Before my burnout, I had it all.

A beautiful daughter, a thriving career, physical health, financial success, great 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 needed a break from being the version of myself I’d built.  From the pressure to perform.  From the responsibility.  From the misalignment that no one else could see - but that I couldn’t not feel.

That was the moment something cracked. In the deepest part of me, in a cellular way.
Like my system finally said: enough.

That moment wasn’t a breakdown. It was a breakthrough. A rupture in the illusion that I could keep pushing without cost. A glimpse of how far I’d drifted from my own internal truth.

Looking back, it was my body - my subconscious - sounding the alarm. The 95% of me I’d ignored for years had run out of ways to whisper, so it shouted.
Not with words, but with sensation. With overwhelm. With refusal.

What followed wasn’t a bounce back. It was a deep descent - into the parts of myself I’d spent a lifetime managing, ignoring, performing over.

It wasn’t about fixing what was broken.
It was about turning toward what I’d exiled.
The fear. The control. The beliefs that said I had to earn my worth through excellence.
The patterns that shaped how I led - and hollowed me out while doing it.

What I came to understand is this:

Leadership isn’t just behaviour. It’s frequency.

We lead through what we embody, what we transmit - far more than from what we say or do.

And when there’s a split between our performance and our truth, between our strategies and our system, between our brilliance and our buried pain - that split doesn’t stay hidden.

It shows up in culture.
It shows up in the team.
It shows up in the silence between words.

This is where my why was born.

I am driven by a deep commitment to shift the leadership status quo - a system that often ignores the profound impact of the unseen forces that truly drive us and our organisations. 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 energised by a burning desire to illuminate what’s hidden and empower 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.

I founded Neema for those leaders.

For the ones who are tired of holding it all together.
For the ones who are celebrated publicly, and privately exhausted.
For the ones who care deeply, but can’t seem to close the gap between how they lead and how they feel.
For the ones who lie awake listening to an inner critic that never quiets.
For the ones who thought if they could just push a little harder, they’d finally be enough - only to realise the goalpost was always moving.

For the ones who want an exhale. A real one.
One that releases who they’re not,
and makes space for who they are.

This is the work I do now - through coaching, facilitation, and speaking.
I don’t bring frameworks. I bring frequency.
I don’t fix. I reveal.
I create spaces where the deeper intelligence in the system - yours, your team’s, your organisation’s - can finally be heard.

Because once you’re back in coherence, you don’t have to perform leadership anymore.

You just lead.