About

Who is Paul Roebuck?

I pay attention to behaviour for a living.

For over thirty years my work has turned on one question: why do people do what they do, and what gets in the way of them doing it differently? I listen to what people say, and hear what they don't.

Three chapters, one question

I started as an engineering apprentice. I became one of the UK's earliest SAP consultants, implementing systems across four continents, then Sales and Marketing Director of a listed company. In every one of those rooms — factory floor, project office, boardroom — the machinery was never the problem.

People were the work. So I retrained, properly: Person-Centred, Psychodynamic, Psychosynthesis, NLP, Inner-Child Therapy, Hypnotherapy, Timeline Therapy. I've been in psychotherapy practice for over a decade.

The consulting room

I work with trauma, grief and loss, anger, psychosomatic reactions, genealogical gaps and identity, and with couples. I coach executives and teams.

Three methods in my practice are my own: Russian Doll Therapy, a psychosynthesis approach to the selves we carry inside the self; the 12-Step Cycle of Grief, published with a counsellor support pack and positioned against the established models; and the NGE–FOF shame continuum, mapping the ground between not-good-enough and fear of failure.

Grief has evolved into the centre of the practice — and grief is not only about death. It follows every ending: a role, a relationship, a version of yourself.

My job is to help people name it, feel it, and integrate it.

Lived, not just learned

in 2017 I was diagnosed with mouth cancer. Half my tongue was removed and rebuilt from my wrist. I had to learn to speak again — a therapist's instrument, taken apart and reassembled. I've represented The Mouth Cancer Foundation as an Ambassador and an NHS end-of-life volunteer, and I've lectured new doctors on the sensitivities of terminal diagnosis.

When I sit with someone facing loss, I'm not working from theory. What matters becomes clearer, what doesn’t becomes obvious.

The gap

I've spent the last 3.5 years paying the same attention to AI behaviour that I've spent thirty years paying to human behaviour.

The result is Mind the Gap: Hidden in Plain Sight Between AI Behaviour and Human Behaviour — and the Ostracon, the complete forensic record of its making, kept open.

The book names five AI failure modes — SHaDS™: Smoothing, Hallucination, Affectation, Drift, Sycophancy — and maps the space between how AI behaves and how we do.

Beyond the room

In-TEO — digital legacy planning; a structured last message, so the people you love are left words, not just documents.

Photography — liminal street portraiture, and remembrance photography at funerals: no poses, no flash, presence and permission.

Writing — essays and papers at the blog.

Paul Roebuck PGCEE, FETC (A.Dip)
Psychotherapist | Executive Coach | Author of Mind the Gap | The Intentional Photographer

📍 Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire, UK. Available worldwide.

Learn more about me on Linked in

Contact me — if this matters, for you or someone you care about, get in touch.