I have sat where my clients sit

I spent twenty years in high-stakes corporate environments. I qualified as a solicitor at an international firm, then moved into restructuring, where I spent most of my career. For much of that time I was Managing Director, leading intellectual property valuation and disposition work across the UK and Europe.

The mandates were about as high-consequence as commercial work gets: Thomas Cook, Monarch Airlines, TM Lewin, MFI, Land of Leather, British Ceramic Tile, Bank Fashion, Poundworld, and the sale of two football clubs, Bolton Wanderers and Blackpool. Household names, usually at the worst moment in their history, with lenders, administrators and thousands of livelihoods attached to the outcome. I was recognised in the TRI 250 Hall of Fame for that work.

I also spent years delivering training to firms and professional bodies across the restructuring and accountancy professions.

I was checking email at two in the morning, not because anyone asked me to, but because I did not know how to stop. I was performing at a high level and quietly coming apart. That is a pattern I now recognise in almost every senior professional I coach.

For a long time I was on the conveyor belt.

I studied law because my father was a lawyer and I had no better idea what to do with myself. I never once asked myself what I actually wanted. No inner compass, just momentum. I crammed, passed, and walked into a traineeship on day one thinking: they are absolutely going to find out.

Nobody forces you onto the conveyor belt. You step on because it is moving and everyone else is moving with it. And you tell yourself this is fine, this makes sense, this is what people like me do.

Years later, at an industry awards dinner, with the career built, the awards won and every measurable standard met, I excused myself between the main course and the speeches, walked to the bathroom, and just sat. Not for any practical reason. Staring at the back of a door, while my brain quietly shut down. That is what high performance can look like from the inside.

So I did what any rational, self-aware professional does. I quit and bought a campervan. I trekked to Everest Base Camp and drove through Europe, and for about six weeks it was brilliant. Then the same flat emptiness came back, standing in the mountains of northern Spain, birds of prey circling above a lake so still it barely looked real, feeling absolutely nothing.

You cannot outrun a life you never consciously chose.

That is when it landed. I had been trying to solve an internal problem by changing my location. The turning point was not about rejecting ambition. It was about becoming deliberate: working out my values, my strengths, what genuinely energised me and what quietly drained me. Through coaching, therapy and a lot of uncomfortable honesty, it came down to five questions.