After college I moved to Tokyo, then Stockholm, Paris, back to Tokyo, Washington D.C., and finally Hong Kong, where I've now lived for thirty years. That itinerary turns out to matter. Leaders today are asked to navigate complexity, ambiguity, and constant change — I've spent a lifetime building the nervous system for it.

I co-founded my first web development company in Hong Kong in 1996, Volkswagen was our first client. The dot-com boom that followed took me into creative director and regional brand manager roles for multinationals. After being made redundant in the 2008 financial crisis, I completed my MBA at the University of Leicester and launched two digital agencies under the Brand Catalyst umbrella, later partnered in a health food business, and went on to serve as CEO of a Web3 wellness venture.

Running underneath all of it, a parallel practice. I began studying Reiki in 1996 and have spent the thirty years since deepening my work in meditation and contemplative traditions. For a long time the two tracks — corporate and inner — moved alongside each other without meeting. The 2008 financial crisis, a toxic business partnership in 2016, and the sudden loss of my sister to pancreatic cancer in December 2017 each pushed the inner work deeper while the outer career kept building. What I offer now is the point where the two finally converge.

One more chapter belongs here, because it shaped the way I lead. During the dot-com years I trained as a technical diver in Hong Kong and ended up teaching trimix and rebreather diving in the Philippines, qualifying divers to operate safely at 100 meters, where panic kills and protocol saves lives. It taught me more about calm decision-making, leadership under pressure, and the real cost of overriding your own instincts than any boardroom ever did.

Today my work brings together neuroscience-based happiness coaching, leadership development, and three decades of personal practice. The belief underneath all of it is simple: real happiness is cultivated, not consumed. The outside world will sell you a thousand substitutes — status, stuff, achievement, distraction — and none of them work for long. Happiness is a capacity, and like any capacity, it responds to the right training.

I live on a small island in Hong Kong, where I hike most mornings, tend a plot in the community garden, and swim in the sea. My husband holds my kite string while I travel — a quiet anchor for a life that has rarely stayed still.