For over 27 years I worked in the corporate world – Human Resources, Finance, Workplace Health and Safety. I was good at it. Really good at it. I got results, I led teams, I created change. From the outside, I looked like someone who had it figured out.

On the inside? I was quietly falling apart.

Not dramatically. Not in a way anyone would have noticed (or maybe they did, but I was oblivious). It was a slow, creeping exhaustion of being completely disconnected from myself while still showing up and performing competence every single day. I kept chasing fulfilment – new roles, bigger challenges, different environments. And every time I got the thing I thought would fix it, the emptiness came right along with me.

There's a reason people say 'wherever you go, there you are.' I now know exactly what that means.

Because it took hitting actual rock bottom to finally get honest with myself. What I was searching for wasn't a new job, a new title, or a new strategy. It was me. I had spent decades overriding my own inner knowing, silencing my own voice, and running so hard I'd completely forgotten who I was underneath all the doing.

That moment of reckoning changed everything. Not overnight – god, I wish it had been overnight – but gradually, messily, and very non-linearly. I started asking the questions I'd been avoiding. Who am I? What do I actually want? What am I here for?

What's funny – and by funny I mean the kind of funny that makes you laugh so you don't cry – is that I remember asking those exact questions as a young girl. Full of curiosity and wonderment. Big, open, unedited questions about who I was and why I was here. Somewhere along the way I quietly abandoned them. Packed them away like they were impractical (because the answers didn’t magically appear). And I had absolutely no idea that doing so would circle back in such a face-slapping way decades later.

Nine years ago I went all in on myself – the real work, the uncomfortable work, the kind that cracks you open before it sets you free. I'm still asking those questions today. And that lived experience, every messy, non-linear year of it, is exactly why I can sit with you while you ask yours.