I didn't set out to work in relationships.
I spent more than two decades leading businesses and assessing people for potential. Not what they had achieved — what they were capable of becoming.
What creates exceptional performance under pressure?
My work was built around that one question. I assessed leaders, helped organisations identify talent, and developed people for roles they hadn't yet grown into. I spent years explaining why good performance today tells you almost nothing about capability tomorrow.
And over time I noticed something I couldn't ignore. Among the exceptional people I assessed, some were flourishing at home and some were quietly failing there — and the difference was never talent, luck or how much they loved their families. It was whether they applied any of their considerable talents to their relationships at all.
The same person who ran five-year strategies at work was running their marriage entirely on assumption.
What fascinated me wasn't simply that some people had happier relationships than others. It was that they seemed to bring into their relationships the very capabilities everyone assumed belonged only in business: self-awareness, honest feedback, emotional regulation, long-term thinking and a willingness to keep learning.
That's when I began to wonder whether we'd misunderstood relationships altogether. Perhaps they weren't fundamentally different from any other area of human performance. They were simply another domain of human capability.
I had started running my day job across dinner tables.
Around the same time, I noticed something else. Without meaning to, I had begun applying my work to my own life. When I decided I wanted a partner, I approached it with the same intention I had always brought to important decisions. I wrote down my values, my non-negotiables and the kind of marriage I wanted to build. I raised them early. I filtered deliberately.
People called it cold. Calculating. Hopelessly unromantic. What they were really reacting to was the idea that love could be approached with intention. We've been taught that planning somehow cheapens romance — as though being deliberate and being deeply in love are mutually exclusive.
Over a decade, one blended family and a marriage I can only describe as the most romantic thing I have ever been part of later, I stand by every spreadsheet. I've never believed romance and rigour are opposites.
Chemistry is a lovely way to start.
It is a terrible way to decide.
Why aren't we teaching relationships the way we teach leadership?
I simply couldn't understand why we leave the most important decision of our lives almost entirely to chance — and I still can't. That way of thinking led me to my husband. More importantly, it led me to a question I couldn't stop asking.
That question took me into psychology. I wanted to know what psychology could explain, and what it couldn't. I refused to accept that our earliest experiences of love define how well we will love for the rest of our lives. If that were true, millions of people would spend their lives limited by circumstances they never chose.
I believed there had to be another answer. That belief now underpins my doctoral research into the psychological capabilities that predict relationship satisfaction — and everything I teach today.
I don't believe great relationships are found.
I believe they're built.
Not through luck or destiny or perfect compatibility, but through capabilities that can be understood, practised and strengthened. I call that philosophy Strategic Love™.
And I should warn you: it is not for everyone. If you believe love should simply happen to you, effortlessly and forever, I will make uncomfortable reading.
If you have ever privately wondered why you can build an exceptional career and still feel lost in your closest relationship — you are exactly who I do this for.
Most people aren't broken. They were simply never taught the capabilities that great relationships require.
I believe relationships deserve the same seriousness we've long reserved for every other area of human performance.
That's the work I've dedicated my career to.
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