I know what it's like to lose yourself in the role.
For years, I was the Managing Director. From the outside, it appeared to be a success: I turned the company from a loss to a profit, increased sales by 70%, and established partnerships with BAFTA, the Royal Opera House, and Rolls-Royce.
But inside, I was performing.
I'd become the polished, high-responsibility leader the role demanded — strategic, decisive, always holding it together. And slowly, quietly, I lost touch with something deeper: creativity, instinct, the parts of myself that didn't fit the performance.
The identity I'd built wasn't false. It just wasn't complete.
And eventually, the cost of maintaining it became unbearable.
The buried river surfaces
My own daylighting began when I finally stopped performing long enough to ask: What am I actually feeling? What do I actually want?
The answers weren't immediate. They surfaced slowly — through coaching, creative practice, and eventually through Internal Family Systems work, which helped me understand the different parts of myself: the achiever, the protector, the critic, and beneath all of that, a quieter, clearer Self I'd buried under years of responsibility.
That process changed everything.
Not because I reinvented myself, but because I finally allowed myself to be whole.
From experience to practice
Today, I work with leaders, founders, creatives, and professionals who recognise the tension I lived: outward success, inward misalignment.
I'm a professionally trained coach (ICF-accredited) with specialised training from the IFS Institute in Internal Family Systems — an evidence-based approach that helps individuals work with the different parts of themselves, understand what has been buried, and lead from a place of authenticity rather than performance.
Before coaching, I spent 25 years in leadership and consulting roles:
Managing Director
Organisational consultant for companies like Warner Bros, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, and William Grant
Strategy work in the UK central government
Supporting social enterprise leaders and board executives through transitions
I bring that commercial and strategic grounding into my coaching work — not as theory, but as lived experience. I know the pressures of high-stakes leadership. I know what it costs to stay in patterns that no longer serve you. And I know what becomes possible when you finally stop performing and start leading from your real Self.
What grounds me
I live in Vienna with my family, who remind me daily why this work matters. They're my foundation — the place where performance stops and real connection begins.
I also volunteer in my local community, putting my values into action beyond my coaching practice. It keeps me grounded in what's genuinely important: connection, contribution, and the kind of leadership that serves rather than performs.
How I work
I create space for people to stop performing, see what's been buried, and rebuild their lives and work from a place of coherence rather than compromise.
This isn't about fixing you or making you more successful by conventional measures.
It's about uncovering the identity beneath the identity — the version of you that's been there all along — and building the clarity and confidence to lead from that place.
If you sense something trying to surface in your life, I can support that emergence.
