Carla Taylor

I was a CEO managing 3,500 staff across 135 sites when the diagnosis arrived. Stage IV cancer doesn't care about your board's strategic plan or the commitments you've always honoured to your team and stakeholders. It simply turns your world on its head and leaves you to make sense of that new and troubling perspective while you float outside the familiar orbit of life as you knew it.

Time marched on while I navigated my new reality. Chemotherapy, surgeries, radiotherapy, immuno-compromised isolation. Then COVID arrived, and suddenly billions of people across the globe were living under the conditions to which I'd already adapted — uncertainty, disruption, the collapse of assumptions about what "normal" looks like. For me the deja-vu was surreal. The digital acceleration that followed only deepened that sense of disorientation.

Returning to the C-suite amidst this chaos, I prepared for the physical challenge — managing fatigue, rebuilding stamina, getting up to speed on a new leadership role in a new sector. What I didn't plan for was the brain drain of back-to-back online meetings, and the disappointment that came with discovering I had been placed at the top of the organisation's risk register: not because of performance failure, but because I had defied the odds and faced down my mortality. What I considered as a victory had left me tainted from a governance viewpoint.

In response, I put pressure on myself to deliver in months what might have taken years for another CEO to complete, pushing through pain and exhaustion. I had a lens that most leadership frameworks don't account for — the cut-through-the-crap clarity that only comes from having your professional identity stripped back to the studs and rebuilt from what actually survived - and I was determined to use this to prove I was still capable of doing what I could “before”... but that required resilience I no longer possessed and a business environment that had physical walls!

I had to invest so much of my energy on catching up to the digital systems I inherited that I never allowed myself the time to step back and engage with the emerging technologies that would have made both my job, and my life, so much easier. I was working harder, not smarter. As a lifelong systems and productivity nerd, this realisation triggered an overwhelming sense of failure.

Once I acknowledged that I had fallen back into old habits that undermined my health, I gave myself permission to redefine what success looks like for me in this new world. I stepped out of the C-suite, immersing myself in AI while reinventing myself as a strategic consultant and coach. My passion is leveraging my experience to empower other leaders whether navigating their own return to work after career-interrupting crises or needing to build confidence in AI and the digital ecosystem in which we find ourselves. In truth, I have discovered that these two goals are not as different as they appear. The core question is the same: do I have what it takes to lead in today's business world?

The answer is yes. And everything here is built to help you prove it — to yourself first and foremost.