About

Photo by Paul Imanuelsen

I am that refugee who has finally found her ultimate safe harbour within her own heart.

When I was 18 months old, I was hidden in an onion truck as part of the perilous journey to escape Vietnam after the war. Miraculously, we survived when the majority of Vietnamese Boat People died at sea. We became refugees in Hong Kong before being sponsored as a community service project to settle in rural Virginia. As young children, my older brother and I spent evenings alone waiting for the headlights of our parents' car to return from working multiple evening jobs in addition to their day shifts. Even though everyone was doing their best given the circumstances, social services visited us on more than one occasion. When we were old enough, we accompanied our parents and started our first jobs cleaning accounting and law offices after school. The focus was purely on survival for the first 18 years of my life. Now, I know the Universe was taking care of me the whole time. At the time, however, the feeling was one of fear, confusion, frustration and loneliness. 

These days, people who meet me cannot imagine those early days of my life. Before becoming a coach, I was one of the pioneers of corporate social innovation. For over a decade, I ran my own business design and innovation studio in the UK, served as a mentor for MIT’s Global Ideas Challenge and Unreasonable Institute’s Project Literacy Lab, and created webinars for Plus Acumen and Grand Challenges Canada. I have worked in the US, Australia, Kenya, Senegal, Mali, Eswatini, South Africa, Ghana, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. I have spoken at conferences, given lectures, and am a published author in Harvard Business Review. Before all of this, I worked in management consulting in strategy and technology. Anyone who has been a management consultant knows this is a grueling professional rite of passage that only amplified the deep wells of anxiety and sense of not enoughness that were planted in my early years. It took decades to find these roots and heal them. The healing is a continuous daily practice that is like an onion. A new layer is revealed only when I am ripe to meet it.

I started my life being a recipient of humanitarian aid and living under the poverty line to then being an advisor to aid agencies such as USAID, UN and DFID three decades later. On the one hand, I spent years cleaning toilets and waiting tables, on the other hand, I hold degrees from MIT + Harvard, have helped a classmate get elected to parliament, and was asked to give a talk about my life in a cowshed in Wales. When I revisit the little refugee girl within me, she is in disbelief at how our life has unfolded. Now, I realise ALL of it is a gift. Each miscarriage and the hard won serenity I now hold regarding my fertility journey, my dad’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis and the deep understanding being his caregiver is giving me about the arc of life, my cancer scare and subsequent healing, every moment of anxiety, joy, confusion, happiness, fear, triumph, sadness, and peace has given me this unique, rare and abundant perspective.

Photo by Nicola Pavan

It is with this perspective and sacredness for each life’s journey that I hold coaching space for clients to digest and celebrate all parts of their lives and love all parts of themselves.

Training & credentials

Along the way I was being taken care of the whole time and gifted these practices, resources and wise souls to light the way:

Meditation

Plant medicine 

Astanga Yoga

Big nature

Somatics

Energy Healing

Chanting 

EMDR

EFT

Learning to build new neural pathways

Practicing Self Love & Self Compassion Daily

Adyashanti

Michael Singer

Tara Brach

Suresh Ramaswamy

Byron Katie

Marie Manucherhi

Abraham Hicks

Rachel Zaremba 

Henry Fields  

Matthew Rogerson 

Those who walk the clean and sober path of recovery every day. One day at a time.

Ronald and Mary Hulnick’s book “Loyalty to Your Soul”

Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems and his book “No Bad Parts”

Erica Ariel Fox’s book “Winning from Within”

Shirzad Chamine’s book and coaching approach “Positive Intelligence”

Oprah’s audio book “The Wisdom of Sundays"

Bessel van der Kolk’s book “The Body Keeps the Score”

Candace Pert’s book “Molecules of Emotion” 

Brian Greene’s book “The Elegant Universe”

Mark Wolynn’s book “It Didn’t Start With You”

Sara Ingerman’s book “Soul Retrieval”

Oak breathing and meditation app