The work starts where
the performance ends.

You already know who you are.
The work is just getting you to act like it.

When I was eight, I lost the ability to communicate. Something happened that caught me completely off guard, and my confident, happy-go-lucky outlook on life vanished, seemingly overnight. I was afraid, terrified, anxious, and suddenly quiet.

I couldn't go to school. I couldn't go to the movies, something I loved and that was my escape as a kid. I couldn't do sleepovers, couldn't get on a plane, any situation where I didn't know what was going to happen next, I actively avoided. I would freeze. My mind would fog. I could barely look people in the eyes. It was like my entire personality had crumbled and I was suddenly a different person.

After trying to run from it for as long as I could, I realised running wasn't a viable long-term strategy. So I turned to face it instead, every single day, every effort charging into the breach. "Feel the fear, and do it anyway" became my motto before I even had the words to explain why I needed one.

Getting my voice back meant forcing myself back into the room, scared, over and over. And somewhere in doing that, I learned something I didn't expect: being willing to act while afraid was teaching the people around me to feel brave too. That's where I first understood leadership isn't the absence of fear or doubt. It's the person who won't sit by and watch someone else struggle, and acts anyway.

As my ability to communicate came back, my confidence grew with it. And as my confidence grew, so did my presence, the ability to actually hold someone's attention, tell a story that lands, connect with a room instead of just standing in front of it.

Feel the fear, and do it anyway got me through those years. But eventually I realised operating entirely from fear isn't sustainable, not for a life, and not for leading other people. So as I grew into adulthood, I went looking for the actual mechanics behind what I'd been doing on instinct. I studied psychology, behavioural science and criminology, the science of fear and performance, fight or flight, alongside years at drama school. That's where I learned how to work with nerves and anxiety instead of fighting them, and turn them into power, confidence and joy instead.

Acting gave me somewhere to put all of it into practice. I'd done it on and off through school and loved it, though it was never really an option, there wasn't even a class for it. I started properly at nineteen. It gave me a place to safely be someone else long enough to find my way back to being myself.

I overcorrected badly before I got it right. There was a stretch where I went from being unable to say anything to saying everything, all at once, to anyone, using raw honesty like a battering ram because it was the only tool I had. I lived and died by that sword for a while. What I eventually learned, the hard way, is that communication isn't just saying the true thing. It's reading the person in front of you well enough to know how, when, and how much.

I didn't do any of it alone. My mum was, and still is, my number one supporter. My dad and my closest friends stayed, even on the days they didn't understand what I was going through. And more than once, it was a kind stranger who simply listened, or stepped in exactly when I needed it.

That's the work now. Not a technique I read from a book. A method I built out of necessity, refined through real study, and have spent years since teaching to people carrying some version of what I carried, whether that shows up in a boardroom, on a stage, or in the moment the stakes are highest. I know exactly what it costs to lose your voice, and exactly what it takes to build it back into something that can hold a room.

"Feel the fear, and do it anyway."

I'm also the founder of Fantome, my creative production company. Director. Performer. The work at CJLT.co draws on all of it. My clients don't just communicate better. They lead differently. They walk into rooms they used to avoid.