For over fifteen years I led consumer insight and strategy for global beauty and FMCG brands, most recently as a Director at Coty and Head of Insights at Galderma, across names like Lancaster, Philosophy and Cetaphil. My job was to take a wall of complex, often contradictory data and find the one thing that was actually true, then turn it into a direction a leadership team could act on.

The longer I did it, the more I noticed what the data never explained. A strategy could be right and still stall, because under pressure smart, capable people stop thinking clearly. The decision gets overthought. The nerve goes. The room manages itself instead of being led. The same intelligence that built the plan could not always carry it out once the stakes rose.

So I went looking for the other half of the answer. I trained in behavioural science and nervous system regulation, and qualified as a trauma-informed coach. Not to leave the commercial world, but to understand the part of it that lives in the body and the moment, the part that decides whether good thinking survives real pressure.

Today I bring both. The commercial brain that reads a market and the human one that reads the person under strain. It is the same skill at two scales, in plain language that people in serious rooms actually trust.