I Used to Read People for a Living. Now I Help Them Regulate Their Nervous System.

"I used to read people for a living. Now I regulate their systems. It's taken me a while to realise those were never two different jobs."

In talent acquisition, you learn to spot things people don't say out loud. Over twenty years corporate experience I didn't just hire people — I led and managed teams, often through periods of real pressure: growth phases, restructures, hiring freezes, the kind of stretches where everyone is expected to hold steady and keep delivering.

Close-up view of a serene meditation space with calming elements

You learn to read a team quickly in those conditions. The person whose narrative doesn't match the worn-out look in their eyes. The tense body language that doesn't match the confident voice on a call. The one who hasn't taken a proper break in months but insists they're fine. I got good at spotting it — good enough that people I managed would sometimes tell me I noticed things about them before they'd admitted those things to themselves.

What I didn't clock for a long time was that I couldn't spot these same things in myself.

The pattern I kept missing

High-functioning burnout doesn't look like collapse. It looks like competence. It looks like the person who never misses a deadline, never drops a ball, never lets anyone see the cost. I spent two decades around driven, capable people — and I was one of them — and what I now realise is that most of us had no real understanding of what was happening in our bodies while we held everything together on the outside.

We called it stress. We called it a busy season. We called it just how the job is.

What it actually is, physiologically, is a nervous system stuck in a prolonged state of activation — braced, not resting, even when the workload eases. And bracing doesn't switch off just because you tell it to. It switches off when the body gets a genuine, felt signal of safety. Willpower doesn't do that. Deadlines being met doesn't do that. A good night's sleep, ironically, often doesn't do that either, because the nervous system isn't operating on logic. It's operating on pattern recognition, built from repetition, over years.

That was true for the teams I led. It was true for the colleagues sitting across from me in one-to-ones, telling me they were fine. And it was true for me.

The pivot

I didn't leave recruitment because I stopped believing in the work. I left because I found something that answered a question twenty years in TA never could: not how do I identify when someone is under strain, but how do I actually help a nervous system come back down from it.

That's what led me to breathwork, sound healing, and the body-based work I do now.

Not as a rejection of my career, but as a continuation of the same instinct that made me good at my old one — paying close attention to what's actually happening beneath the surface, rather than what's being performed on top of it.

The skills transferred more directly than I expected. Reading a room. Building trust quickly with someone who's guarded. Knowing the difference between someone who's fine and someone who's saying they're fine. Those instincts didn't disappear when I changed fields. They just found a more direct way to be useful.

Why this matters for the women I work with now

Most of the women I work with are not in crisis. They are capable, self-aware, and often deeply resourced in every visible way. They've usually already tried therapy, tried the courses, tried rest. What they're looking for isn't more insight — most of them already understand, intellectually, why they're tired. What they're looking for is a way to actually change the physiological pattern underneath the tiredness, not just manage around it.

That's the gap breathwork and nervous system work fills. It doesn't ask the body to think its way out of a bracing pattern. It works with the body directly, in the language it actually responds to — breath, sound, felt safety — rather than the language of insight alone.

I Used to Read People for a Living. Now I Regulate Their Systems.

I used to read people for a living. Now I help them regulate their nervous system. It turns out those were never two different jobs. Just two different ways of paying attention to the same thing: what's really going on, underneath what's being shown.

If this is resonating — if you recognise the pattern of holding it together on the outside while your body is quietly running on empty — I'd love to talk.

Book a free Discovery Call to find out more about how breathwork and nervous system work could help.