- Bogotá · London
- Marsh · Aon
Twenty-five years. Three continents. Senior roles at multi-billion dollar global companies across Bogotá, London, and Sydney. Every credential, every promotion, every box ticked — and a drive that never really switches off.
A few years into my career at Marsh, something shifted. I'd been promoted to APV, then to VP — fast, by any measure. Then I started getting unwell. Slowly at first, then all at once. The diagnosis landed hard: a blood condition, and a warning I couldn't ignore. I was close to chronic fatigue syndrome.
So I did what a young, driven woman does when the system she's been running on finally breaks down.
- Sydney
- Sabbatical · Re-build
I packed my bags and booked a sabbatical to Australia. I told myself it was for English and business management studies. That was true. It was also the first time I'd stopped long enough to actually hear myself think.
I became a certified personal trainer. I rebuilt myself physically — and realised, somewhere in the middle of it, that the body wasn't the whole problem. I read everything. Personal development. NLP. Neuroscience-backed performance research.
I made it my mission to understand my mind.
I read everything. Personal development. NLP. Neuroscience-backed performance research. Eventually I understood something no amount of visualisation was going to fix: I didn't need more motivation — I had the drive. I needed a better operating system.
Back in corporate, I built it as I went — inside the system, not outside it. And despite the fact the system still wasn't built for women like me, I loved every part of my career. Across those twenty-five years the work took many shapes — structuring large infrastructure deals for investment approval, legally and commercially defending tenders that decided the next decade of a business, leading strategic relationships across global markets, and, in the worst weeks of a company's year, sitting at the table for the crisis negotiations where a brand, a reputation and a balance sheet were on the line in the same conversation.
All of it across three continents and in two languages. Clients in one country, counterparties in another, regulators and stakeholders in a third — different time zones, different cultural codes, different definitions of risk, and almost always at least one room where I was the only person reading it through more than one cultural lens. That work taught me how senior environments actually behave under pressure. How invisible the real load is. How much of the work happens before anyone opens their mouth. And how rare it still is for a senior woman — let alone one carrying a second language and a second culture into the room — to be operating in a system built for the way her brain, her wiring, and her life actually work. I have carried all of it into every Black Impetus engagement since.
