Meet your Living Profile.
A 20-minute conversation with Yan shows what you reach for first — and helps you reach further. A label freezes on the day you take it. A Living Profile changes as you do. You're a human, and no human is a type. Whether you're building a career, running your own practice, or leading a team.
20 minutes · No questionnaire · Yours to keep
Created by Simon Phillips, Founder of The Change Maker Group, international best-selling author and award-winning trainer. A Validation Study of Anyan is under way with a chartered psychologist.
The end of the label
For forty years, a whole human was handed back a label.
A four-letter code. A colour. It went in a drawer. Six months later: "oh, she's a red, that's just how they are" — and a tool built to open a conversation had become a way to close one. You were never asked again. Not when you changed roles. Not when you changed.
A Living Profile is the opposite. It asks again. It's true the moment you look at it, because it changes when you do. Reach for an energy you rarely use and it shows. Come back in six months and it has moved — because you have.
It's the difference between reading about a tree and watching one grow.
You can learn to recognise the energy a moment is asking for, and choose to connect differently. Any human can. No human is a type.
Illustrative — a Living Profile over eight months. Colour is now; grey is where it was; the dashed line is how far it has reached.
How a Living Profile grows
Range is taught two ways
From outside, by challenge — the situations that make you reach for what doesn't come naturally, until one day it does. From inside, by change — who you're becoming as you go. A career gives you both, eventually, at the pace of hard experience. Anyan works both at once, and doesn't make you wait for the hard years.
Four energies. All yours from the start.
A Living Profile for the person across the table
The one you reach for least is the key to the people you find hardest
A client, an interviewer, the colleague you can never quite read. You weren't born good or bad with people. You were born with all four energies of connection — and among them, the one you reach for least is the key to the people you find hardest.
Anyan shows you which one that is, and helps you reach for it. Between jobs, running your own practice, or building a client list from nothing — that's the range that opens doors.
Living Profiles for teams
One person extends. A team covers more ground.
As your reach widens, more of what work asks of you comes easily. That's what makes someone more employable.
Put a team together and every person who extends gives the whole more ground to cover. A team reaches further because its people did. An organisation improves because its people changed.
On the team page, each person keeps a line saying how they want to be reached today — and it changes as they do. Nobody has to guess.
Why I built it
Thirty years of reaching, then a better way to see it
After thirty years helping organisations change, I kept watching good people be handed a label and filed. I built Anyan so nobody has to be. A Living Profile asks again, moves when you move, and belongs to you.
— Simon Phillips, Founder
Why a Living Profile is different
Three Welsh words underneath it all
You'll never need these to use Anyan. Here's what they mean anyway.
Anian (AN-yan) — nature, temperament and power, in one word. Nature: what you're made of. Temperament: the shape that takes. Power: what you bring to the people around you. English needs three words for it. Welsh needs one. You were born with all four energies, and what differs from person to person is which one you reach for first. The ones you reach for less never went anywhere. They're still yours.
Cynefin (kuh-NEV-in) — the ground you choose to spend your time on. A hill farmer uses it for the patch of mountain a flock knows as its own: the paths they've worn, the ground they head back to. You've done the same across your four energies. Some ground you know without thinking. Some you've barely walked. Your profile is a picture of where you spend your time, and it moves as you go further.
Awen (AH-wen) — the breath between us. What appears between two people when a conversation is working, and never in either person alone. It's why Anyan asks you questions instead of handing you a form. It's also what a team has between it, which was never the sum of everyone's profiles.
Wherever you go next, the ground you've covered goes with you.
Meet your Living Profile.
Twenty minutes with Yan. The whole human, all four energies.
20 minutes · No questionnaire · Yours to keep