Sir John Henry Douglas Whitmore, 2nd Baronet (16 October 1937 – 28 April 2017) was a pioneer of the executive coaching industry, an author and British racing driver.

[2][3][4][5] In his first year in the competition, 1961, Whitmore won the British Saloon Car Championship in his BMC Mini Minor.

In the first year he finished tenth overall and second in class along with Jim Clark in the Border Reivers Lotus Elite.

After leaving racing and the world of motor-sports, he became interested in transpersonal psychology and its emphasis on the principle of will, intention, or responsibility.

In 1970, he studied at the Esalen Institute in Slates Hot Springs, California, with the likes of William Schutz (creator of team development model FIRO-B), and then trained with Harvard educationalist and tennis expert Timothy Gallwey, who created the Inner Game methodology of performance coaching.

[9] Along with Tim Gallwey, Laura Whitworth and Thomas J. Leonard, he is credited with launching modern coaching in the 1970s.

[17] Whitmore also wrote the foreword to and is extensively quoted in a book called Nine: Briefing from Deep Space which was published in 2005.

The book is based upon interviews with extraterrestrial beings which a group of people including Whitmore, as well as Phyllis Schlemmer[18] and Uri Geller,[19] claimed to have had over a number of years.

[21][22] During the 1970s, Whitmore commissioned Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry to write a script for a movie that he was intending to fund called The Nine, but the deal fell through.