I grew up in Germany and moved to the UK to study design more than 30 years ago. To Germans, I'm a free-wheeling creative spirit; to Brits and Americans, I'm a wildly organised strategist who gets things done. I gave up trying to resolve the contradiction long ago. It's my favourite place to live: the intersection. Empathy lets me translate between perspectives — disciplines, cultures, ways of seeing — and the intersections are where creativity and innovation thrive.

I've been a designer all my working life: an art-school-trained creative problem solver who thinks with her hands and thrives on ambiguity. I brought design to the emerging world of digital technology and the internet, then to every wave of innovation since — mobile, voice, and now AI — and I was deeply passionate about cross-disciplinary collaboration long before it became a thing. Along the way, I designed and built products and teams at Silicon Valley leaders like Amazon, Yahoo! and Pivotal, co-wrote "Communicating the UX Vision", taught at the University of the Arts London, and helped organisations from tiny startups to trillion-dollar giants transform how they work.

I loved that work. I still do some of it. But the longer I did it, the clearer one pattern became: behind every "organisational" challenge was a person — often a brilliant, exhausted person — trying to create change without anyone truly in their corner. More and more, the moments that meant the most to me weren't the strategy workshops. They were the quiet conversations afterwards, and helping these leaders create the change they envisaged.

So I trained properly: first as a coach (I'm an ICF Professional Certified Coach), and then — following a thread that began with a little girl who asked for a pony every single birthday, in a family that was scared of horses — as an Equus Coach Master Facilitator with the Center for Equus Coaching. The ponies finally arrived, decades late and right on time.

Horses taught me about presence, honesty and leadership more than any boardroom ever did. Now they are my co-coaches, teaching fundamentals of modern leadership and helping people reconnect with their true selves.

And through it all, I kept making things, because I know first-hand how easily a career built on creativity can stop leaving room for your own. That's why coaching creatives back to their spark is some of the work I treasure most.