That certainty is overrated. Many of us have been taught that good leaders always have the answers. In reality, some of the most important leadership moments involve admitting you don't know, staying curious and being willing to change your mind. Leadership isn't about being the smartest person in the room. It's about creating enough safety for the best thinking to emerge from the room.

I've unlearned the idea that success is something you arrive at. For years I thought success lived somewhere in the future: the next milestone, the next achievement, the next piece of recognition. What I've come to understand is that success is much more relational than that. It's about how you feel while you're building, who you're becoming and whether your work remains aligned with your values. Does it mostly support you feeling good is a question I stop and ask myself often. The moments I'm most proud of rarely show up on a spreadsheet.

The normalisation of emotional suffering. We've become remarkably good at accepting stress, burnout, loneliness and anxiety as inevitable by-products of modern life. We wear exhaustion as a badge of honour and often don't realise how disconnected we've become until something breaks. That belief fuels everything we do at Self Space. Mental health shouldn't be reserved for moments of crisis. It should be part of everyday life, something we actively tend to rather than something we only pay attention to when it's gone wrong.

I'd redefine business success to include human outcomes alongside financial ones. We measure revenue, growth and productivity with incredible precision, but we rarely ask what impact an organisation is having on the wellbeing of the people within it. If leaders were held accountable for creating psychologically healthy environments, we'd see better businesses and healthier societies. It would serve employees first, but ultimately everyone benefits.

I don't think purpose is something you find. I think it's something you stop ignoring. As a therapist, I spent years watching people arrive only when life had become unbearable. Bright, successful, capable people who had learnt to override themselves in the pursuit of achievement, productivity or simply keeping everyone else okay. It struck me that we'd normalised waiting until crisis before offering care. We don't do that with our physical health, yet with our emotional health it's become the default.

Self Space was born from wanting to interrupt that pattern. To make therapy feel less like an emergency service and more like a place to stay in relationship with yourself.

That I'd be far less interested in proving myself. When I was younger I thought leadership meant being impressive. Now I think it's about being available. Available to listen, to change your mind, to hold complexity without rushing to simplify it. To say I don’t know, I need help/support, there are people better than me at that, what do you think, can you give me some time. The more authentic you are, the more people trust you. 

She also wouldn't believe that I'd build a business around conversations. Words were not free flowing in my childhood and emotional language was non-existent. Yet I've never been more convinced that conversations change lives, not because they give us answers, but because they help us ask different questions.

Building a values-led business means this isn't a one-off moment; it's a recurring decision. There have been partnerships we've walked away from because they didn't feel congruent with who we are. There have been commercial decisions that looked sensible on paper but would have compromised the trust we've worked so hard to build. Purpose means the most when it costs you something, when it speaks to your integrity,  Otherwise it's just branding.

Many times, the pressure to grow can quietly pull you away from the very thing people connected with in the first place. Growth can become addictive. We've had to repeatedly ask ourselves whether we're scaling the business or diluting it. Leadership, I've learnt, is often about protecting what shouldn't be optimised. 

One of the biggest myths I've challenged is that emotional wellbeing sits outside performance. We still talk as though looking after people and achieving ambitious results are competing priorities. They're not. People don't thrive despite feeling psychologically safe; they thrive because of it. The future of leadership isn't choosing between humanity and performance. It's recognising they're deeply connected. One cannot exist without the other. 

It's the everyday conversations that stay with me, the rich and truthful chats about the real shit. Where vulnerability is allowed to show its face always draws me in and encourages me to stay present with it, most of us need somewhere we can stop performing and this still feels increasingly rare. I also like collaborating, not debating but conversations that help elevate me in some way, help me feel a tiny bit uncomfortable maybe, because that's when growth can happen on that very edge of discomfort. 

Everything I do outside Self Space has the same intention. Although honestly I have very little time for any other type of hustle. Whether I'm writing, speaking or having conversations online, I'm trying to make psychology feel less like something you study and more like something you live and feed less into the psycho babble which is dominating our air waves. Therapy shouldn't only happen behind a closed door. It should spill into workplaces, friendships, families and culture. If we change the conversation, we change what's possible and our world is crying out for change right now. 

I'd stop treating wellbeing as an employee benefit. It's infrastructure. Every business depends on the emotional capacity of its people, yet we rarely measure or invest in it with the same seriousness as financial performance. The organisations of the future won't win because they demand more from people. They'll win because they understand people better.

They've become much less willing to accept, "That's just how it's always been." I find that hopeful and exciting.  They're questioning presenteeism, hierarchy, burnout and the idea that your worth should be measured by your productivity. Rather than criticising that, I think we should pay attention. They're asking questions many of us stopped asking years ago.

I hope they say I helped make emotional wellbeing feel more human, more accessible and less stigmatised. I hope they say I was a human first, that I led with vulnerability and truth. But more than anything, I hope they felt something, seen, met, understood. That being around me meant something. 

The thing I've learned through therapy, leadership and life is that people rarely remember the strategy or the presentation. They remember how they felt in your presence. If I've helped people feel a little less alone, that's probably the legacy that matters most.