My Hero’s Journey

THE ESTABLISHED WORLD

I built a career that looked exactly like success.

For over a decade, I worked at the heart of global consumer goods — leading cross-functional teams, shaping category strategies, and building commercial growth plans for some of the world's most recognisable brands. I was a senior leader and the subject matter expert in my field. I knew my numbers, I knew my market, and I knew how to turn a vision into a plan that actually delivered results.

Alongside that, I had spent many years building and running my own property business. I understood entrepreneurship from the inside. I knew what it meant to create something that was genuinely yours.

From the outside, it all looked impressive. And for a long time, I told myself it was enough.

THE AWARENESS

Five star hotels. Limos. The best restaurants. And all I could think was: I don't want to be here.

I came back from a sabbatical feeling different. I couldn’t fully explain it yet — but something had shifted. And before I’d had a chance to find my feet, I was on a plane. First week back. Fresh out of gallbladder surgery, not yet recovered, running on jet lag and adrenaline and sheer stubbornness.

On paper, it was glamorous. Limos. Five star hotels. Restaurants most people would dream of. All the external markers of a career that I had made it.

And privately, quietly, I was in the middle of a fertility journey. Four years of hoping and waiting and not knowing — what I didn’t yet know was that an undiagnosed thyroid condition had been quietly working against me the entire time. I was carrying all of that in my body and my heart, flying across time zones and showing up polished, professional, and performing.

I remember sitting in a taxi with a colleague, listening to her compare notes about her kids — how little she saw them, how her little one had taken to looking under beds and in cupboards for her, searching the house for a mum who was always somewhere else. Said with a kind of resigned acceptance that broke my heart a little — not for me, but for her. 'Oh well, it's got to be done.' She wasn't wrong. The system just shouldn't have made it true. And then there was my boss — the VP — boasting about how many countries he’d visited. About how his kids didn’t speak to him anymore. He said it like it was a badge of honour. Like that was the price of success and he’d paid it gladly.

And I sat in silence, wanting nothing more than exactly what they were both, in their different ways, trading so lightly.

Something in me went very still.

And then, that first week back, I stood up in Singapore and presented someone else’s work. Work I didn’t agree with. Work that wasn’t mine and didn’t feel true. In a room full of people, thousands of miles from home, still not recovered, running on nothing.

I crumbled. Right there in Singapore. And later, in the airport terminal, still in excruciating pain from the surgery, willing my body to get me on that plane — it became crystal clear: I could only ever operate in full alignment with myself. Ask me to stand behind something I didn’t believe in — and my whole system would fall apart.

That wasn’t a weakness. Although it felt like it at the time.

THE TURNING POINT

One conversation. Then I walked in the next morning and resigned.

It came down to a presentation. My boss asked me to change it — not because I was wrong, but because the SVP wanted to hear something different. It didn't matter that I was the expert. It didn't matter that the data was clear. It didn't matter that I was right.

He was the boss. And apparently, that was that.

I remember the exact feeling. Everything looked the same as it always had. The same office, the same people, the same career I'd worked so hard to build. And yet everything was completely different. Something had cracked open and I couldn't put it back in its box.

The next morning, I resigned.

I will be forever grateful to that not so nice SVP and my sadly weak boss for doing me that favour. Truly.

THE CHOICE

I walked away. Deliberately. And I would do it again in a heartbeat.

After four years of fertility treatment, longing, uncertainty — and a thyroid diagnosis that finally gave the unexplained infertility a name — I got pregnant. And then again. And by complete surprise, again. Three children in three years. Chaotic, wonderful, completely consuming.

I made a choice. I wanted to be at home with my kids. I was willing to risk my career for that. I knew what I was walking away from and I chose it anyway.

I also know — because of my husband’s work — how lucky I was to have that choice. Not everyone does. I don’t take that for granted for a single second.

For seven years I stepped away from corporate life entirely. And while the world kept moving and my CV sat quietly gathering dust, something else was happening. I was finally living in alignment, and gaining wisdom as I healed. It turned out that was everything.

THE INSIGHT

When I came back, everything made sense.

Seven years on. A few grey hairs and wrinkles I have absolutely earned. Three very chaotic children, one dog, two elderly parents, and a husband who is wonderfully, perpetually busy with the demands of his job. I retrained in Hypnotherapy and NLP, went back to my business brain, and started putting the two together in a way I'd never thought possible.

And then my neurodivergent diagnosis arrived. And instead of feeling broken, I felt like someone had finally handed me the instruction manual for my own mind.

Here's the thing nobody tells you. I was a top performer in corporate. Delivering results, leading teams, exceeding targets. From the outside — and even to myself — everything looked fine. More than fine. The masking was so complete, so deeply built into how I operated, that I didn't even fully know I was doing it.

But my body knew. The gallbladder. The thyroid condition silently undermining my fertility for years before anyone thought to check it. The burnout. The anxiety and somatic symptoms that would flare whenever I was out of alignment. The way I could white-knuckle my way through almost anything — until suddenly, one request too far, I absolutely couldn’t. My body was keeping score the entire time. Even when my career wasn’t showing it.

The diagnosis didn't change what happened. But it finally explained it.

The shadow. And the light.

The same attributes that made corporate life so costly are the exact same attributes that now make me exceptional at this work. They were never the problem. The environment was.

Demand avoidance meant I couldn't comply with being asked to present something wrong, even under enormous pressure. In corporate, that read as the end. In my own business, it means fierce, uncompromising integrity. I will never ask you to do something that isn't true. I resigned rather than compromise — and I'd do it again.

A strong social justice wiring meant I couldn't ignore what wasn't right, couldn't stay silent, couldn't pretend. The research backs this up — neurodivergent thinkers are disproportionately aligned with fairness and doing what's right. We're built for it. In corporate that created friction. In purposeful business building, it's everything.

And hyperfocus — the ability to go completely, intensely deep into something — means that in the few hours I get while the kids are at school, I can get more done than most people manage in a full day. I don't do surface level. With my work, or with my clients.

I'm also deeply creative and genuinely love data. Which sounds like a contradiction until you understand that both are just different ways of reading a story.

And that's when it all clicked. Story is in everything.

It's in the founder — in the moment they decided to build something that mattered. It's in the customer — in the deep, often unspoken reason they're searching for a solution. And it's in the data — because your numbers aren't just figures on a spreadsheet. They're telling you the full, unfiltered picture of what's actually happening in your business. The good, the bad, and the damn ugly. When you know how to read it, the whole story is right there.

THE MISSION

This is the work now.

I work with founders and small business owners who are building something that genuinely matters — and who are feeling the full weight of that.

They're heart-led, highly driven, full of ideas. And often overwhelmed. Many are neurodivergent or highly sensitive thinkers who have spent years looking for support that truly gets how they work. I do. Because I am one.

My work sits at the intersection of strategy, story, and soul. We strip back the chaos. We reconnect you with your purpose. We look at your data — really look at it — and we build something that is both commercially strong and deeply human.

Because your founder story isn't just something nice to put on your About page. It's the foundation of your entire strategy. Your customer's story isn't just a persona in a deck. It's the key to every conversation, every piece of content, every offer you'll ever create. And your data isn't there to intimidate you. It's there to show you exactly what your business is doing — and what to do next.

THE RIPPLE

Why this matters right now.

We're living through a genuinely chaotic time. Post-pandemic uncertainty. Social media eroding childhoods. Political unrest, war, loneliness, disconnection. People are exhausted by noise and desperate for something real.

In that world, authenticity isn't a nice-to-have for your brand. It's everything. People aren't buying products or services anymore — they're looking for meaning. They're drawn to founders who stand for something real, who know their own story and aren't afraid to tell it.

When founders build businesses that are purposeful, heart-felt, aligned, and commercially sound — it doesn't just change their business. It changes everything around them. The clients they serve. The families they support. The communities they're part of. The world they're helping to shape.

That's the ripple. And it starts with your story.

And then there's the other project. The one that proves everything I believe about story — that it isn't a department or a deliverable. It's how some of us are simply wired.

Because understanding story isn't just something I teach — it's how I move through the world. I can sit with a founder's data and find the narrative hiding in the numbers. I can hold space for the emotional truth underneath the strategy. And on the days the kids are at school and the house goes quiet, I'm four drafts into a children's novel about growing up in a world that feels like a lot — because story has always been how I make sense of everything, including myself.

It's magical realism. A story about navigating life as a child in what genuinely feels like a dystopian reality — because for children growing up right now, it kind of is. The uncertainty, the noise, the weight of a world that doesn't always make sense. If we feel it, they feel it more. I wanted to write something that helped them find their footing in it. Something that told the truth sideways, the way only story can.

I'm on my fourth draft and I am determined to finish it - because some stories are too important to not tell.

The ripple doesn't stop at founders and business owners. It reaches all the way down to the next generation — to the children growing up in the middle of all of this, trying to make sense of a world that moves too fast and asks too much.

Story has always been how humans find their way through. That's as true at age five as it is at forty-five.

There — I did it. I was brave and shared mine.

I’d love to hear yours — if you’ll let me. ♥

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