About me
I spend a lot of time thinking about people.
Hello, I'm Joanne.
By day, I lead regional teams across marketing, customer experience and engagement. My work has always involved understanding people: what gets our attention, what shapes our decisions, what makes us act and, sometimes, why we do things that don't seem particularly logical at all.
Outside of work, that curiosity has taken me into coaching, wellbeing and breathwork.
I'm a Certified Health & Life Coach and a Certified Embodied Breathwork Practitioner. But while the certifications matter to me, they came from something much simpler: wanting to understand people, including myself, a little better.
On paper, these might look like quite different worlds.
To me, they're really about the same thing.
Humans.
How we think.
How we behave.
What we tell ourselves.
And why we sometimes make things much more complicated than they need to be.
I am very much part of the problem.
I didn't create UN/complicate because I have mastered the art of a simple life.
Quite the opposite.
I have a demanding corporate career. I lead regional teams and portfolios. I travel frequently. I exercise. I learn. I plan. I make lists. And then, occasionally, I make lists about my lists.
I have spent much of my life being an overthinker, a perfectionist and a fairly unforgiving critic of myself.
For a long time, I thought those things were simply part of being ambitious.
Work hard. Be prepared. Don't get it wrong. Think three steps ahead.
Some of that has served me very well.
Some of it hasn't.
Over time, I became increasingly curious about the difference.
That curiosity changed the way I work. And live.
The more senior I became professionally, the more I realised that having more experience doesn't necessarily mean having more answers.
Often, the opposite happens.
You become more comfortable asking better questions.
You start noticing how much energy we spend worrying about things that haven't happened, perfecting things that were already good enough, comparing ourselves with people living completely different lives, or trying to control outcomes we were never entirely in control of.
That curiosity about behaviour and habits eventually led me to train and become a Certified Health & Life Coach.
And eventually, it led me to the breath.
I trained with the Embodied Breath Academy, completing its 200-hour Embodied Breathwork Practitioner programme, and am a Certified Embodied Breathwork Practitioner.
Breathwork fascinated me for the same reason many simple things fascinate me.
It was almost too simple to take seriously.
We breathe all day.
And yet most of us barely notice it.
I don't believe we need to optimise everything.
This might be an odd thing for someone who has spent a career in marketing, growth and customer experience to say.
But I don't think every part of being human needs a framework, a five-step programme or another thing to track.
Sometimes those things are useful.
Sometimes we need expertise, structure and effort.
And sometimes the useful thing is much simpler.
Notice what's happening.
Ask a better question.
Take a breath.
Stop trying to solve something that isn't actually a problem.
I think knowing the difference matters.
That's really what UN/complicate is about.
Not making life effortless.
Not pretending difficult things are easy.
And definitely not having everything figured out.
Just getting curious about the complexity we create, the things we do automatically, and what might happen if we looked at them a little differently.
You don't have to have everything figured out.
I certainly don't.
Curiosity before judgement.
I've learnt to ask “Why am I doing this?” before deciding whether I should be doing more of it.
People over formulas.
Frameworks can be useful. Humans rarely fit neatly inside them.
Simple doesn't mean simplistic.
Some of the most useful things I've learnt have been remarkably simple. That doesn't make them easy or insignificant.
Evidence matters. Experience does too.
I like understanding what the research tells us. I'm equally curious about what we notice for ourselves. Not everything needs to be completely understood before it can be worth exploring.
A few things that shape how I see the world.
And when I'm not thinking about all this?
I'm probably working, travelling somewhere, breathing, having coffee (and cocktails), or discovering yet another subject I suddenly feel compelled to learn about.
I'm still ambitious.
I still work hard.
I still overthink things.
I've just become much better at noticing when I do.
Regional Marketing, Customer Experience & Engagement Leader
Experience and training
Certified Embodied Breathwork Practitioner
Certified Health & Life Coach
15+ years across marketing, brand, customer experience and engagement
200-hour practitioner training
Embodied Breath Academy
Health Coach Institute