practical skills they needed to increase their self-confidence, but crucially (and unlike most other trainers), working on their mindset too. When working with senior executives, Dee wanted to draw out their hidden skills and inner confidence, so they felt worthy of their roles and found it easy to speak up and be heard. Her aim was to bring out the very best in people. In the early days, she spent every spare moment learning to become a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, and later became a licensed Insights Discovery and Motivational Maps Practitioner.

Amazing and award-winning

In 2022, Dee won the most prestigious award of her career – National Business Women’s Awards 2022 “Overall Winner” and “Business Owner/s of the Year” and Best Business Women Awards 2022 “National Silver Winner in Best Businesswoman in Business Services.” These recognitions are valuable and proved that Dee continues to strive for excellence in her work and is committed to providing quality services to all of her clients.

All of the recognitions that Simply Amazing Training received over the past years (check out the trophy cabinet!) demonstrates the quality and effectiveness of our programmes as we also focus on our clients’ mindset and not just their skills.

Small but perfectly formed

Over the years the Simply Amazing team has grown, but Dee makes sure that they never outgrow the guiding principles that she started with – to bring out the best in people. There are now three training/coaching partners, plus a small army of people working behind the scenes in marketing and communications.

Simply Amazing trainers have worked with multi-sector companies and individuals across the UK and internationally, from Bournemouth and Bedfordshire to Brussels and Bulgaria. They have helped to improve the performance of key people at Netflix, RBS, Toyota and Volkswagen, to name but a few. (See some more of their clients here).

And we mustn’t forget the cutest member of the team, Abi. Abi is unrecognizable from the cowering rescue dog that arrived with Dee and her partner Leon in 2015. Now that she’s comfortable in a safe and loving home, it shows in her newfound confidence.

Taming your monkeys

When she left for university, Dee’s parents gave her some wooden monkeys similar to those she used to play with as a child – possibly to keep an eye on her! Inspired by these monkeys, Dee came up with her unique Speaking Monkeys (trademarked) method technique. She managed to condense years of NLP study into a simple but effective method whereby she could help clients to articulate and overcome their innermost fears of presenting. Speaking Monkeys are the negative, internal voices that put doubt in our mind about our presenting abilities when we speak to others. For example, in board meetings, pitch presentations, and all hands meetings. (You might be hearing voices, “You’re not god enough to do this job”, “You’re gonna get caught out.”) She has a 99% successful track record of helping clients overcome blockers like speaking monkeys.

Dee published her first book, Taming Your Public Speaking Monkeys in 2012, and High Performance Presentations in 2019.

Bringing out your best

No matter what training or coaching we do with our clients, our guiding principle is to bring out the best with the individuals and teams we work with. When we work on a one to one with executives and leaders, we help them to bring out their best by overcoming any blockers that get in their way. Sometimes these blockers are missing skills and knowledge but more often than not, these are mindsets or attitudes that the individual is largely unaware of so they start working with us.

Developing yourself is the best thing to attain. We often start with the individual rather than the team. Once we helped you to be great, then we can help with your teams roll out ways of working.

When you know you have a problem but you don’t know how to pin point – that’s when we talk about executive coaching. We can help with that.