Like most people, I spent the better part of my life looking outward for the things that needed fixing on the inside. I studied, I developed, I threw myself into personal growth — at work and outside of it. I read the theory. I did the courses. And I still didn't quite get there.

But it was running a Mind organisation in the North East of England that began to show me something different. I came to love that work — the lunch clubs where people simply got together, the art sessions where thoughts and emotions found their way onto paper and became something beautiful, the bread making course that was never really about bread making. It was about providing enough distraction, enough warmth, enough ordinary human connection, for the inner critic to go quiet long enough for the person to simply exist. To feel seen, heard, humanised, normalised.

What I noticed, again and again, was this: the less formalised the environment, the more people became themselves. It wasn't the latest therapy that made the most difference. It was the feeling of being in a room where nothing needed to be performed. We had service users who went on to run activities, to sit on the board as Trustees, to gain qualifications that gave them the edge in a job search and, with it, a renewed confidence I watched transform people in real time. That work shaped everything I now believe about what actually helps.

And still, even after all of that, there was something in me that hadn't been reached.

A friend told me about the Mace Energy Method. I was nervous — I wasn't sure how much I'd have to disclose, how much I'd have to relive. I needn't have worried.

At the start, I was asked just two questions: what did I need help with, and what did I want to feel like at the end? From there, the process works by finding the upsets — the significant ones, the ones that have quietly changed you as a person — and guiding you through a simple process with a practitioner. At the end of it, you still remember what happened. But you are no longer caught up in the drama of that emotion. It stays as memory. The charge around it simply isn't there anymore.

I found it entirely liberating. Illuminating. I felt genuinely joyful by the end, because I knew that the thing I had unknowingly believed about myself — the thing that had been getting in the way without my even realising it — was never going to hold me back in the same way again.

And it hasn't.

Nothing else I had ever tried did that. That's why I believe in it completely, and why I want to share it with everyone who is ready to change.

The Mace Energy Method quietened my inner critic long enough for something else to become audible: my own inner knowing. My inner wisdom. It gets louder with each day that passes. I no longer reject who I am. I listen to what I'm trying to tell myself, what I'm trying to remember. And if I can help you do that too, then I'm here.

Not polish. Not a perfectly curated story of transformation with a tidy bow on the end. I bring grounded, down-to-earth knowledge and a deeper understanding of what actually works — not on a scientific level, but at an emotionally raw, human one.

I have experienced my fair share of pain and suffering. If there is any way I can relieve the suffering of someone going through something difficult, I will. The menopause was its own kind of wake-up call for me — the moment I finally understood that I matter too, that a lifetime of putting everyone else first had quietly cost me something, and that it was time to go looking for myself. The joy that came back when I did was unlike anything I had expected.

This work — all of it — is inner leadership. The work of knowing yourself from the inside out. Inner knowing, inner trust, inner choice, inner freedom. Like Dorothy in those ruby slippers, the means to go home was always there. The work is simply learning to use it.