Empowering Your Journey
Professional Coaching and Mentoring That Meets You Where You Are
Headacity combines evidence-based behaviour change coaching models with creative health approaches to support your wellbeing, leadership, and career development – without judgement, without prescription, with genuine partnership.
Why Happiness Isn’t Optional
At Headacity, we believe happiness and wellbeing aren’t luxuries—they’re leadership strategies. When you feel grounded, joyful, and psychologically safe, you lead better, think more clearly, and create healthier cultures around you.
This isn’t wishful thinking—it’s neuroscience.
Leading to Happiness integrates evidence-based behaviour change with creative health approaches to help you strengthen your inner world so you can transform the outer one.
Your Partner In Transformation
Meet Our Founder - Barry Taylor
Barry Taylor knows transformation. At 20, he was homeless – seven months navigating streets and homeless shelters after an abusive childhood, just two GCSEs to his name and nowhere to turn. By 27, he bootstrapped university access qualifications, achieved a First Class Honours degree and completed a Postgraduate Certificate in Education at the University of Cambridge.
After completing his PGCE, his education career saw one of the fastest progressions to Advanced Skills Teacher and Lead Practitioner in the UK (just three years, Her Majesty’s Inspectors assessed, the minimum time allowable). He went on become a Head of Department, Faculty Lead, Internal Assessor, External Verifier, Initial Teacher Trainer, NQT Mentor, INSET Planner and Training Facilitator, County-wide Behaviour Strategist and Educational Coach & Consultant, providing professional development mentoring to staff at under-performing schools.
Then… epic burnout.
In the period of reflection that followed, both from his own past, his experience as an educator, and the staff and students he mentored, he realised that burnout wasn’t entirely workload related. Burnout is far more complex. He analysed the overwhelm experienced in his past, the strategies he had developed and the issues he was now facing, and began to understand the real factors affecting work-life and home-life wellbeing, the challenges it brought, and the antidotes and strategies to manage it.
The research that emerged from that experience revealed something powerful: the survival strategies that had carried him through adversity were actually backed by neuroscience, positive psychology, and behaviour-change science. Wisdom that is rarely shared and much misunderstood. He recognised the need for a different kind of support – one that integrates wellbeing with performance, compassion with rigour, science with creativity.
Nine years developing an ecosystem of wellbeing support followed – one that Barry continues to develop – working with those in roles that require them to carry the darkest days others are experiencing. He has worked with multiple NHS Trusts facilitating staff training. He has also been a keynote speaker at care conferences and opened the NHS Virtual Wellbeing Festival during the pandemic, alongside Dr Michael Mosely, GMTVs Dr Amir Khan, and Olympic gold medalist Nicola Adams OBE. He has worked with suicide support charities, hospices teams, Macmillan Cancer teams, Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS), child social care first-response teams, and has designed creative health and wellbeing training for businesses, schools and community groups.
Barry is also the Founder/CEO of Laugh Therapy, and a founder member of Craic Health’s Comedy-on-Prescription team with Dr Simon Opher MP (Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Care).
Barry has never lost sight of the fact that it was one to one support and personalised coaching and mentoring that first helped him – provided when at his lowest point, with no judgement. This led to him training as a Personalised Care Institute Health & Wellbeing Coach (NHS-aligned Practitioner) and pursuing an ILM (Masters Level 7) Executive & Senior Leaders Coaching and Mentoring qualification to add to his growing skillset.
Today, Barry brings together his polemic lived experience, his extensive teaching expertise, his research as a Gelotologist and accredited Laughter Therapist, and his clinical-grade and executive level coaching into one space. Through Headacity, he has developed his own neuroscience-backed, creative health methodology, integrating the transformational health benefits of laughter, the science behind happiness, and the power of play – into unique, evidence-based behaviour-change coaching and mentoring that’s engaging and joyful.
Barry still has one unwavering focus: the potential of the individual in front of him – meeting them where they currently are – no judgement, just compassion, realism, and a lived understanding that extraordinary, sustainable change is possible when you have the right support.
Our Methodology
The Leading to Happiness Approach
At Headacity, we believe that wellbeing and performance are not opposites — they are inseparable. When people feel grounded, joyful, and psychologically safe, they lead better, think more clearly, and create healthier cultures around them. That’s why our methodology begins with one simple principle:
Happiness and wellbeing isn’t a luxury. It’s a leadership strategy.
A Person-Centred, Happiness-First Philosophy
We don’t use a one-size-fits-all model. Every individual carries a different story, different pressures, and different strengths. Our coaching and mentoring meet you exactly where you are — with compassion, realism, and a deep respect for your lived experience.
Our approach is built on the understanding that:
- Happiness is not superficial; it is a measurable, trainable state with profound effects on behaviour, resilience, and decision-making.
- When individuals cultivate their own wellbeing, it naturally influences the environments and cultures they lead.
- Sustainable change happens when science, creativity, and humanity work together.
This is the foundation of Leading to Happiness — a methodology that helps you strengthen your inner world so you can transform the outer one.
Evidence-Based, Neuroscience-Backed Practice
Leading to Happiness integrates the most effective elements of:
- NHS-aligned Health & Wellbeing Coaching (Personalised Care Institute Accredited Practitioner)
- ILM Level 7 Executive & Senior Leaders Coaching & Mentoring
- Positive psychology and behaviour-change science
- MBSR (Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction)
- Neuro-architecture and neuro-aesthetics (how environments shape wellbeing and behaviour)
- Research-backed creative health approaches, including the science of laughter, play and applied improvisation
- Cross-cultural coaching and wellbeing approaches from around the world
These are not used as rigid techniques, but as a flexible toolkit — adapted to the individual, the context, and the goals they bring.
Lived Experience Meets Professional Mastery
Headacity’s methodology was developed by our founder, Barry Taylor, whose journey from homelessness to Cambridge-trained educator, NHS-aligned coach, and executive mentor has shaped a uniquely empathetic and practical approach.
Barry’s lived experience of adversity, burnout, recovery, and reinvention gives him a rare insight into:
- How people cope under extreme pressure
- Why burnout is rarely just “workload”
- What truly helps people change
- How joy, humour, and creativity can unlock resilience
- Why compassion and rigour must coexist
This lived wisdom is combined with decades of professional experience across education, healthcare, frontline services, and organisational development — creating the Leading To Happiness methodology that is both deeply human and highly effective.
The Creative Health Advantage
A defining feature of Leading to Happiness is the integration of creative health — the use of creativity, play, and laughter as evidence-based tools for wellbeing and behaviour change.
This includes:
- Gelotology (the science of laughter)
- Accredited Laughter Therapy
- Play-based emotional literacy
- Creative problem-solving and reflective practices
These elements are not gimmicks. They are grounded in neuroscience and used strategically to:
- Reduce stress
- Increase cognitive flexibility
- Strengthen social connection
- Improve emotional regulation
- Enhance leadership presence
When people reconnect with joy, they reconnect with possibility.
Behaviour Shapes Culture
The “Leading” in Leading to Happiness is intentional.
When individuals strengthen their own wellbeing, it creates a ripple effect:
- Their communication becomes clearer
- Their decision-making becomes calmer
- Their relationships become healthier
- Their teams feel safer
- Their environments become more positive and productive
This is how personal happiness becomes cultural wellbeing.
Leadership is not just a role — it’s a behaviour. And behaviour is contagious.
A Flexible, Adaptive Framework
Leading to Happiness is not a rigid programme. It is an adaptable, person-centred framework that can be applied to:
- One-to-one coaching
- Mentoring
- Leadership development
- Team wellbeing
- Organisational culture change
- Creative health interventions
Every journey is co-created with the individual or organisation, ensuring that the support is relevant, realistic, and sustainable.
The Outcome: Sustainable, Human-Centred Change
People who work with Headacity often describe the experience as:
- Grounding
- Insightful
- Transformational
- Surprisingly joyful
Our aim is simple:
To help you build a life, a career, and a culture that feels good to live in — not just one that looks good from the outside.
Leading to Happiness is more than a methodology.
It’s a way of approaching life, work, and leadership that honours the whole human being.
What To Expect From Coaching and Mentoring With Headacity
Clarity Without Overwhelm
We help you identify what matters most and create manageable next steps.
Strategies That Actually Work
Evidence-based techniques tailored to your situation, not generic advice.
Support That Feels Different
No judgement. Just partnership. Meeting you where you currently are..
Accountability That Empowers
We hold space for your goals while respecting your autonomy.
Sustainable Transformation
Change that lasts because it's built on your strengths, values, and capacity for joy.
A Sense of Possibility
Rediscover hope, resilience, and belief that transformation doesn't have to feel heavy.
Part of a Wider Wellbeing Ecosystem
Headacity is one of several specialist brands, each focused on a different aspect of wellbeing:
Let's Talk
Book a free 30-minute discovery call and let’s explore how coaching or mentoring could support you.
We’ll discuss your goals, answer any questions, and determine if this approach feels like the right fit.
No pressure. No obligation. Just an honest conversation about what’s possible.