OUR STORY

"For years, I believed there was a price to high performance"

 

I thought resilience meant being strong enough to carry everything life threw at me, quickly regain control and keep pushing through adversity.

 

Life taught me a different lesson.

 

For much of my career, I was the person who could handle everything, and more.

I spent twenty years leading operations in aerospace and space, eventually reaching the boardroom. I loved the challenge. I was ambitious, capable and driven.

 

My working week was spent between airports, hotels, meeting rooms and complex decisions. I would leave on a Monday, suitcase in hand, pushing away the guilt of knowing my young children would have another week of a mother who was mostly somewhere else.

 

I told myself this was the price of success: private education, a big country home and an affluent lifestyle.

From the outside, I was an admired, successful high performer at the top of my game, living life in the fast lane.

Inside, the picture was very different.

 

Monday dread, frequent headaches, shoulder tension, poor sleep and very little patience. My mind rarely stopped working. I was so accustomed to pushing through that I barely noticed how exhausted I was.

It had become the only operating mode I knew.

 

Then life showed me what happens when pushing harder is no longer an option.

 

In the summer of 2022, my husband announced that our marriage was over. Although our relationship had deteriorated since the arrival of our children, it came as a complete shock. I was devastated. It wasn’t what I had ever envisaged for our family.

 

The following year, a serious riding accident that could have cost me my life left me with a fractured pelvis. Only a couple of weeks from the next board meeting, I kept working from my hospital bed. A welcome distraction from the then overall pain of existence.

Still on crutches, I moved out of our family home, telling myself it was only for a few months while we worked things out.

But things weren’t going to work out. At least not the way I wanted them to.

 

In quick succession, the career I had spent twenty years developing, and built so much of my identity around, came to an unexpected end. I lost my grandmother, who had been such an important part of my upbringing, and my young horse.

 

These weren’t challenges I could solve with another action plan, a longer working day or sheer determination.

 

For someone who had spent her life in the driving seat, it was a disorienting place to be. I had turned around underperforming factories and transformed failing operations, yet I couldn’t fix my own marriage.

 

What happens when the very strengths you’ve relied on to succeed are no longer working?

 

I had to stop. I could no longer ignore what my mind and body had been trying to tell me for years.

It was time to learn a different kind of strength.

 

Mindfulness practices became my lifeline. Stillness gave me space to breathe and hold my grief. Movement helped my body release years of tension. Growing awareness of my emotional, mental and physical state helped me reconnect with a part of myself buried beneath years of responsibility, expectations and constant doing.

 

Never one to stop at the surface, I went deeper. I studied stress physiology, neuroscience, functional medicine and the relationship between mind and body with leading experts worldwide. I returned to yoga, Qi Gong and other embodied practices.

Eventually, my search led me to formal Zen training with my teacher, Zen Master Daizan Skinner.

 

What began as a way to find my feet again profoundly changed my relationship with myself, life and everyone around me.

I discovered that resilience isn’t about pushing harder, withstanding more or fighting back.

Zen taught me to meet life as it is. To see reality more clearly, accept it and respond to it, rather than constantly trying to control it, fix it or change it to how I thought it should be.

 

I began to recognise how ingrained conditionings, expectations and the need for external validation had shaped my choices.

I learned to loosen my grip on outcomes, on the identities I’d built and on the belief that my worth depended on what I achieved.​

And I began to understand something that changed how I saw performance itself.

 

When we attach to outcomes, roles or expectations, we lose touch with what’s happening in the moment, and we lose the very freedom to choose our next step. The performance advantage sits in being totally at one with the moment and respond to what's there, rather than react, strive or control.

 

As I stopped fighting what I couldn’t change, I discovered a greater capacity to meet life’s difficulties without being consumed by them.

And perhaps for the first time, I experienced a sense of fundamental adequacy. That I was enough, without needing to achieve or prove myself. With that came an enormous sense of relief.

 

My health and energy returned. So did my sense of possibility.

Despite everything that had happened, life began to feel expansive again. A new direction emerged.

 

Those gruelling years became the foundation of HASU High Performance Zen.

I wanted to bring together everything I’d learned: the reality of leading under pressure, the transformative discipline of Zen and a more holistic understanding of the human mind and body and their innate potential.

And share it with others who might recognise something of themselves in my story.

 

Because I know how easy it is to build a successful life and gradually live at the edges of it.

And I know that even when life takes away so much of what you’ve built, there can be more ahead than you can currently imagine.

 

A Japanese saying goes 七転び八起き - Nana korobi ya oki

Seven times down. Eight times up.

 

Sometimes, rising again means letting go of what was, accepting what is, and allowing what might be.