About Rowena
At 19, I met ‘The One’At 21, I qualified as a teacher. I was ‘on-track’At 25, my first play was published. Champagne anyone?At 27, we got married. More champagne?My late 20s were spent working as a senior leader in some of the best schools the UK can boast, branching into Education consultancy alongside working with World Leading theatres and directors as a playwright and dramaturg. I prided myself on my work ethic. My edge. My drive.The whole thing. All of it. Was a complete and utter sham.Behind the scenes, I was already halfway through a nervous breakdown.I was constantly nauseous, constantly stressed. The panic attacks would hit so suddenly and violently I’d often have to pull over in the middle of the road just to breath. Sometimes I’d take a lie down in my car in the school carpark, waiting for my nervous system to settle enough to keep going. My self-loathing was through the roof, shower time became known as ‘cry time’ and I was permanently anxious, wired, and exhausted. My BMI dropped to an alarming 14 and my hair was falling out. My digestive and nervous systems were shot. And for the life of me, I just couldn’t understand why. My daily diet became shame, ‘get it together’ affirmations …and Diet Coke. I was isolated with this relentless pressure to be all things to all people. Just not myself. From the outside, I had the perfect life: the successful career, the glitzy friends, the power-couple husband. I had done everything ‘right’.
Inside, I was at breaking point.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. ”
So I did the only thing I knew how: I burnt the whole thing down.
Most people don't realise how much of their life is being run by outdated beliefs and programs that no longer serve them. I grew up with parents who both had NPD, in the kind of poverty you don’t usually associate with the UK, alongside three siblings who, like me, were just trying to survive.Like all children, Little Me was clever. I learnt from a very young age the more amenable I was, the more love I got. The more magnetic I was, the more people liked me. The more I put others needs first, the ‘easier’ I became to be around. Having my own needs aggravated people, so my solution was genius: don't have any. Stay small.If my mum could afford opera tickets for my older sister’s birthday but not my school shoes, no problem. If my husband had betrayed me again, I’d dial-up the smile and cook a nicer dinner. If someone criticised my work, I’d make sure I’d work for the next glitziest ‘name’.Dysfunctional environments and people felt familiar to me, so I’d naturally gravitate towards them. Forget 'No is a complete sentence'; it was not even a word in my vocabulary.I’d learnt the art of being impressive. But I had absolutely no idea who I was. And if it felt risky to find out, why put my head above the parapet?It was the perfect plan.Until it wasn’t.“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”
When your true self becomes your compass, life stops feeling like survival. It becomes something far more powerful: choice.
It wasn't a life, in fact it was indeed the beginning of a very slow death wrapped in the socially acceptable package of all the 'right choices'. So I made myself a promise: to be radically and audavI gave myself permission to choose my own life.I ended the marriage that was making me ill and I quit the job I hated. Then I went looking.Driven by a determination to understand why intelligent, capable people can feel so stuck in their own lives, I began studying how real change actually happens. Not just in theory, but in real human beings — in real relationships, real careers, and real turning points.I immersed myself in the worlds of coaching, psychology and nervous system regulation. I have studied and trained with leaders such as Tony Robbins and Cloe Madanes, investing hundreds of thousands of pounds in learning, earning certifications, and training in Neuro-Linguistic Programming while exploring how early conditioning shapes the way we think, respond and relate to the world.Alongside this formal training sits over a decade of personal study with therapists, doctors, psychiatrists and healers, exploring consciousness, nervous system regulation and identity change.Because eventually you begin to realise something important: the life you are living is not fixed. It is shaped by the patterns you repeat, the beliefs you carry and the choices you make. And when those change, everything can change.This is the work I now do with my clients. I work with thoughtful, capable people who sense that something in their lives is ready to shift — whether that is a relationship dynamic, a career path, or simply the quiet realisation that the life they built no longer reflects who they are becoming.Together we identify the patterns shaping their choices and begin the work of changing them.Because when your true self becomes your compass, life stops feeling like survival. It becomes a choice.
“You don’t find yourself. You build yourself.”
If this resonates with you, I’d love to work with you.