Hi, I'm Jess.

These days that means splitting my time between Bali and Ibiza. I've been living abroad since I was 19 — nine countries so far — but for most of that time I was chasing something quite different.

If you wanted a textbook example of someone living up to everyone else's expectations, you could have used me. Good grades, then better ones. The internships. The languages. The degrees people nod at when you mention them. A body pushed into "perfect shape" at the gym before class. And I was good at it — genuinely, a little proud of it. I believed, the way you believe something you've never thought to question, that if I just achieved enough, the restlessness underneath would finally quiet down.

It never did. It just got more expensive.

At 23, "one more thing" caught up with me. Two degrees, a startup job, volunteering with AIESEC, gym sessions before dawn, 5am wake-ups — all running at once, because doing things one at a time felt like falling behind. I ended up calling an ambulance for myself, after weeks of doing too much and resting far too little. The therapist I saw afterward gave me a diagnosis you won't find in any medical textbook: "overachiever syndrome." She wasn't wrong.

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I thought that was the lesson. I made some changes, felt lighter — and then went out and built a far more impressive version of the same pattern. Honestly? At the start, I loved it.

I landed in technology sales at a Fortune 500 company, and it was a whole new world. Commission that made it feel like my education had finally paid off. Targets I beat. Flights I could book without doing the maths first. I was in my twenties, good at something that paid well, surrounded by people I liked, building the life I'd been told to want — and for a good while, it was genuinely fun.

Then came the promotion into leadership, and I loved it — more than I expected to. It turned out the best part of my week was the people, not the numbers. But the stepping stone you're supposed to want brought a quiet question with it: so what now?

Because everything was right. Great salary, great team, people I actually enjoyed. But when I looked at the ones five and ten years ahead of me — the people whose jobs I was next in line for — I kept thinking: that's not me. I don't see myself doing this.

Which was, at the time, deeply confusing. It seemed ridiculous not to want this. So I did what I'd always done. I pushed.

My body had other plans. The gut issues started, got serious, and stayed — six rounds of antibiotics over a year and a half, and nothing holding. I tried everything a person tries. Then one day, in the annual strategy meeting, I heard myself say it out loud: "My gut is literally telling me to do something else." I gave my notice that week.

Three months later, my gut was fine. It has been ever since.

No doctor healed that. But here's what I did take from it: being tired all the time is not normal. Waking up exhausted, dragging yourself through weeks that all look the same, feeling stuck inside a life that is objectively fine — that isn't simply what adult life is. And when the tests come back clear and the advice is to eat a little differently, sleep a little more, get to the gym, and you are already doing all of that, then that isn't the answer either.

Sometimes what's off doesn't show up in the bloodwork. It's the alignment. I'm not willing to settle for permanent tiredness anymore, and a good part of why I do this work is that I don't think you should have to either.

Leaving didn't happen all at once, though. There was another stretch in tech after that, at one of the fastest-growing startups in the world. And I'll be honest about the money: it mattered to me, it still does, and I'm not going to be coy about liking a good income. It just turned out not to be enough on its own. What I was missing was purpose — something to point all that effort at that was actually mine. Peeling back a life takes a lot longer than deciding to.

How I ended up doing this

I didn't set out to become a coach. I thought the way out was building a business of my own — I just had no idea what it would be.

So a friend and I started meeting every Wednesday. At home, walking across Barcelona, working through every personality test and framework we could get our hands on, trying to figure out what we'd build. Months of it. He found his business — it's funded by the Barcelona City Council now, and he still says he wouldn't have started it without me. And somewhere in those Wednesdays I noticed what I'd been doing the whole time: asking the questions that helped someone else find their own direction.

It had been in front of me for years. For about three of them, I coached my sales team — not as an occasional side task, but constantly — and quietly turned it into something closer to a personal development programme than sales training. Watching people evolve, get braver, get clearer, get closer to who they actually were: by a distance the most fulfilling part of my job, and my first real hint at what I wanted to do with my life. I loved that role. It just sat inside an environment built for something else, so the part that fulfilled me most was never really the point of it. And I never counted any of it as experience, because it just felt like me being me.

Then I resisted it for a while. The last thing the world needs, I thought, is another coach.

Everyone else had apparently worked it out long before I did. When I finally told friends I was starting a coaching business, not a single one was surprised. The most common reaction was some version of: wait, do I have to pay you now? For all the advice I've been getting from you for free all these years?

What changed my mind was hiring one myself. What I got wasn't another framework — it was accountability, and someone who helped me actually see why I'd been holding myself back. Once I understood that, things started moving. Faster than they had in years.

I think everyone should have a coach. The way I see it: therapy is where you understand why you are the way you are. Coaching is how you build forward with that. Both matter. I've done both.

What I'm proud of

I've been to some very good schools — Copenhagen Business School, Bocconi, Harvard, Brown — and worked at some genuinely cool companies. I'm not above being proud of that.

It's just not what I lead with anymore. These are the ones that actually count:

• Watching someone build their own business after years of feeling stuck — there is nothing quite like it
• Friends and clients living lives that look far more like them than they used to
• Feeling healthy, after years when I didn't, and a gut that healed naturally once the rest of my life made sense
• Watching people reconnect with themselves in a matter of days at my first women's retreat, in Spain, two years ago
• Building a life that lets me be anywhere — fully remote for three years now, and I wouldn't trade it back

And the one that took the longest: finally letting my own voice and intuition run my life, instead of everyone else's opinion of it. That's the hardest thing I've ever done. It's also the only reason I can sit with you while you do it.