I came home to Ireland thinking it would take a few months to settle back. It took considerably longer.
I launched into work almost immediately — SalesCraft, UpAGear, familiar territory. What I knew, what I had always done. It felt safe and logical. What I did not do was stop and ask the more honest question: what do I actually want to build, and what do I genuinely have to offer?
For most of my career I was the person in the room who looked like they had it together. CRO of a global organisation, leading teams across continents, hitting targets. From the outside it looked like confidence and clarity. From the inside it was something different — constant pressure, a quiet anxiety that never fully switched off, and a sense that no matter what we achieved it was never quite enough. I was not 100% enjoying my life. I knew it but I kept moving anyway.
It took losing someone I loved to really make that land. Grief has a way of cutting through everything that is not essential and asking you what you are actually doing with the time you have.
I started paying attention differently after that. To my health, my energy, my sense of purpose. Fitness had slipped badly since returning to Ireland — it always does when the foundations are off. Getting fit again became the first intentional act. The catalyst for everything that followed.
Then earlier this year a health scare stopped me in my tracks. It turned out to be nothing. But it could have been something serious, and in the days when I did not know that, I found myself sitting with some very direct questions about how I had been living and whether I was building something that actually mattered to me.
The products were good. But I knew I had more to give. A different kind of contribution. Something rooted in the whole story — not just the commercial career but everything underneath it.
That is what Intention is. Not a programme I designed from a textbook. Something I built from the inside out — from the questions I could not stop asking myself.
If you are somewhere in that same territory — performing well by most measures, but sensing something important is still missing — you are exactly who I am building this for.