I started out as a bit of a hippie with Buddhism, yoga and the shamanic work. I spent a year in Sri Lanka at a Buddhist monastery whilst teaching Buddhist psychology at Peradeniya University, I am a qualified Vinyasa yoga teacher, and took part in Ian Reese's brilliant and absolutely bonkers shamanic Awen training. I also did two years of Karuna Institute's excellent and infuriating Buddhist psychotherapy training, where I ended up setting the chimney on fire.

My first proper career was in the United Nations, I spent several years in different warzones like Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Eritrea and Timor L'Este leading educational, CIMIC and SRHR projects. The intense focus of this work, the relentless and immediate consequences of one's actions in it taught me grounding and efficiency.

My first degrees in psychology were in Sweden three decades ago; they focused on children, CBT and psychodynamic modalities. A decade later at NSPC London, I became the first doctor of existential psychotherapy and counselling psychology in the UK, as I presented my dissertation on how humanitarians returning from warzones suffered more from alienation than any form of PTSD, as previous research had assumed.

I then worked with OTR Bristol - Bristol's main young people's mental health charity - overseeing a substantial service transformation as their Clinical Director. I led a radical transformation of our ethos from being service led to being user led, so that we went from being a counselling only service to having an array of innovative ways to engage. We saw an increase in the service by several orders of magnitude and were awarded the King's Fund GSK Impact Award. Following this, I became the consultant psychologist and lead supervisor for Empire Fighting Chance' Boxing Therapy initiative which I helped set up with Cat Taylor.

I did quite a radical career shift in 2020. I had become a humanitarian and subsequently psychologist in order to assist where I could help most in order to create a better world. I reappraised my position on where I would be most useful when I came understand the scale of disinformation and undermining narratives that were coming, both from outside and inside our culture, to attack Western liberal values. I decided to retrain as an Officer in the British Army and began working in Cognitive Warfare as an Officer Psychologist. This job has morphed a few times, and I am currently a Senior Concept Developer for NATO's Cognitive Warfare Concept, while still supporting the British Army and adjacent formations. The cultural understanding from hippie years and UN work, coupled with the psychological understanding of behaviour change, underpin my current work with NATO and the British Army. For more details, visit the TALK Framework.