Angela Cox is an executive coach, founder of Purseda 360, and host of the Leader Unmasked podcast. After more than a decade running lean transformation at Lloyds Banking Group, change management at Barclays, and strategy for a half-billion-pound business at Compass Group, she moved into coaching full-time — bringing the operational rigor of root-cause analysis into a profession she felt was still running on 1980s models. In 2021, after her husband Martin's brain injury, she built Purseda 360 into a formal academy training the next generation of coaches. She's pursuing a doctorate in coaching at Cambridge / King's College London, and runs a national coaching conference whose proceeds fund the Blue Light Bursary — coaching training for NHS, police, and ambulance service leavers.

In this conversation, Angela walks us through why operational change leaders make different coaches, the four masks people wear at work (perfectionist, people pleaser, persecutor of self, persecutor of others), the "silent middle" of high-performing employees quietly burning out, why recording sessions destroys the unmasking process, why coaching ROI may be the wrong question (and what the right one is), and how to know when wearing the mask is a conscious choice versus autopilot.

Find Angela

• LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/angelacoxpaseda360/
• Purseda 360 — https://purseda360.com

Builders & Doers is produced by Horizon Search.

0:00 Intro

0:36 From Lloyds, Barclays, and Compass to executive coaching

2:32 Bringing root-cause analysis from transformation into the coaching room

3:52 Her husband Martin's brain injury and the legacy that built Purseda 360

6:32 What's actually wrong with 1980s coaching models

8:29 The pretending pandemic — and why "open culture" rarely is

9:30 The four masks: perfectionist, people pleaser, persecutor of self, persecutor of others

11:51 The silent middle — high performers quietly eroding12:50 How to surface masking inside an organization13:40 Why she built an academy instead of just scaling her practice

15:41 Cambridge, King's College, and the credentialing problem in coaching

17:20 Why recording client sessions undermines the work

18:02 Integrating psychology and neuroscience without crossing into therapy

19:35 The "swimming swan" she saw years before she had words for it

20:49 Hiring a coach for your leadership team — what to look for, what to avoid

23:10 Coaching ROI is the wrong question — what's the cost of NOT doing it?

24:36 The Blue Light Bursary — coaching for NHS, police, and ambulance leavers

26:13 The question she asks every podcast guest (that she'd ask herself)

27:48 Congruence as a daily reflection practice

28:40 Conscious masking vs autopilot masking — why the choice matters

30:42 The cost of wearing the mask in your own life

31:16 Where to find Angela