I spent twenty years in investment management and real estate development across London and the Middle East — $300m and more under management, managing hundreds of people across three continents.

I built a manufacturing business in the desert, delivered residential schemes in central London, and ran an investment company through periods of political unrest. I was the person people called when something was actually on fire, and I was very good at it.

I was also running on untreated PTSD and calling it resilience. It caught up with me in my thirties.

What followed was years of experimenting with various kinds of therapy and practice, and a long unflattering look at patterns I hadn't known I was running. It also took me to India, Nepal and Peru, living in and studying wisdom traditions, trying to understand what actually makes communities thrive.

I learned to be where I am. Then people started asking me to teach. Since 2019 I have privately mentored more than a hundred people and run teaching residencies across Europe and the United States, including for organisations like Soho House — meditation, yoga philosophy, somatic awareness, and hypnosis techniques I had studied extensively.

I had assumed the answer was a quiet, contemplative life away from the hustle. It wasn't. We are at the start of the largest shift most of us will live through — new technology arriving faster than we can absorb it, politics pulling people apart, the natural world in disorder.

It was difficult to look at my own life — the strategy, the crisis management, the years of practice — and not conclude that all of it had been training for this moment in time. I was not going to sit this out.

So I put the suits back on.