About
I’m Dean Coates, founder of Rock Pool and an certified life coach based in Bristol, working online with clients across the UK and internationally. I specialise in coaching creative professionals and founders who want to build sustainable, fulfilling careers without sacrificing their wellbeing.
My work focuses on helping creatives navigate the particular pressures of creative environments, where responsibility is high, expectations are complex, and the line between personal identity and professional role can easily blur.
My work has spanned creative enterprise and educational leadership: running my own business and chairing an arts charity. Each has offered a different perspective on what it means to lead thoughtfully while staying connected to creativity and purpose.
I understand the weight that comes with senior responsibility, decision fatigue, competing priorities, visibility, financial pressure, and the quiet expectation to always appear capable. I also recognise the cultural dynamics of creative organisations, where passion and purpose often sit alongside uncertainty, short term contracts and tight deadlines.
Through thoughtful, individualised coaching, I support creative professionals and founders to regain clarity, strengthen resilience, and design working lives that are both ambitious and sustainable. My approach is practical, reflective, and grounded in lived experience helping you lead with confidence while protecting the energy that enables you to do your best work. When I’m not coaching I spend as much time as possible in my ceramics studio, walking in the country and working out.
Find out more by getting in touch.
Why Rock Pool
I sometime get asked why I called my coaching business Rock Pool Coaching so here’s the answer. Rock pools are small worlds full of fascinating and diverse life. I’ve always been drawn to them as places to pause, watch, and observe. Sometimes they are calm and still; at other times they are shaped by turbulence and change, they are metaphors for how life can be. That sense of reflection, resilience, and possibility is what inspired the name Rock Pool Coaching.