“Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast, or a bridge player.” – Bill Gates
Starting from January 2026, I am accepting requests for consulting assignments (water policy research, market analysis, policy evaluations, trainings & seminars, workshops), public speaking, academic mentoring and professional coaching. Coaching is crucial for development of early career researchers/professionals and more senior professionals. I have benefitted from coaching and mentoring myself tremendously, and have been very lucky to have world-class scholars, counsellors and therapists who showed me the way.
I have also seen how very bright and hardworking friends, colleagues and sometimes students do not reach their potential because they choose to walk the career paths alone without seeking advice and mentorship. Why not to ask for help, for a critical conversation partner, for someone who can help, guide and challenge when needed? See this useful TED talk on how coaching helps even seasoned specialists, such as established surgeons. And of course a short clip from Gates’s TED talk.
At the same time, being a “critical friend” (a coach/mentor) is very important to researchers, academics (on tenure-track, post-docs, senior Ph.D. students) as well as professionals who are looking for a partner to advise, listen and critique a project, a plan or a trajectory. I have benefitted enormously from such mentors, coaches and “critical friends” (paid and unpaid) at critical times of my life, and would be happy to engage with you in shaping your project and helping you achieve your goals.
I offer services in two areas:
Academic Career Consulting
-Writing successful Ph.D. proposals in the “Western” academia, successful strategies of getting into a PhD programme with a promise of an academic career;
-Academic job search and applications, tenure-track applications, promotion trajectory to Assistant and Associate Professor;
-Academic writing & journal publishing strategies and guidance per paper including editing strategies and advice (social sciences and humanities);
-Individual or small-team academic grant applications (PhD and postdoc fellowships, project applications for individual researchers or small teams);
Policy Consulting
-Public policy in action, policy cycle, policy evaluation packages, policy analysis methodologies;
-Interpretive policy analysis methodologies, frameworks and models and their application to real-life situations, sectors and governance challenges;
-Water diplomacy and security globally and in the region of the larger Mediterranean (Eastern Europe, Caucasus and Central Asia);
-Water governance & policy reforms (e.g. public-private partnerships, pricing reform, financing, public participation, inclusive social development);
-Linking commercial diplomacy (trade missions) with knowledge diplomacy (longer-term knowledge partnership between countries and other parties) in the water and climate change adaptation sectors;
-Capacity building of universities in the region of the Caucasus and Central Asia, and more broadly, in the Global South;
Fees & Discussion
Please, get in touch to get a price quote: farhad@policytranslation.eu or mukhtarov@iss.nl