I came to technology through biology, not code.

My summers at university were spent interning in the planning sector, mostly around sustainability and green energy. In 2012 I joined the family business, a commercial asset portfolio worth $350M — though the years following the 2007/8 crash had hit us hard, and I arrived in the middle of it.

In 2014 I became special assistant to the serial entrepreneur who had taken on our case against the banks. For the next few years I was in the room: executive boardrooms, C-suite negotiations, litigation, legal process, settlements. Witnessing the strategy and tactics up close showed me the rooms that exist, and what truly matters in any decision.

It also taught me to always run the macro before the micro. The geopolitics, the national politics, the decisions being made in industries nowhere near your own — all of it lands on your business eventually, and you only see it coming if you are looking up. Curiosity had given me my why. This decade gave me the what.

Lockdown gave me the chance to explore another industry, and I fell into music. I started out managing digital marketing channels for an artist, then moved to Amsterdam to manage them full time. With the artist signed to Armada Music, I was quickly exposed to the industry and everything it had to offer. Leaning on my corporate background, I adapted fast to release schedules, social campaigns, touring, contracts and collaborations. Being surrounded by people who were creatives in their own right, who think differently, was a new and exciting experience for me.

It expanded how I approach everything, and truly gave me a deep appreciation for that way of working. Art starts with what a person feels and works outward from there, and the people around me solved problems the same way: not by reasoning towards the correct answer, but by expressing something honestly and finding the answer inside it. Sometimes, logic isn't always the answer.

A decision in late 2020 to release music on the artist's own label opened the door to the world of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). I went down the rabbit hole of exploring all the possibilities when you put art on a token: more value and more fun for the communities already around an artist, while providing another revenue stream that went straight to the creatives.

Partnering with a company called Blockparty, we used their platform to launch our limited edition digital music collection: a building album that released a track a month, with a tiered collectible system. During the release, we also partnered with their sister company Moonwalk to create a sub-niche community within the artist's fan base, embedding an artist token in every interaction across the artist's ecosystem and bringing fun, functional utility!

In April 2022, I was asked to join Moonwalk to help roll this out across their music vertical with other artists. The hype was massive and for a while it looked like a new economy for artists. However, riding the wave was a difficult balance of showing fans the positive side amongst the scams and rug pulls that made headlines, and the distrust that followed buried the good with the bad. It taught me that convergence creates the opportunity, but it doesn't always decide what gets built with it.

My work with NFTs took me to many crypto conferences across the US. One in particular created another pivotal point in my career. I was at W3BX in Las Vegas, learning more about tokenomics and other blockchain protocols. Everyone there called what they were building Web3 — as the conference name implies!

On the second day, I fell into a conversation with the founder of an AI company who argued that it isn't: crypto and blockchain have pushed our current tech infrastructure hard in the right direction, but they will never get us there on their own (an important reminder that this was all before ChatGPT entered the commercial market).

The gentleman I am speaking about is Dan Mapes, and he had coded a protocol he knew could get us there: a true evolution from Tim Berners-Lee's web. As our conversation continued, it naturally followed through into AI. Suffice to say, my curiosity was piqued and I dived into a new rabbit hole.

For months after, we continued our discussions and I began researching deeply into an AI called active inference AI, created by Professor Karl Friston. The stranger at the conference became a friend, and I went for tokenomics and left with a different direction in life.

My curiosity this time was flow: the state where you perform at your best, and what is actually happening in the brain when you get there. I took the Flow Research Collective's course first, purely to understand it for myself, then went on to their training programme and certified as a peak performance coach.

Understanding the neurochemistry behind it changed how I work. The brain trains and tires like any other muscle, and flow runs in a cycle: struggle, release, flow, recovery. Knowing where I am in that cycle is what lets me work smarter rather than harder. But you cannot work on the brain alone. Mind, body and spirit move together, and treating one in isolation from the other two never holds for long.

What most people miss is that flow is not only about activation. It is also about recovery. I can disappear into hyperfocus for hours, and in a world of over-stimulation and constant connectivity, pushing to the extreme until you burn out has become ordinary. Intellectual recovery matters just as much, if not more, as physical recovery.

Peak performance training left me with a thread to follow. Flow is a whole-body state, not a mental trick, and recovery happens in the body or it does not happen at all. So I went looking for how to be present enough in mine to actually feel it.

I have practised meditation on and off, along with yoga, kundalini, pilates and the gym, but I wanted to go deeper than a practice I turn up to twice a week. I had been aware for a while that the body holds what the mind will not, from books like The Body Keeps the Score and The Great Pain Deception. Knowing that and living it are two very different things, and I had done plenty of the first.

As a woman, I wanted to approach this from that foundation: to connect with the feminine, and to listen to what my body is trying to tell me rather than talking over it. It matters for the work, too. Two of the four pillars I write about are physical and spiritual, and I am not willing to write about coming back into your body without doing it myself. I am still in training — but I can happily say that it has brought another depth to my understanding and the work I do.