I’ve been
where you are.
I stood at a window in Cape Town in January 2011, phone in hand, and chose — barely — to step back from the edge. What happened next became the work I do today.
“In hindsight I realised that you can’t change the way you feel by thinking differently. You have to, in fact, feel differently.”— Alan Strydom, on what two years of depression taught him
It began with a
10-year love story ending.
We’d been together almost eleven years. We were engaged. We were building a home on a little piece of her parents’ farm. Then one morning, she woke up and wanted to travel — without me.
I had a background in NLP, hypnotherapy, psycho-neuro-immunology. I had contacts across the wellbeing industry. I used every tool I knew. Nothing shifted. Slowly, I slipped deeper into depression.
I moved cities. I went to Thailand looking for some kind of reset, ran out of money, got stranded on an island with my passport held by a scooter hire company, and begged strangers for help. None came. I went home five days in, cutting the adventure short.
“Little by little I was losing sense of meaning and purpose in my life. Then, on one particular trip back to Plettenberg Bay, something changed.”
That something was a phone call. January 28, 2011. Standing at the window in Cape Town, I answered. Andy Pellant — a name I barely recognised — was in town from the UK, asking if anyone wanted to talk about HeartMath. I had almost not picked up. I almost hadn’t been there to pick up at all.
“I feel you’re on the edge of something,” Andy said, when we met. “I wonder what would happen if you leaned into it?” If only he knew how literally that was true. I decided not to tell him. Instead, I decided to lean.
The fog lifted on
an ordinary Friday afternoon.
I’d been practicing daily with the HeartMath technology for two weeks — ten minutes in the morning, ten in the evening — when I ran into her. Unexpectedly. In Plettenberg Bay. With him.
I had seconds to compose myself. My friend’s face went white. She burst into tears when she saw me. We went for coffee. Afterwards, I waved them goodbye as they drove off into the sunset together.
“I was OK. I noticed I felt different. I didn’t feel numb. I didn’t feel heart-sore. I felt like the fog had lifted, and that everything was as it should be.”
I called Andy immediately. “The most amazing thing just happened. When are we bringing HeartMath to South Africa?”
That’s the moment this work began — not in a training room or a certification course, but in a car park in a small coastal town, with two weeks of daily practice behind me and a lifetime of tools that had never quite done what this one just did.
The work isn’t about
fixing. It’s about becoming.
In over thirty years of working on myself and with others — from personal development in my early twenties to becoming a certified HeartMath coach and trainer in 2012 — I’ve arrived at a few convictions I can no longer talk myself out of.
The heart is not a metaphor here. HeartMath research shows the heart generates an electromagnetic field larger than the brain’s, communicates with the nervous system in ways that shape perception, memory and decision-making, and can be trained. This is science. It just happens to feel like something deeper.
The people I work with aren’t broken. They’re often the most capable, self-aware, driven people in the room — and that’s precisely why the thinking-harder approach has stopped working for them.
01
You can’t think your way to a different feeling.
Insight without embodiment rarely sticks. The body has to be part of the shift — not as an afterthought, but as the starting point.
02
Clarity is a physiological state, not a decision.
When your heart and nervous system are coherent, decisions that were previously impossible become obvious. We’re not chasing epiphanies. We’re creating the conditions for them.
03
The journey to the heart is slow — and it never ends.
It took me 41 years to consider the heart a destination. The work isn’t a programme you complete. It’s a practice that deepens your whole life.
04
Who you become matters more than what you achieve.
Results are important. But the person you are when you reach them — how you carry yourself, how you relate, what you can withstand — that’s the real measure.
The ground
beneath the work.
1990s – 2000s
Early foundation
Training in NLP, Psycho-Neuro-Immunology, hypnotherapy and complementary health disciplines. Over 20 years in personal development work — starting with my own practice, long before it became professional.
2012
HeartMath certification
Trained at HeartMath Institute, Boulder Creek, California. Certified coach and trainer — one of the first to bring HeartMath practice to South Africa. Practising, teaching and mentoring continuously since.
2012 – present
HeartMath South Africa
Over four thousand one-on-one mentoring sessions with more than a thousand certified HeartMath coaches across South Africa and beyond. Individual coaching, group work, and leadership programmes — shaped by what I’ve seen actually work in real lives.
What it’s like to
work with me.
I don’t have a formula. What I have is presence, a set of tools that work, and a genuine interest in the specific texture of your life — not the category you fit into.
Sessions are unhurried. Some arrive knowing exactly what they want to work on. Others arrive knowing only that something needs to shift. Both are fine starting points.
The HeartMath technology — the biofeedback, the coherence training, the measurable practice — gives us something concrete to work with. But the conversations that happen around it are where most of the real movement occurs.
Present, not prescriptive
Each session begins with where you actually are — not where the programme says you should be. The process adapts to you.
Grounded in science
HeartMath is peer-reviewed research, not intuition dressed up as method. You can measure coherence, track progress, and see what shifts — and what doesn’t.
A practice, not a fix
We’re not looking for the insight that changes everything. We’re building the daily capacity that changes how everything feels — gradually, and permanently.
I’ve walked this
I’m not a theorist. Every tool I offer, I’ve needed. Every practice I teach, I do. That’s not a marketing line — it’s just how this started.
There are two distinct ways to work with me.
You want to become a HeartMath coach — and build a practice around it.
The flagship path is the HeartMath Coach/Mentor certification programme — a six-week, deeply personal process for those who want to carry this work into the world, or simply go deeper into it themselves. Whether you’re building a practice or building your own coherence at a more serious level, this is where that happens.
Not ready to go all in yet? The 14-Day Reset is a lighter entry point — a way of experiencing the work before deciding whether to commit. Think of it as the beginning of a conversation.
Already in a leadership role and want to develop yourself from the inside out? HeartMind Leadership is built for that.
This tends to suit
- Coaches, therapists and practitioners wanting certification
- Those curious about the work before committing — start with the Reset
- Leaders wanting personal development grounded in coherence
- Anyone who wants to go deeper than a two-week introduction
You need someone in your corner.
You’re not necessarily looking for a programme. You’re looking for a thinking partner — someone who can sit with the real complexity of your life without rushing to fix it, and who carries enough of their own lived experience to meet you where you are.
This is personal work. It uses HeartMath as one of many tools, but it begins with you, specifically — not a curriculum.
This tends to suit
- Those at a crossroads who can’t yet name what’s next
- High-performers whose inner life isn’t keeping pace
- Anyone who’s tried thinking their way out and hasn’t
- Those who want depth, not just direction
“The journey to the heart is slow. It took me 41 years to even consider that it was a destination.”
If something in this resonates — if you recognise the fog, or you’re already leaning toward an edge of your own — the first step is simply a conversation. No obligation, no programme pitch. Just an honest hour together to see if this is the right work, and the right time.
Start with a conversation Or explore the Coach/Mentor programme →