About Peter R. Valderhaug

Coach, speaker, and educator working with identity and human change

I'm Peter R. Valderhaug. I work with leaders, founders, professionals, and organizations who want their thinking, communication, and actions to support the responsibility they carry.

Some come with a decision, transition, or pattern that has become difficult to move. Others want to strengthen how they present, negotiate, lead a room, or work through dynamics a team has learned to treat as normal.

Identity, in my work, means the expectations you carry about who you are in a particular situation. Those expectations shape what you notice, how your body responds, the language you reach for, and the choices that feel available.

When attention, emotional state, language, action, and identity begin to support the same direction, change becomes easier to live.

A life spent studying how people work

Much of my professional life has been shaped by questions such as:

Why does a capable person have access to their full capacity in one situation and lose it in another?
How do tone, pace, posture, language, and expectation shape the trust a leader creates?
What does a team already know without saying directly?
What allows insight to become a response that remains available under real pressure?

Coaching, teaching, and work with leaders and teams have allowed me to explore these questions in many different environments.

I have worked with individuals, leadership groups, founders, students, customer-facing teams, and people in performance settings. I have also delivered keynotes and development work for organizations including the Oslo Police District, ISS, TOMRA, and Vanir Esport.

In a publicly funded project with NAV Fredrikstad, the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration, and AOF Østlandet, I explored how skills developed through gaming could be translated into language that employers and educators could recognize. The project showed how quickly a person's view of their own capability can change when they are given a better way to see and describe it.

Peter R. Valderhaug smiler ved et kafébord med en kaffekopp i hendene.

Walking the talk

My understanding of identity change became deeply personal in January 2023, when I stood on a scale that read 177 kilos.

I knew a great deal about food, training, behavior, and change. I had also spent years returning to the same pattern. Food had become a reliable source of calm and comfort, while my body made the cost of that pattern increasingly visible.

The real shift began when I explored the relationship between attention, emotion, language, daily action, and the person I expected myself to be.

I began asking questions such as:

How do I really feel about myself?
How do I speak about myself?
What do I consistently notice in myself and other people?
What do I actually do each day?
Who do I expect myself to be?

Journaling, visualization, training, and small daily choices gave me new evidence about who I was becoming. My attention changed. My language changed. The actions followed.

Over the following three years, I lost close to 65 kilos and completed more than 800 training sessions. The weight loss is the most visible result. The more important change is the relationship I have with myself, my emotions, and the person I expect to be.

This experience shapes the way I work today. I teach from within the work, with a clear respect for the patience and honesty involved when an old pattern begins to take a new direction.

What I work with today

Private coaching

I work individually with leaders, founders, and professionals who want clearer decisions, stronger presence, greater steadiness under pressure, and action that holds up in everyday life.

Explore private coaching

Executive, team, and organizational development

I deliver executive coaching, keynotes, workshops, skill labs, and longer development processes in communication, executive presence, team dynamics, identity, leadership, negotiation, and human change.

Explore work for organizations

NLP Practitioner and Master Practitioner training

I teach practical NLP education in communication, self-leadership, emotional state, and change. Participants who complete the education are licensed through The Society of NLP and Dr. Richard Bandler.

The training combines precise skills with demonstrations, guided practice, and direct feedback.

Explore NLP training

The Authenticity Paradox

Created with Lexi Cruz, The Authenticity Paradox is an English-language podcast and free community built around a question that sits close to much of my work:

"What if the hardest person to become is the person you already know you are?"

Explore The Authenticity Paradox

How I work

I begin with conversation and close observation. I listen to what is said, how it is said, what changes under pressure, and what remains carefully outside the conversation.

In individual work, that may be the hesitation before a decision, the overexplaining that weakens authority, the tone that creates distance, or the familiar loop behind a pattern.

In team work, it may be the role no one formally assigned, the disagreement everyone has learned to work around, the informal rules shaping communication, or a risk people can sense but have not yet named.

Once the pattern is visible, we can work precisely. The work may draw on coaching, teaching, NLP, hypnosis, reflective practice, gestalt perspectives, psychology, visualization, rehearsal, and practical work between conversations.

I am direct, calm, and comfortable with silence. The aim is not confrontation for its own sake. It is to make the situation clear enough for something useful to happen.

The result should be visible in the decisions, conversations, and actions that follow.