About
About The Soft Road
there’s a different experience of life.
We call this The Soft Road.
The Soft Road’s program offers coaching, Vedic meditation, retreats, talks and master classes.
The program is based on a curriculum of knowledge, masterful guidance, and the cultivation of five key elements:
Conditions for Change
Your receptivity and capacity for change – doing different things.
Mindset
How you see the world and your place in it.
Relationship to Self
The most important connection you have.
Building New Capacities
Growth and development within reach of us all.
Meditation
A foundation for personal transformation.
Softness here is strength. Grounded in practice and action, we learn it’s the quality of the journey that makes all the difference.
Life with natural flow and greater ease – less hard.
The Soft Road Founders
Guiding the way, individually and together. Empowering people to thrive in creative action.
Melanie Kirkbride
Melanie is an expert in personal transformation and professional development. For over two decades as coach and an advisor, she has brought wisdom and guidance to individuals around the world. People are drawn to her warmth, insight, and unique breadth of knowledge: her experience of life.
Melanie is a natural coach, teacher, and speaker who has followed a path of empowering others. She has sought out Masters, learning directly from pioneers in a wide range of integrated fields, including business, communication, meditation, psychology, yoga, and ayurveda. Her passion is the understanding of authentic human behaviour, particularly in leadership.
In 2000 Melanie established her own successful executive coaching practice in Sydney, Australia, working internationally with leaders and influencers. In 2014, after two years of study, she spent four intensive months in the Indian Himalaya to complete the highest-level training as a master teacher of Vedic meditation, integrating the benefits of this tradition into her coaching.
As a coach, Melanie has repeatedly witnessed that no one is immune to the experience of pressure, overwhelm, exhaustion, or anxiety. More than ever before, she believes that people need deeper foundations to thrive in the presence of such constant demands.
The Soft Road was born of Melanie’s desire to create a new program that could address the needs of this time—a source of inspirational, practical, and ongoing support to contribute to the raising of human consciousness.
Neil Kirkbride
Educated at Oxford University in mathematics, Neil had a successful 30-year career in the worlds of IT & Banking. He led large teams and pioneered some of the industry’s most innovative ways of providing service.
Neil’s effectiveness and success come from his authenticity and insight. He has always combined his business career with a curiosity to gain knowledge through experience, journeying both geographically and spiritually.
A major contributor to Neil’s perspective is his Vedic meditation practice. In 2014, after 2 years of study, he left the corporate world and travelled to the Indian Himalaya for four months to complete his intensive training as a master teacher of Vedic meditation.
What makes Neil’s teaching and coaching particularly powerful is his ability to demonstrate the relevance of this enduring knowledge and practice now.
The Soft Road is the natural outgrowth of Neil’s interest in creating and using practical techniques for innovation, creativity, adaptability, and expansiveness to help people have their fullest and richest experience of life.
