From Empty Suit to Authentic Life

I’m Jeremy Tomlinson — a former Finance Director, Chartered Accountant, and now an ICF-accredited Transformative and Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach. I work primarily with UK-based senior professionals and also support clients internationally through online coaching.

For many years, I lived a life that looked successful from the outside and felt increasingly hollow on the inside.

I understand the world of senior professional responsibility — particularly within the health, legal and education sectors — because I spent decades inside it. I also understand what happens when a life built on duty, expectation, and performance quietly disconnects from the person living it.

Both experiences shape my work today.

Like many people of my generation, I chose my career in the mid-1980s less from inner conviction and more from conformity. I followed a path that seemed sensible, respectable and safe — shaped by the expectations of others and a desire to do the “right thing”.

From early childhood, my compass was set for me, not by me.

The pressure to succeed in an unknown and intimidating world weighed heavily on my young shoulders. This, combined with my experience of bullying at school, formed the basis of an anxious, people-pleasing pattern that quietly shaped the internal framework of my early professional career.

Outwardly, the path worked.

I held senior finance and business roles, almost entirely at board level, in complex professional organisations across the health, legal, financial, and independent education sectors. I was well-paid, well-regarded, and trusted with responsibility. I appeared calm, competent, and in control.

But internally, something didn’t align.

My professional working environments were permanently stressful and dynamic, with almost relentless strategic change to manage and direct. As a perfectionist, I worked many long and lonely hours in private agony and this played havoc on my mental agility and emotional health. My face was etched with exhaustion and anxiety.

And having qualified as a chartered accountant, I felt the expectations of all around me to perform effortlessly at the highest level. Yet I am at heart a people person with a creative mind, and the rigours and pressures of those expectations for spreadsheet expertise and precision almost broke me.

My anxiety was at its extreme in leadership and board meetings where I felt almost overwhelmed with the scourge of “imposter syndrome”.

Over time, the gap between who I appeared to be and who I felt myself to be grew wider. The professional role became a mask — one I wore convincingly, even to myself.

Behind it lived immense anxiety, chronic stress, exhaustion, and a deep sense of loneliness – even hopelessness – I didn’t know how to name, let alone share.

As I moved into midlife, my body began to express what my mind had learned to suppress.

I experienced persistent anxiety, emotional overwhelm, exhaustion, and physical symptoms that could no longer be ignored. Caffeine consumption went through the roof. Sleep became fractured. Concentration faltered. The effort required simply to function increased every year.

I was not unskilled.
I was not weak.
I was profoundly disconnected from myself.

And I became increasingly depressed.

Eventually, in 2007/08, that disconnection reached a crisis point.

The physical symptoms in my body became acute and debilitating.

Burnout became my body’s alarm system: the wake-up call that saved my life.

My doctor’s words: “Jeremy, you are about to pop. I am telling you to take time off, and I’m telling you it’s non-negotiable.”

I was forced to step down from my job, and I chose to step out of my career.

I quit, and I hid.

My initial convalescence took many months as I slowly allowed my body to slow down and heal, and I began the journey of self-discovery.

Looking back now, I don’t see that period as a breakdown.
I see it as a rite of passage — my transition to the life I was meant to live.

The years that followed were not about reinventing myself overnight or escaping responsibility. They were about deep re-integration after burnout.

I undertook my own deep personal work — therapeutic, somatic, psychological and reflective — to understand how earlier experiences, unexamined beliefs, and survival patterns had shaped my adult life and professional identity.

I learned how trauma, often experienced in childhood — often subtle and long-normalised — lives not just in the mind, but in the nervous system and the body.

I learned how perfectionism, people-pleasing, over-responsibility, and chronic self-doubt often begin as adaptations — not character flaws.

And I learned that lasting change doesn’t come from trying harder, but from listening more honestly.

This work reshaped not only my working life, but the way I live.

Today, I support professionals — particularly within education — who recognise aspects of their own experience in mine.

People who are capable, committed, and outwardly successful, yet inwardly tired, disillusioned, fragmented, or quietly despairing.

People who sense that continuing in the same way is no longer sustainable — but who don’t yet know what a different way of living might look like, or how to get there.

My role is not to “fix” you or tell you who to become.

It is to offer a secure, thoughtful, trauma-informed space and transformative experience in which you can:

• Understand the patterns that have shaped your life
• Reconnect with yourself beneath professional identity
• Calm a nervous system that has been on high alert for years
• Make profound discoveries about your true self, your identity, potential and unique calling
• Make choices that are aligned rather than compelled
• Move forward with greater clarity, agency, and self-respect

My work draws on three integrated foundations:

Professional Experience
Chartered Accountant and former Finance Director within complex, high-pressure professional environments, including the National Health Service, law firms and independent schools.

Coaching & Therapeutic Training
ICF-accredited Transformative Coach
ICF-accredited Somatic Trauma-Informed Coach (incorporating Polyvagal Theory, Internal Family Systems, Positive Psychology and Regulation techniques)

Hypnotherapy, NLP, and Personality Profiling Practitioner

Personal Integration
Not theory alone, but lived, embodied experience of chronic stress, burnout, and recovery.

This combination allows me to meet you with empathy and steadiness — understanding your world without colluding with what is harming you.

As a man who spent many years carrying distress in silence, I am especially aware of how difficult it can be for men to acknowledge vulnerability without feeling diminished by it.

If that speaks to you, you may wish to read:

If you recognise yourself in this story — not in every detail, but in its emotional truth — you don’t need to face this turning point alone.

You’re welcome to begin with a private, confidential 30-minute discovery conversation.

This is not a commitment.
It’s a space to pause, reflect, and see what might want to change.

(No pressure. Just space to speak honestly.)

Based in the UK. Working online with clients internationally.