My Backstory
I spent 25 years helping organisations build unshakable bonds with customers, at times doing the things nobody else dared to do. From Richard Branson waterskiing behind a blimp in Barcelona to world records, we took the science of human connection and stress-tested it at every scale we could find. Then cancer forced me to ask the question I'd been avoiding my entire career: Who am I when I'm not performing?
Six months of treatment, a lot of time to think, and nobody to impress, chase validation from, or seek approval from. Just me, trying to confront mortality and sitting with a question I'd spent my whole career avoiding: if I'm not a Chief Strategy Officer or the person who wins aviation championships and breaks world records, then who the hell am I?
What I discovered much later was that I wasn't always applying what I knew worked to myself. Not because I didn’t want to, but because it felt too risky. I learned that we can become very good at hiding behind expertise and achievement, adapting to our environment, dulling the parts of us that could make us ‘different’, and working hard on a polished projection of who we think we need to be instead of backing who we are.
Once I stopped performing, I could finally see the pattern everywhere - in myself, in my clients, in entire industries. And once you see it, you can't look away.
I watch brilliant people exhaust themselves performing, and I know exactly what it costs them because I lived it and still do. So that's what I do now: I help leaders and teams stop performing and lead with conviction, not by creating something that is missing, but by removing what's actually in the way.
My approach blends evidence-based research with lived experience, testing what actually moves people and how we build, lose, and rebuild trust. Years of studying the biology behind behaviour, how our brains define our identity, respond to threat, seek belonging, now show me exactly why performing feels safer than being seen, and what it takes to move through that.
I am wired to make sense of the world around me, annoying as that can be at times. I have to understand how things work, including us.
My training as a strategist means I can blend ideas and information from very different places and find a better way forward. What I ultimately bring is simple solutions that help people change perspective and move faster towards what’s possible for them.
Sometimes that is a tool. Sometimes a framework. Sometimes just a powerful question that does the work that another framework never will.
The work starts with conviction. What it builds is belonging.
