I've spent a long time in rooms where people talk about things that matter.

For nearly three decades, some of those rooms were press offices, agency suites, and boardrooms. At the BBC, then running my own communications and PR agency for 27 years - working with clients who needed to shape narratives, manage crises, and hold their nerve under pressure.

For the last twelve of those years, I've also been in a different kind of room. I retrained as a therapist while the agency was still running, not as a pivot, but as a parallel path. Two practices built side by side. What surprised me then, and still does, is how much the same questions surface in both.

Who am I underneath the role I play? What am I actually feeling, versus what I'm showing? What's the cost of the gap between those two things? These aren't just therapy questions. I heard them in boardrooms too - usually unspoken, but present.

I've been practising for over a decade now, working with individuals, many of them professionals and leaders, using Transactional Analysis and CBT.