Matthew
Gilsenan
30 Years of Intercultural Navigation
Strategy and
Presence
My work is grounded in the idea that the most meaningful growth in a leader's life goes beyond adding new skills, to expanding the depth of perspective you bring as a leader to your most difficult challenges.
Relational communication is more than a soft skill. It is the root of every outcome that matters — in organizations, in partnerships, in the conversations we've been avoiding. We work together at the root level.
After 8,000 hours of one-on-one coaching work, I've come to understand we need to consider the whole nervous system: mind, body, purpose, beliefs. Whether the Prepared Presence model, the Whole Leader approach, or a custom coaching package tailored to your needs, the work we do prepares you as a whole person.
“The capacities leaders need for their most difficult conversations are within us — they just need to be accessible under pressure.”
Prepared Presence — a contained four-session coaching engagement for senior leaders preparing for a single high-stakes conversation.
Learn about Prepared Presence →The Whole Leader — a six-month coaching package that moves leaders from disconnect or overwhelm to impactful presence.
Learn about The Whole Leader →A brief introduction
to the work
Where to find
the work
Twenty years of
one conversation at a time
Twenty years ago, the late Jim Patterson — one of the formative voices of CTI and the Co-Active coaching model — was coaching me to clarify my life purpose. What emerged was a simple statement, but I have used it to guide me ever since: to help people better understand one another.
In the two decades since, what I have come to understand is that the path to understanding others continuously passes through the terrain of understanding ourselves. That insight is the foundation of my work.
My coaching and leadership journey has been shaped by living and working across cultures: adapting to new countries, navigating the re-orientation and growth that comes with that, and developing a deep grounding in intercultural understanding. For many years I have worked with executives making the transition to global roles, helping them read not just different professional contexts but different modes of human expression. That intercultural foundation greatly informs the Prepared Presence work — the capacity to hold genuine curiosity about another person's world is fundamental to high-stakes conversations.
Before coaching, I spent nearly twenty years in construction — running a design/build general contracting firm in New Jersey, which served, through referral, a largely international client base. That work taught me early that managing the human experience of a project matters as much as the technical execution. The quality of communication on a job site is the difference between success and failure, regardless of the technical outcome.
I hold a PCC credential with the International Coaching Federation and have accumulated over 8,000 hours of one-on-one client work. My approach draws on contextual awareness, somatic intelligence, nonviolent communication, and the structural communication frameworks of the Harvard Negotiation Project. Outside of coaching, I am active in leadership for Unitarian Universalism in Europe — an engagement that keeps me close to the work of building and sustaining community across differences, which is ultimately what all of this is about.
“Between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space lies our freedom and our power to choose our response.”
— Viktor Frankl
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