I Found My Voice in the Crisis. Now I Want to Help You Find Yours.
When I walked away from a successful 11-year tech sales career after burning out, I didn't just change professions. I discovered that my authentic voice had been buried under years of high performance and people-pleasing. Have you found your voice yet? Or are you still performing a version of yourself that's exhausting to maintain?
Lauren Cartigny
The Hidden Cost of Excellence
For over a decade, I excelled in enterprise technology sales at companies like LinkedIn, Equinix, and Rackspace. I closed multi-million pound deals, built strategic accounts, and hit my targets consistently. From the outside, I looked like I had it figured out.
But here's what nobody saw: the chronic stress, the disconnection from my body, the sense that I was succeeding at someone else's definition of success. I had mastered the external game while my internal world was collapsing.
Like many high performers, I'd read all the right books such as Covey's 7 Habits, Gladwell's Outliers with its famous 10,000-hour rule. I put in my 10,000 hours. I reached mastery. And then I fell apart.
When Crisis Becomes Your Teacher
Stephen Covey identified an 8th habit beyond his famous seven: finding your voice. He defined it as the intersection of your passion, talent, need, and conscience, the place where what you're uniquely equipped to do meets a need in the world you feel called to serve.
My crisis forced me to discover mine.
Through burnout, I learned that sustainable high performance isn't about grinding harder or optimising better. It's about coming home to yourself, understanding how you're actually wired, not how you think you should be wired.
Over the past six years, I've committed to understanding:
How my nervous system responds to stress (through HeartMath's heart-brain coherence training)
Where my patterns and protections come from (through Compassionate Inquiry and trauma-informed work)
How I communicate under pressure (through Process Communication Model)
How to regulate my own system (through yoga, meditation, HeartMath and somatic practices)
This wasn't a linear path. It was messy, uncomfortable, and often lonely. But it led me to my real work.
What Actually Creates Change
As an Executive Coach (ICF PCC) and Leadership trainer in companies, I also work with people navigating major life transitions such as loss, divorce, career upheaval, identity crises, and spiritual awakening. I've learned that transformation doesn't happen through willpower or positive thinking alone.
Real change requires:
Scientific foundation: Understanding the physiology of stress, the heart-brain connection, and how our nervous system shapes our reality. HeartMath's research shows that heart coherence directly impacts decision-making, emotional regulation, and performance.
Trauma-informed awareness: Recognizing that our patterns aren't character flaws, they are protective adaptations. Dr. Gabor Maté's Compassionate Inquiry helps us explore what's beneath our behaviours with curiosity, not judgment.
Practical tools for self-regulation: You can't think your way out of a dysregulated nervous system. You need embodied practices that create actual physiological shifts.
A safe space to be seen: We all have the answers within ourselves. We just need someone who can hold space without fixing, advising, or rescuing. someone who trusts our process even when we don't.
Your Voice Is Waiting
My voice today isn't about solving customer problems with technology. It's about helping people reclaim themselves during life's hardest moments – when everything you thought you knew falls apart and you have no idea who you are anymore.
That disorientation? That's not the problem. That's the invitation.
Your authentic voice emerges when you stop performing who you think you should be and start discovering who you actually are. It shows up when you learn to regulate your nervous system, understand your patterns, and trust your own inner knowing.
The Self-Science Lab exists to support that journey teaching self-leadership skills for navigating transitions, trauma, and transformation at home and at work.
What If This Is Your Moment?
If you're reading this and something is resonating, if you're exhausted from high-performing, recovering from a crisis, or sensing that there's a deeper version of yourself waiting to emerge, know that you are not broken. You are being called to do the inner work to free yourself from suffering and make space for your untapped potential to find its way into your consciousness.
Your voice is still there. It's just been waiting for you to get quiet enough to hear it.
Ready to explore your own journey of self-leadership?
If you believe change is possible, and have decided to make an investment in changing yourself to change your external reality, follow me on Youtube, LinkedIn and visit The Self-Science Lab for more info.
Join my Reset and Rise weekly workshops or book a discovery call to see if 1:1 coaching might support your transition.
Lauren Cartigny, a Life & Business Coach and Mindfulness Practitioner
Following a successful international corporate career in Sales for leading Tech firms, Lauren faced an unexpected burnout, life and health crisis. After re-building her life, transforming her career, and healing her body, heart, mind and remembering her connection to Spirit, Lauren has created transformative coaching and experiential workshops to support you in improving the quality of your life and your career by developing Self-Leadership skills..