The path
Not broken. Just un-nurtured.
I didn't start with emotional intelligence. I started with social anxiety, depression, and a deep sense of not belonging. No one taught me that the energy I was born with was something to value.
So I did what made sense: I tried to understand it from the outside. A degree in Communications and Psychology, years as a language interpreter, then audit and finance, more than fifteen years in hard numbers inside organisations that trade in certainty, including multinational entities, and I was good at it.
For years I was told to wear a mask, and I tried. It felt like a betrayal I couldn't name, but that same pull to understand the world kept me on national radio for over twenty years and in front of rooms as a public speaker. Still, the sharpest decisions carried a second signal below the data, and I'd learned to ignore it. Most leaders have.
So I kept looking, deeper, into the things the corner office quietly dismisses: massage therapy, Reiki, yoga, martial arts, family constellations, nervous-system work. Not as a departure, but as the missing half. The body keeps the data the mind edits out, and learning to understand it made me a better strategist, not a softer one.
Then my daughter was born. Through her eyes, I saw what I'd never seen in myself: energy that wasn't broken, just un-nurtured. That's when it clicked: emotional intelligence isn't something you acquire, it's a language to return to. The bridge between the logic we use to survive and the energy we need to thrive.
Whole Intelligence is what happened when I stopped choosing between them. Everything I do now sits at that intersection: the accountant's discipline and the practitioner's depth, held in one room, underpinned by over 25 years of unlearning and relearning. Because I lived the split, and I know its cost.
