About
The path that brought me here wasn't shaped by one defining moment.
It unfolded over many years, in corporate boardrooms, on the island of Zanzibar, in hospital rooms, across kitchen tables, on mountain trails, and in conversations with people whose lives looked completely different from one another.
Again and again, the same pattern emerged.
People rarely came because they lacked insight. More often, they had simply stopped noticing what had quietly become normal: the responsibilities they carried, the conversations they avoided, and the ways they had learned to hold everything together without ever stopping to ask what it was costing them.
It took me much longer to recognise that this wasn't something I was only seeing in other people.
It had been quietly shaping my own life as well.
Where It Began
In My Twenties
In my twenties, I worked in international mergers and acquisitions.
From the outside, my life looked successful. I travelled constantly, worked with remarkable people, and built a career that many people would have admired.
I hated it.
I didn't know how much I hated it because I had never experienced anything different. The exhaustion, the constant pressure and the feeling that I always needed to be moving towards something simply felt like the price of being successful. Everyone around me lived that way. So did I.
At the time, I believed I was building a successful career.
What I was really building was a way of feeling valuable.
The more capable I became, the more I believed I had something to offer. The harder I worked, the more secure life seemed to feel. Achievement became more than ambition. It became the place I looked for reassurance that I was enough.
None of this felt unusual.
It simply felt like the way life worked.
I didn't realise how much of myself had become wrapped up in achievement until I stepped away from it. Only then did I begin to recognise that I'd spent years trying to earn something that couldn't be earned.
In 2007, at age 28, I left for what was supposed to be a three-week trip to Africa.
I stayed for five months.
I was living in Zanzibar, teaching business at a local college. There was no internet, very little distraction, and very little of the pace that had shaped my life for years.
For the first time in a long time, there was nowhere I needed to be. My days were no longer measured by meetings, deadlines or what came next. Nobody knew what I did for a living. Nobody expected anything from me beyond showing up.
At first, I found that surprisingly difficult.
I hadn't realised how much of my life had been organised around achievement until there was nothing left to achieve. I didn't know how much I had been relying on being busy until life became quiet enough for me to notice the difference.
I didn't leave Africa with answers.
I left having experienced something I hadn't known I was missing.
Space.
What Happened Next
That time in Africa changed the direction of my life.
It was also where I met my husband, Todd.
Together, we went on to build Canada's largest institute for holistic medicine and sustainable living. Over the next sixteen years, we spent our days with people navigating illness, relationships, grief, burnout, major life transitions, and the quieter questions that often emerge when life no longer feels the way it once did.
No two stories were the same. Some people arrived because of illness, others because of a relationship, a loss, a business, or a decision they couldn't seem to make. The details were always different.
What stayed with me was how often the deeper conversation wasn't.
Again and again, I met intelligent, capable people who weren't lacking insight. They had simply stopped recognising what had quietly become normal: a responsibility they no longer questioned, a relationship they had slowly adapted themselves to, or a pace of living that no longer left room to hear themselves think.
Over time, I stopped looking for the right framework. I became much more interested in the person sitting in front of me.
The first conversation was rarely the deepest one.
Another Kind Of Knowing
Motherhood deepened many of these observations in ways I never could have anticipated.
When my daughter, Ela, was born, she went without oxygen for eleven minutes and was declared dead at birth.
The days that followed were filled with opinions, predictions and more uncertainty than I had ever known.
Beneath all of it, something else remained remarkably steady.
I knew she was okay.
I couldn't explain that knowing, and I wasn't interested in trying to. It existed alongside everything the doctors were telling us, and it never left.
Today, Ela is a remarkable young woman, and she and her younger brother, Oliver, continue to shape me in ways I never expected.
What I Keep
Coming
Back To
I still read. I still learn from other people, and there are conversations that continue to shape the way I think. Some books have stayed with me for years. Some people have changed the direction of my life.
But after all these years, I've become much less interested in collecting answers than in paying attention.
I've sat with founders, physicians, parents, entrepreneurs, artists and people standing at some of the biggest crossroads of their lives. Their stories have all been different, but I've rarely found the most important conversation where they expected it to be.
Again and again, I've watched people discover that what they were searching for wasn't something new. It was something they had quietly stopped trusting, or something that had become so familiar they no longer saw it.
Today
Today, my work takes me to many different places.
Some conversations happen across a table. Others unfold over Zoom. Some take place while walking forest trails in British Columbia, along coastlines, or through mountain landscapes across North America. Others continue over several days on retreat.
I've found that where a conversation happens matters far less than whether someone finally has enough space to hear themselves.
