Anita Newton
My sweet spot
Family, the outdoors, time with friends and laughing until my face hurts.
My publications
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Professional Doctorate (in progress), Cardiff Metropolitan University
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MSc dissertation (2025): "Exploring leaders' experiences of strengths-based leadership"
Anita is a Senior Performance Consultant and High-Performance Coach at Mindflick, and part of the leadership team. She designs and delivers leadership, team and individual development programmes for clients in corporate, education and sport settings. She also leads Mindflick's practitioner training and accreditation, preparing a worldwide network of practitioners to use the Mindflick profile in their own organisations.
She came to psychology through leadership. Anita spent nearly two decades leading teams in commercial settings, starting at 21 as a rollout branch manager for a telecoms brand, opening new stores across outer London. She went on to lead a team of more than 20 marketers as an Account Director at a Leeds advertising agency. She then became Head of Client Services at a field marketing agency, taking on an £11.2 million P&L and a struggling client relationship. There she introduced a shared leadership language across a 1,500-strong workforce, which helped rebuild trust and steady performance. She later set up her own private consultancy, helping customer-facing organisations build strengths-based cultures.
One pattern kept coming up. Strengths-based approaches worked, then got dropped as soon as leadership challenges grew. That problem now sits at the centre of her research. Anita holds an MSc in Psychology and is in the second year of a Professional Doctorate at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her study looks at how strengths-based leadership can be embedded and sustained under the conditions that now define contemporary work: overlapping change, transient and cross-functional teams, and the faster pace brought by technologies such as AI.
Experience
Anita's career spans business, consultancy, and leading Mindflick's community of coaches:
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Leads training and accreditation for Mindflick's worldwide network of practitioners
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Nearly two decades leading teams in commercial settings, from retail roll-outs to agency leadership
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Founded and ran a strengths-based coaching and consultancy practice