From Empty Suit to Authentic Life

I’m Jeremy, a chartered accountant and former finance director, now an ICF-accredited transformative and somatic trauma-informed burnout coach.

I work primarily with UK-based senior professionals experiencing burnout, chronic stress and life transition, and also support clients internationally through online coaching.

Alongside this, I offer executive coaching for school leaders, particularly within the independent sector, and I am involved in initiatives to develop an awareness and culture that supports mental wellbeing in the workplace.

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 this was my life for several decades.

I also understand what happens when a life built on duty, conformity and performance slowly disconnects from the person living it.

Both experiences shape my work today.

Like many people of my generation, I chose my career less from inner conviction and more from conformity.

I followed a path that seemed sensible, respectable and safe, shaped by external expectations and a desire to do the “right thing”.

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

That path led to a long career in senior finance and leadership roles across the health, legal and education sectors.

Outwardly it worked.

I appeared calm, competent and in control.

But internally, something didn’t align.

Over time, the pressure of responsibility, combined with perfectioism and people-pleasing patterns, created a constant underlying strain.

• Long hours.
• High expectations.
• A sense of needing to hold everything together.

I became increasingly anxious, exhausted and disconnected, though I continued to function.

Like many professionals, I became highly effective at appearing “fine”.

Inside, emptiness and malaise invaded every aspect of my life. Fatigue, disassociation and constant despair became my constant companions.

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

Anxiety, emotional overwhelm and physical fatigue symptoms became impossible to ignore. Caffeine consumption went through the roof. Sleep fractured. Concentration faltered. Functioning required more and more effort.

Burnout in professionals is often misportrayed. It is not simply the mental exhaustion and fractured emotions resulting from working too hard. Apathy and hopelessness are trademark symptoms of burnout, along with a steady decline in productivity, competence and powers of judgment. Commonly, these symptoms are accompanied with feelings of great shame and loss of self-esteem.

The mental and emotional impact of burnout are likely to morph into the body. Physical symptoms include persistent headaches, chronic fatigue, gastrointestinal issues, muscle pain and weakened immunity.

In 2007/08, I reached my own crisis point.

The physical symptoms in my body were debilitating and all-consuming.

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

Looking back now, I no longer see that period as a breakdown.

I see it as a rite of passage.

The years that followed were not about escaping responsibility or reinventing myself overnight.

They were about deep re-integration.

I undertook extensive personal work – therapeutic, somatic and reflective – to understand how earlier experiences and survival patterns had shaped my adult life.

I came to understand how trauma (often subtle and long-normalised, and with origins deep in the past) lives not just in the mind, but in the nervous system and the body.

I learned how patterns such as perfectionism and over-responsibility develop.

And I discovered that lasting change doesn’t come from “trying harder”.

This was not quick work.

But as I started to heal from the inside out, I began to understand it as my metamorphosis.

Today, I support senior professionals 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 safe, thoughtful, non-judgmental and empathic space in which you can:

• understand the patterns that shaping your life
• reconnect with yourself beneath professional identity
• calm a nervous system held in chronic alert
• begin making choices that are more aligned and sustainable

My work draws on three integrated foundations:

Professional experience

Chartered accountant and former finance director in complex, high-pressure environments, including the National Health Service, law firms and independent schools.

Coaching & therapeutic training

• Transformative coach
• Somatic trauma-informed coach
• Training in positive psychology, polyvagal-informed and parts-based approaches
• Hypnotherapy, NLP and Insights Discovery personality profiling practitioner

Personal Integration

Lived, embodied experience of professional burnout, recovery and reintegration, not theory alone.

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

Alongside my work with individuals, I also support school leaders and independent schools.

This includes:

• executive coaching for senior leaders
• leadership reflection and support
• team-building, incorporating personality insight and self-awareness
• creating and developing trauma-informed workplaces

You can learn more about this work here:

As a man who carried distress in silence for many years, I am particularly aware of how difficult it can be to acknowledge vulnerability without feeling diminished.

If that resonates, you may wish to read:

If you’d like to talk through what you’re experiencing – not neccarily every detail, but the emotional reality of it – you are welcome to begin with a private, confidential 25-minute discovery conversation.

This is not a commitment to coaching.

It’s simply a space to pause, reflect, and explore whether working together might be helpful.

(No pressure. Just space to speak honestly.)

Based in the UK. Working online with clients internationally.