A note from the founder.

I never set out to create a mental health programme.

I set out to understand people what drives them, what drains them, and why the same people who appear to have it all together can feel like they’re only just holding things together.

For over twenty years, I worked in the IT and telecoms sector, managing multimillion-pound accounts and working directly for one of the Dragons from BBC Dragons’ Den. My success was never about strategy decks or spreadsheets. It was about people - how they think, how they respond under pressure, and what helps them do their best work when the stakes are high.

Alongside my professional life, my personal life was doing what life does.

I lost my mum in 2005. I thought I coped well but grief has its own timetable. Several years later, when it finally caught up with me, a friend persuaded me to see a counsellor. That experience changed everything without changing anything. It gave me language for what was happening beneath the surface, and showed me the power of awareness, perspective and self-understanding.

More years later and still shaped by that experience, I chose to retrain as a counsellor, studying Humanistic Counselling based on Transactional Analysis - three years of study alongside a full-time role and a one-year-old baby. Counselling itself wasn’t quite my path, but coaching was. A few years later, I completed a postgraduate qualification in coaching and, by 2019, left corporate life for good.

Then came a period that tested everything I thought I understood: Covid, divorce, moving home five times in a year, solo parenting, the unexpected death of my dad, and a medical emergency that forced me to slow down and reassess what really mattered. What got me through wasn’t just resilience, but the very tools I’d spent years learning - self-awareness, regulation, perspective and choice.  Not perfectly, but with more grace than I might have expected. 

Coaching others through their own turning points showed me something important: the same insights that help one person navigate complexity, pressure and change can transform how an entire organisation functions if they’re designed to scale and kept personal.

That realisation became the starting point for CLEVRA.

CLEVRA is a coaching-led, evidence-aligned Great Mental Health programme designed to help organisations build the kind of mental health that allows people to think clearly, feel good, and function well at work. It brings together professional rigour, lived experience and practical tools, not as a reaction to crisis, but as a way of strengthening what sits underneath performance, relationships and decision-making every day.

If what you’ve read resonates, the human cost, the business cost, the strain that shows up in absence, presenteeism, attrition or diminished capacity you’re not alone. These patterns are familiar and they can be addressed.

If it would be helpful to talk things through, I’d be glad to have that conversation.

When I’m not working, you’ll usually find me solo parenting my son, running by the sea or in nature, in the gym, travelling with my son, or being the person friends come to when they need a proper conversation and a bit of perspective.