I came to this work the long way round.

Not through a policy document or a diversity strategy. Through the experience of standing in rooms — workplaces, institutions, ordinary Tuesday afternoons — and feeling something happen that no one around me had a name for. Or if they did, the name they reached for was the wrong one.

I learned early that the words available to describe my experience had mostly been chosen by people who didn’t share it. Resilience instead of accumulation. Composure instead of dissociation. Professionalism instead of performance. The name we give something determines whether we’re allowed to feel it. For a long time, I used the names I was given, and wondered why they never quite fit.

Finding language for my own experience didn’t feel like therapy. It felt like cartography. Like finally being able to draw the map of terrain I’d been navigating blind. And once I could name it for myself — once the map existed — I couldn’t stop handing it to other people.

That’s where the work began.

Not in the wanting to fix organisations, but in the recognition that what organisations do to people is often invisible precisely because we’ve agreed — collectively, quietly — to call it something else. I started in marketing, drawn there by the simple fury of not seeing myself reflected anywhere. I moved into internal culture work when I realised the external image was always downstream of internal systems. And I arrived at where I am now — advising senior leaders, writing, speaking — because naming things accurately turns out to be one of the most political acts available to us.

I am based in Norwich. I work nationally. I write on Substack about the things institutions prefer to manage from a distance. And I believe, with the certainty of someone who has carried invisible bruises through an ordinary day, that the most important question an organisation can ask is not what are our values — but what are we actually asking people to swallow.