Our Team
You will not find this combination of experience in a single consulting firm.
A former UN humanitarian leader, a high performance specialist and a Defence capability coach. Between them, our founders have operated at the intersection of human performance, organisational systems and extreme-pressure environments across defence, elite sport, humanitarian crises and complex leadership.
Robert Gaylard
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Robert has spent over two decades in extremely complex, high pressure environments where high performance can be the difference between life and death, and where high workloads and pressure frequently lead to exhaustion and burnout. Robert lived and worked in Kenya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Indonesia and Israel/Palestine, and undertook emergency humanitarian surge missions to Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan and Turkey.
He has coached senior leaders within the United Nations, Australian Defence, and a number of Civil Service agencies. His coaching is grounded in Developmental, Solutions Focused Approaches, and uses the latest empirically supported tools and techniques from high level sports performance and positive psychology.
Robert is also a keen sportsman, an internationally and nationally ranked Padel player, who works with Australia's elite Padel Players on Mindset and Peak Performance issues.
Charlotte Matheson
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Forged in psychology, and physiology and strength and conditioning, Charlotte designs and delivers strategies that build physical capability, mental resilience, and team performance.
She brings over a decade of experience in high-performance sport science, working with Olympic-level athletes and elite programs across New Zealand, the USA, and Australia, alongside mission-critical roles in policing and defence.
Her approach integrates biometric data with deep qualitative insight. The principle is simple: data informs performance, but internal systems determine it.
Charlotte specialises in developing tactical professionals in high-pressure environments. Through coaching, education, and performance systems, she builds the capacity to perform when it matters, sustain output over time, and remain effective in complex, demanding conditions.
Lauren Watts
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Lauren Watts has spent four years embedded in Defence performance and capability pipelines, coaching officers and emerging leaders through high-stakes training environments where the margin for error is real and the pressure is sustained. She integrates evidence-based psychology and performance science not as concepts, but as practical tools that work under operational conditions.
Before co-founding Performance Paradox, she spent over a decade as an HR specialist across corporate and industrial sectors, developing an unusually clear view of the gap between what organisations demand of their people and what those people actually need to sustain it. This is the space where Lauren works.
She brings both worlds into every engagement: the science of human performance and the hard-won understanding of how organisations function.