I know what it feels like to be pulled away from yourself, slowly, almost imperceptibly, until one day you look up and realize the life you're living has very little to do with who you actually are.

I've walked that path more than once. After a decade in academia, including five years working toward a PhD, I realized that what I was learning in the field, through presence, observation, and something closer to intuition than analysis, didn't fit the scientific framework I was working in. So I left. Unfinished degree and all.

I found my footing in the corporate world, and for a while, I thrived, growing into leadership, finding genuine meaning in the work. Until, 15 years in, the environment shifted in a way that has become painfully familiar across large organisations today. Top-down, productivity-obsessed, asking me to treat the people I led as resources to be optimised. It was costing me something I wasn't willing to lose. So I left that too. A well-paid, stable job. I walked away, no package, no severance.

Not because I'm reckless. But because I've learned, more than once, to recognize the moment when something that served you starts to consume you.

Looking around, I don't think my experiences were unique. I see people hanging on to work that once gave them meaning, now running on empty, caught in a way of life that quietly disconnects them from themselves, from each other, from what actually matters. Most can feel something is off. Fewer can see a way out.

That's the work I do with clients now. I help professionals who find themselves in the twilight zone. Successful on the outside, exhausted and empty on the inside. I know that place. And I know what it takes to plot a way out.