My Story

For years I tried to solve the problem. The cost of focus and satisfaction at work was an inability to switch off, laugh easily and be present at home. Everything felt like hard work. Weekends and evenings increasingly became about patching myself up to get back into the fray.

And yet I loved my job. I was achieving highly. I was riding high on years of hard work. But the rollercoaster of secretly teetering on the verge of burnout was taking its toll.

I thought I was winning through problem solving. Every new thing I discovered to try added to the highs and lows, and eventually added to the problem itself. Better sleep hygiene made my sleep better, but any disruption felt like a disaster. Productivity hacks made me more productive and so I became the go-to person to get things done, which was flattering and a privilege — but also added more. I was improving things but not getting closer to what I actually wanted. And I felt like I was spinning plates on top of spinning plates.

What I wanted was what I'd assumed would come automatically from working hard and making sacrifices others weren't willing to make — fulfilment and freedom in how I spent my time.

Then came a series of moments that started to shift me out of that old model of success into a new one.

After leading my department through a really difficult period, I was called into management — not to be thanked, but to be pulled apart with personal criticisms I couldn't even act on. I was so overwhelmed I apologised, pushed through the rest of the day like a professional, holding it together until I got through my front door. I collapsed in tears the moment I got home.

For two weeks I woke in the night feeling like I'd been punched in the chest and couldn't breathe. And that's when my assumptions about the value of sacrificing my ease, myself, and the relationships with those I love most in the world — for work — started to unravel.

If my sacrifices were not appreciated, like a pebble on a beach when the tide comes in, my efforts would simply be washed away and forgotten. I needed to rethink. I started planning my exit. And I quietly stopped overgiving — though as someone highly conscientious, it probably wasn't even noticed.

I had been trying to solve a problem that couldn't be solved that way. The severe overwhelm, the exhaustion, the losing myself — these weren't problems to fix. They were signs that the old way of achieving success was no longer working for me. Working hard and making sacrifices others weren't willing to make had got me this far, but wasn't getting me what I wanted. It was time for an upgrade.

For my 50th birthday I attended a Zen enlightenment intensive. After a profound experience of oneness, something fundamental shifted. I moved from treating personal growth as a self-improvement project to a deep understanding that there is nothing wrong. Not with me, not with my situation, not with the world. That realisation was what allowed me to start living differently — more aligned.

I went on to train as a Zen yoga teacher with the same Zen master. What I learned went far beyond yoga and changed my life. My teacher, Daizan Roshi, drew a triangle with two horizontal lines separating it into three sections — mind, heart, body in each. He told us that most of us are living with it inverted, overusing the mind at the expense of everything else.

"The Buddha said that 'mindfulness centered on the body leads to a happy life here and now and to the culmination of wisdom and end of suffering.'" — Practical Zen, p.57

We can learn to live more skilfully — with mind, heart and body in alignment, supporting each other. For me, this means learning to control my attention, because how and what I attend to determines my experience of life. It underlies the ability to focus on our work and be present at home. It's all an attention practice.

I no longer believe that what I want — focus and satisfaction at work, and the ability to switch off, laugh easily and be present at home — is in contradiction. I see focus at work and presence at home as the same thing. Those of us who like to work hard, who are naturally highly driven, can have it all if we're willing to learn to live more skilfully, as Daizan Roshi taught me.

For a while I thought the answer was to want less — to downsize my dreams and settle for something smaller. I worked hard at this, focusing solely on teaching Zen yoga. I learned a great deal and gained many appreciative students, some of whom were happy to pay me simply to lie on a mat for an hour in the middle of their crazy week. But it wasn't enough for me. It didn't fulfil me.

I can't downsize my dreams. I was born to coach, and before I knew it I found myself coaching again — then launching courses and memberships, starting a podcast, writing a book, then another. I'm now fully back to my driven, ambitious self. Only this time it's very different. I refuse to compromise either my ability to focus in a satisfying way at work, or my ability to switch off, laugh easily and be present in the rest of my life. I don't always get it right — it's a practice. But one I highly recommend if you really want it all.