How Nicholas got here
I spent a decade inside software — two start-ups, senior operator roles, the kind of work where the calendar is always full and full is supposed to mean good. And then I stopped being able to access myself. Not dramatically, not all at once. I just noticed, at some point around 32, that I could talk about product strategy and team structure and quarterly goals with complete fluency, and I had almost nothing left when anyone asked me something personal. The burnout wasn't a breakdown in the clinical sense. It was quieter than that — a kind of grey-out. I kept performing. Nothing on the outside collapsed. That's what made it so disorienting.
What pulled me through wasn't a productivity reset or a new framework. It was a practitioner who refused to fix me — who just sat with the mess and didn't flinch and didn't rush toward resolution. That experience changed the direction of my life more than anything I'd done professionally. I wanted to understand what that was, and eventually I wanted to be able to offer it.
I trained in somatic work and Internal Family Systems, not because I was looking for methodologies to deploy but because they gave language to what I'd already experienced from the inside — the body holding things the mind had stopped acknowledging, parts of the self that had been performing one function so long they'd forgotten everything else. The work I do now isn't separate from the decade I spent inside high-performance culture. It comes directly out of it.
I work mostly with people who are still in those systems — senior leaders, founders, engineers at the top of their field — who have started to feel a gap between who they are on paper and what it actually feels like to be them. People who are successful by any external measure and find that disorienting rather than satisfying. People who are carrying grief or anger they've rationalised almost entirely out of existence.
I don't assign homework. I don't work from scripts. Sessions are slow, and I'm comfortable with long silences and unresolved tension. What I'm trying to create is a space where something that's been operating underground can come up and be seen — not solved, not optimised, just met. That's the work.
