Before my burnout, I had it all.

A beautiful daughter, a thriving career, physical health, financial success, amazing friends, and a loving, supportive family.  I also had clinical depression, crippling anxiety, relentless panic attacks, insomnia, and too many vices to count. 

Outwardly, I was the picture of success. Inwardly, I was drowning.

Year after year, I watched with horror as my negative, self-destructive thinking and behaviour sabotaged crucial areas of my life - personally and professionally. I was caught in a cycle of striving, succeeding, and silently breaking down, wondering why nothing was never enough.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

It was a sunny morning, and I was walking through the busy streets of Leeds on my way to a client meeting.  It was then that I had a thought that stopped me in my tracks - a thought so dark and deeply unsettling that it shattered the walls of denial I’d built around myself:

“If only I could get hit by a car right now, then I wouldn’t have to do this.”

I didn’t want to die. I just wanted an escape - a minor accident, a few broken bones, and a week in hospital - anything to press pause on my client, my situation, my life, my Self.

That was my turning point. A moment of brutal clarity. I realised that something had to change - not just the surface details of my life but the deeper forces within me that kept leading me back to this place of despair. Everything I thought I knew about success, leadership, and life, needed to be redefined.

I’d spent my life believing that only some parts of me were acceptable. These were the qualities I welcomed and included in what I called ‘Me’. The rest - the fear, the self-doubt, the inner-critic, the fragility - were unacceptable, and were banished to the shadows of my subconscious.

What I didn’t understand was that, like all human-beings, 95% of my thoughts, reactions, and behaviours are driven by my subconscious mind – a mind that only instinctively feels and never deliberately thinks.

This revelation was the key to understanding why, no matter how much I achieved or how hard I tried, my thoughts and behaviours seemed to betray me time and time again.

What followed was a journey unlike any I’d experienced before. It wasn’t about fixing what was broken or chasing another version of success. It was about uncovering, understanding, and embracing the parts of myself I had spent most of my life trying to suppress. 

It was about clearly seeing the subconscious patterns and invisible forces that drove me and integrating them with my conscious intentions and aspirations. This process of integration showed me what it truly meant to lead and live.

This is where my Why was born. I realised that the principles of Integrated Leadership - illuminating and integrating all parts of ourselves, from the bits we are proud of to the bits we are not - are not just transformative on a personal level but have the power to ripple out into teams, organisations, and society itself.

My Why is rooted in a deep frustration with the leadership status quo - a paradigm that often ignores the profound impact of the unseen forces that drive not only us, but also our organisations and the communities we serve.

It’s heart-breaking to me to witness brilliant, capable leaders trapped in cycles of burnout, disconnection, and misalignment, often blaming themselves for challenges they don’t fully understand.

I’m driven by a burning desire to illuminate what’s hidden and to guide leaders to reclaim their power.  To see themselves, their teams, and their organisations through a new lens - one of acceptance, compassion, and radical self-inclusion. A lens that transforms not just how they lead but how they live.

Through my coaching and consultancy, I apply neuroscience-informed techniques, somatic intelligence, deep intuition, rigorous diagnostics, and lived experience to help leaders access and integrate their subconscious programming.  I create spaces of safety, clarity, and possibility - enabling leaders to tune into what’s really been driving them.  It’s in these spaces that they can see and harvest the treasures buried within their automatic impulses, and release with love the patterns and beliefs that don’t serve them anymore.

I founded Neema to support and honour the leaders who are tired of pretending they have it all together.

The leaders who are recognised as brilliant, driven, and capable - and yet feel the heavy weight of disconnection, frustration, or burnout in their hearts.

The leaders who care deeply about their people yet see the gaps in their culture or teams and blame themselves for not having the answers.

The leaders who lie awake at night, listening to an inner critic relentlessly telling them they aren’t good enough - and then start the day wondering, “Is this all there is?”

The leaders who have spent their careers believing that if they push through the exhaustion just a little more, they’ll finally have done enough - only to realise, time and time again, that ‘enough’ was always a mirage.

The leaders who yearn for a deep, cleansing exhale.  An exhale that releases them from the grip of who they are not, to make space for who they are.