My yoga practice deepened into trauma-sensitive work. Understanding what it means to need informed support without being able to access it, I founded True North, a non-profit delivering therapeutic yoga to women and young people affected by domestic, sexual and childhood abuse.

The experiences that the women I worked with and I had within the UK court system led me to pursue a law degree. I wanted to understand the systems that were re-traumatising people at their most vulnerable, and contribute to changing them.

Throughout all of this, I kept working as a veterinary surgeon. I'm now the principal surgeon at one of the busiest emergency clinics in the UK, and I've used everything I know about business strategy, nervous system regulation and values-led decision-making to transform the clinic's reputation, commercial success and clinical performance.

But the real shift wasn't professional. It was personal.
  
I stopped building the life I thought I should want and started building one that actually fit.

I moved to a remote corner of the Lake District. I run in the hills every day, climb mountains and frozen waterfalls, swim in lakes when it's inadvisably cold, and run further than is entirely sensible. I have more financial freedom, more purpose, and more joy than at any point in my career — and I work fewer hours to get it.

What changed wasn't hard work. I was never short on hard work. What changed was the framework — mindset and nervous system work, building on values rather than expectations, integrating neuroscience and nature, and learning to make strategic decisions from a regulated, clear-headed place rather than a survival state.

I work in a trauma-informed way not because it's on-trend, but because most of my clients are carrying more than they've named. When I started applying these methods deliberately, everything accelerated.

I was sceptical of coaching for a long time. I'd sat with coaches who helped me make lists of things I already knew, attached a made-up deadline, and unsurprisingly nothing changed. It was working with a running coach that shifted my thinking — with the right guidance, I went from the back of the pack to almost on the podium in a single race. When I found a business coach who actually challenged how I thought about money and growth, everything moved. Other vets and yoga teachers started coming to me for advice on their businesses, and things grew from there.

This approach — the integration of strategic business thinking with nervous system work, neuroscience, nature and values — doesn't currently exist anywhere else in the clinical or outdoor professional space. I built it because I needed it. I coach with it because it works.

Wild places shape my methodology because they shape how I understand resilience, risk and what it means to be fully alive in the world. The outdoors isn't peripheral to what I do. It's where I live, think, recover and come back to myself. There is nothing like reaching the top of a route — cold fingers, wind in your hair, ravens circling below you — and knowing you got yourself there.