An ever-evolving practice · Auckland, New Zealand
“Latham, who is kind of an engineering genius… He was like, 'Ok. Here's your problem. Here's what you need. Here's how we get it.'”
-Richard Linklater on Latham Gaines' work with Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon (2025).
GH
The work
Every client arrives wanting to solve a problem.
A presentation. Imposter syndrome. Better presence. More confidence. But the problem usually isn't the problem.
Throughout my career I’ve been asked to solve problems that didn’t respond to conventional thinking. Products. Films. Manufacturing. The context changes. The process doesn't.
You don’t get what you want, you get who you are.
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The work combines performance psychology, creative problem solving, and rehearsing important moments.
Every session follows the same rhythm.
Diagnose.
We’ll uncover what’s actually happening beneath the surface, not just the symptoms you’ve noticed.
Experiment.
Conversation isn't enough. We'll use whatever the moment requires, from first-principles thinking, to camera work, and creative exercises. The goal isn't performance. It's transformation.
Build.
We'll build practical ways of accessing your best thinking, presence, and confidence under pressure until they become repeatable.
Rehearse.
Insight doesn't change much. Practice does. The goal isn't a great session. It's becoming someone who can reliably access more of themselves when it matters
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A practice tool
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Invitations to a different way of working
1:1 · 90 minutes
The Rehearsal
Using techniques developed over years directing actors and observing people under pressure, we’ll recreate the situations where you’re expected to perform.
In this session we'll recreate moments that matter to you, but before we talk about confidence, leadership or communication, let's find out what you're really bringing into the room.
To discover how you're actually experienced when the stakes are high.
Actors receive this kind of feedback every day.
Most leaders never do.
The goal isn’t to teach confidence, it's to embody it. And to remove whatever prevents the real you from arriving.
POA · Auckland
1:1 · 90 minutes
Ongoing Practice
Once you've experienced how you're actually perceived, we begin building the capacities that allow you to access more of yourself consistently.
This is long-term work. Quiet. Private.
Entirely tailored to the individual.
Because becoming more yourself isn't one event, it's a practice.
POA · Auckland
GH
About Latham Gaines
I grew up in a household where impossible things were normal.
My father invented paintball and wrote Pumping Iron, the book that introduced Arnold Schwarzenegger to the world and changed how an entire culture thinks about human potential and physical transformation. Reinvention wasn't something we talked about. It was simply what people did.
I never stayed in one discipline.
That inheritance shaped everything that came after. I became an inventor, composer, entrepreneur and actor.
I licensed products to Mattel, Hasbro, and Moose Toys. I earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for sound sculpture on Broadway. I've scored films with instruments I built from salvaged objects.
When director Richard Linklater needed to solve an impossible problem on the film Blue Moon, making a six-foot actor convincingly inhabit a man five feet tall with no visual effects and fifteen shooting days, he called me. I diagnosed the real constraint, reframed the problem, and built a solution.
Then something unexpected happened.
Alongside all of that, I spent years coaching hundreds of actors.
At first I thought I was teaching performance.
What I was really studying was confidence, identity and pressure.
The same patterns emerged again and again, regardless of the profession.
The camera became one of the tools. It reveals the gap between who we think we are and how we're actually experienced. Closing that gap changes confidence faster than advice ever can.
Looking back...
It took me thirty years to realise I hadn't been changing disciplines at all.
Whether I was inventing products, solving impossible problems for filmmakers, performing, or coaching actors, I was studying the same question from different angles:
Why do some people consistently access the best version of themselves when it matters most, while others can't?
One answer kept appearing.
Actors don't simply perform. They rehearse.
They spend years discovering how they're actually experienced by other people. They experiment. They fail safely. They repeat. They learn to access themselves under pressure before the real moment arrives.
Most people never get that opportunity.
Yet they're expected to walk into the conversations that shape their careers and lives without ever rehearsing them.
The work now.
Today I work with founders, executives, entrepreneurs, creatives and ambitious people facing moments that matter.
Not to help them become someone else.
To help them consistently access more of who they already are.
We do that the same way actors have for generations: By rehearsing.
Because the moments that shape our lives deserve more than improvisation.
Begin the work — from $750 NZD