The story behind the work

I’ve taken a strange route into this work.

I started as a musician and performer. I sang jazz, wrote songs, played guitar and worked as a theatre actor. Later, I moved into personal training, coaching, wellbeing consulting, workplace mental health, and eventually co-founded Unmind.

At Unmind, I’ve spent nearly a decade helping build and scale a company working to make mental health part of everyday working life. That put me close to what leaders carry, what organisations reward, what people learn to hide, and how easily success can start asking too much of the person holding it all together.

I’m grateful for what I helped build.

I’m also more honest now about what it cost.

The turning point

In 2024, a health crisis and breakdown stopped me in my tracks.

I don’t think of it as simple burnout. That word doesn’t quite hold what happened.

There had been too much building for too long. Too much pressure in my system. Too many old patterns being exposed at once. I was carrying more than I understood, and trying to stay in control of things that couldn’t be controlled that way.

For years, I’d been able to override it all.

And then, I couldn’t.

It unravelled quickly and frighteningly. My body felt unsafe. My mind became fragile. The old ways of holding myself together stopped working.

I had spent years helping organisations talk about mental health.

Then I had to face my own life more honestly.

What I saw was uncomfortable. It wasn’t just workload. It wasn’t just too many meetings. It was the body, the nervous system, the role, the startup pressure, the family history, the need to stay in control, and the environments I’d adapted to for so long that I’d stopped seeing what they were asking of me.

That experience changed how I approach this work today.

I took time away to recover properly. Not to optimise myself back into the same life, but to listen more honestly to what had happened and what needed to change.

I came back less convinced by the stories we tell ourselves to make self-override feel responsible. And with more respect for the body, the nervous system, and the cost of asking too much of ourselves for too long.