From Empty Suit to Authentic Life

I’m Jeremy, a Chartered Accountant and former Finance Director, now an ICF-accredited Transformative and Trauma-Informed Burnout 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 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 in the mid-1980s 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.

The pressure to succeed in an unknown and intimidating world weighed heavily on my young shoulders. Combined with experiences of bullying at school, this laid the foundations for anxious, people-pleasing patterns that steadily shaped my professional life.

Outwardly, the path worked.

I held senior finance and business roles, largely at board level, in complex 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 working environments were permanently high-pressure, with relentless change and responsibility. As a perfectionist, I worked long, isolated hours, quietly eroding my mental and emotional health.

I felt constant pressure to perform effortlessly at the highest levels set for me by my accountancy training, despite being, at heart, a people-centred and creative thinker.

Leadership meetings were constantly accompanied by anxiety and a persistent sense of imposter syndrome.

Over time, the gap between how I portrayed myself and the real person hidden within grew wider.

The professional role became a mask…..one I wore convincingly, even to myself.

Behind it lived chronic stress, exhaustion and a constant despair I didn’t know how to name, let alone share.

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

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

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

And I became increasingly depressed.

In 2007/08, that disconnection reached a crisis point.

The physical symptoms in my body were acute and debilitating.

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

I remember my doctor’s words as though they were uttered yesterday: “Jeremy, you are about to pop. This is non-negotiable. You must stop.”

Those words were like manna from heaven. I had been given an order to step off the treadmill, before it was too late.

• I stepped down from my role.
• I stepped out of my career.
• I withdrew.

Recovery took many months. Slowly, I learned how to rest, regulate, and listen again.

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, psychological 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 perfectionism, people-pleasing, and over-responsibility are often adaptations, not flaws.

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

It comes from listening more honestly to my body and my nervous system.

This work reshaped not only my professional life, but how I live.

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 have shaped your life
• Reconnect beneath professional identity
• Calm a nervous system held in chronic alert
• Clarify what genuinely matters to you
• Make aligned, self-respecting choices
• Move forward with greater agency, and integrity

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

• ICF-accredited Transformative Coach
• ICF-accredited 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 deeper trauma-informed work, I also support professional leaders, primarily with independent UK schools, through transformative executive coaching and personality profiling.

Alongside my individual coaching work, I am also a licensed practitioner with The Mental Wellbeing Company.

Through this work, I support professional organisations, particularly schools and law firms, to develop trauma-informed cultures that enhance:

• staff mental health and wellbeing
• leadership effectiveness
• team congruence
• resilience, adaptability and agility
• productivity and creativity
• sustainable efficiency and performance
• empowerment and inclusion
• staff absence and retention levels

This strand of my work focuses on fostering mental wellbeing and reducing burnout in workplaces and schools to build resilient, compassionate and safe environments for everyone to grow and thrive. This complements the deep individual work offered through Empty Suit Coaching.

You can learn more about this work here:

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

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

If you’d like to talk through what you’re experiencing, you’re 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.