Alistair Horscroft
Founder, The Mind Academy
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Alistair Horscroft is the founder of The Mind Academy. He has spent thirty years as a practitioner, trainer, and developer in integrated mind work, with over ten thousand client sessions across coaching, therapy, and high-performance environments. His work is the synthesis of hypnotics, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, philosophy, somatic discipline, and brain training — refined into a single methodology grounded in the pragmatic idealist tradition the academy stands within.
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The work
Alistair's professional work has been tested across a range of public, clinical, and high-performance environments where outcomes are measurable and the standard is high.
Television and media. By twenty-seven, Alistair had his own Discovery Channel series — The Life Guru — across fifteen episodes. He served as the resident mind-body coach on Living TV in the United Kingdom across forty episodes of Loose Lips. He has been featured as a behavioural and psychological expert in The Times, The Evening Standard, and National Geographic, among other major outlets.
The Fearless Program. Across seven years at Taronga Zoo and Australia Zoo, Alistair designed and delivered a phobia elimination program that resolved severe phobic responses — spiders and snakes — in over 300 hundred participants with a one hundred percent verified success rate. The program is one of the most rigorously documented phobia interventions in the contemporary literature.
Government-accredited Diploma of Modern Psychology. Alistair developed and delivered a government-accredited Diploma of Modern Psychology in Australia across eight years, training practitioners in the integrated methodology that became the foundation of The Mind Academy and the current Mind Dynamics Training.
Return-to-work program. Alistair designed and delivered a government-backed return-to-work intervention for long-term unemployed individuals, integrating identity, behavioural, and mindset work into a structured behaviour-change protocol with measurable outcomes.
UK health and wellness establishment. Alistair was the first practitioner to establish dedicated mind clinics in leading UK health farms, including Henlow Grange — the country's premier celebrity health destination — where he worked with numerous high-profile clients across film, music, and broadcasting. The model integrated psychological, behavioural, and emotional-change work into the health-farm setting at a time when no equivalent provision existed.
Elite performance work. Alistair's one-to-one practice has included Olympians (most recently working with two athletes preparing for the 2026 Cortina Winter Olympics), CEOs and senior executives of major banks and corporations, world champions across multiple sports, and high-performing entrepreneurs and creatives.
Clinical Practice. Having had clinics in London, Sydney and Online, Alistair has assisted people with trauma, addiction, confidence, relationships and countless others concerns for over 25 years.
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Training and certification
Alistair holds training and certification as:
Honours Degree Philosophy
Clinical Hypnotherapist and Hypnotherapy trainer
Master NLP Practitioner and NLP trainer
High Performance Coach and Coach trainer
Myndlift Neurofeedback Practitioner
Personal trainer with Anatomy and Physiology Certification
Ancient Egyptian metaphysics — four years of study at the SIA Academy in London
Currently engaged in nutritionist training
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The lineage
Alistair's training is direct rather than inherited. He has studied with the founders, senior figures, and most accomplished practitioners across the disciplines he now teaches.
Hypnosis. Alistair's hypnotic methodology stands on the work of Milton Erickson, Dave Elman, David Grove, John Overdurf, and the contemporary neuroscientific work of David Spiegel at Stanford.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Alistair has trained directly with Richard Bandler — co-creator of NLP — alongside Paul McKenna, Michael Breen, Julie Silverthorne, John Overdurf, and Dr. William Horton. He also studied with Peter Seal and Jo Cooper, co-founders of Centre NLP in the United Kingdom and a foundational influence on NLP training in the UK through the 1990s and 2000s. He has been privileged to count Frank Pucelik — co-founder of NLP and one of the three originators of the discipline — as a personal friend.
Coaching. Alistair was trained directly by Bob Proctor in his first formal cohort of coaches. From that foundation he has developed his own contemporary methodology which was accepted by the IICF and the AC, grounded in brain–mind alignment — the integration of current coaching principles with neuroscience, NLP, and somatic discipline. The result is a coaching practice that is not a transmission of any single lineage but a working synthesis built across thirty years of practice.
Consciousness work. Alistair is one of a small number granted formal permission by Dr. David Hawkins (Power vs Force) to use his consciousness-mapping methodology in clinical and coaching practice.
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Outside the work
Alongside the work, Alistair is a long-standing practitioner in the movement culture tradition, integrating bodyweight training, martial discipline, and embodied practice into a daily architecture. He was a personal trainer in his early 20’s and integrated the mind into physical practice very early on.
Alistair was taught to meditate at age 4 and was formally schooled in the Indian metaphysics of Advaita Vedanta from age 9 - 16. It is not a lineage that any longer holds water for him, preferring the greek philosophy lineage from Pythagorus through Plato and onwards.
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Where to go from here
→ Read About The Mind Academy — the institution, the philosophical foundation, and what the academy stands for.
→ Train in the methodology: Mind Dynamics — the twice-yearly live certification in NLP, hypnotherapy, coaching, and applied mind work, held in Noosa.
→ Work one-to-one: private coaching and therapy with Alistair Horscroft.
