For twenty years my job was to understand people — what reaches them, what they carry, what they need to hear. Eventually I turned that same attention to the people holding everything together, and found they were the ones with no one holding them.
I spent the first half of my career in marketing and communications — two decades of working out how to reach people and connect them to something worth caring about. Then I asked a better question: what if that skill was pointed at the people inside organisations, not just the audiences outside them?
That question led me to an MSc in Applied Positive Psychology, accredited coaching training, and years building wellbeing and engagement work for complex organisations. But the real turning point wasn’t academic. It was personal.
Understanding myself changed everything.
I am a neurodivergent woman. I was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and I parent a neurodivergent child. For years I did what so many women in demanding roles do without ever naming it — I masked. I held things together on the outside while the effort of doing so quietly drained me on the inside. I was good at it. That was part of the problem: no one could see the cost, including me.
When I finally understood how my own mind worked, and built the conditions that actually let me function rather than just cope, the change was profound. Not because I became someone different — but because I stopped spending so much of myself trying to appear like everyone else.
No one talks to us more than we talk to ourselves. Under pressure, that voice gets loud — and the people carrying the most are usually carrying it alone.
I started noticing the same pattern in the senior leaders I worked with. Brilliant, capable people holding entire organisations together, with nowhere to put down what they carried. No structure built to sustain them. The wellbeing industry offered workshops and apps and the word “resilience” — none of which met the actual shape of their need.
So I built Tacuma.
A confidential partnership that sits entirely outside the organisation. Not coaching, not therapy, not another initiative. A steady, external presence for the person everyone else relies on — someone to notice what pressure is doing before it does damage, and to make sure recovery is designed rather than hoped for.
It is built deliberately for the people most likely to be overlooked: the ones who look like they are managing. Often women. Often neurodivergent. Always carrying more than anyone can see.