Dr. Oliver Hayakawa

Before academia and coaching, I spent a significant part of my career working at the intersection of government, international business and UK–China relations. As Shanghai Chief Representative of the Liverpool–Shanghai Partnership, I led the organisation’s work in China across government, business, education and culture, and later served as Pavilion Director of the award-winning Liverpool Pavilion at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo.

I subsequently joined the British Consulate in Shanghai as a Trade & Investment Manager, building strategic partnerships across sectors including technology, healthcare and education, and served as a Lead Officer for the UK Government’s High Value Opportunities programme, working on multi-million-pound trade and investment opportunities and collaborative projects between the UK and China.

Those roles placed me repeatedly in environments where relationships, cultural interpretation, competing interests and the quality of communication carried real consequences.

After years of experiencing international relations largely through governments, institutions and diplomacy, a five-month overland journey along the Silk Road in 2015 offered me a very different perspective. Travelling from China, through Central Asia and finally through the Middle East, I encountered countries and communities much more from the ground up — through people, conversations and everyday experience. It deepened my curiosity about the relationship between the large forces we study in politics and the way those forces are actually lived.

That curiosity eventually took me more deeply into research and higher education.

I went on to build an academic career in international relations — university teaching, research and programme leadership within Sino-British and international higher education. My PhD in Middle East Politics focused on the Israel–Palestine conflict and involved extensive periods of on-the-ground fieldwork in Palestine over a number of years.

Working closely with people whose lives, histories and perspectives were shaped by conflict reinforced something that has stayed with me: understanding another person’s world requires more than analysing it from a distance. It requires attention to context and to the competing narratives through which people make sense of their own lives.

I am currently a Lecturer in International Relations, teaching across areas including diplomacy, conflict and security, mediation and development.

Universities taught me something I still carry into every room: the most consequential moments in education rarely happen in lectures. They happen in conversations — between supervisor and researcher, educator and student, leader and colleague. And yet the people holding those conversations are rarely trained for them. That observation eventually became the centre of my work.

Long before I became a coach, much of my work was already concerned with how people understand one another: across cultures, institutions, political differences and competing interests. Coaching gave me another way of working with many of the same questions — at the level of the individual, the conversation and the choices people make.

Alongside my academic work I trained professionally as a coach — a Diploma in Transformational Coaching with Animas, and later ICF Professional Certified Coach (PCC) accreditation. Over time my focus shifted increasingly toward coaching education: helping universities, leaders and professionals develop the skills of listening, questioning and creating the conditions in which other people can think.

Today I serve as Head of Coaching Skills across a network of Sino-British universities, designing and delivering programmes in coaching skills, self-leadership and coaching-informed practice. Alongside the higher education work, I coach individuals one-to-one, and I founded The Man in the Mirror — a men’s coaching programme and retreat — and created Cornerstone, a one-to-one coaching and mentorship programme for men.