About Anjalee
Founder
Dr Anjalee Perera
Born in Scotland to a Sri Lankan family, Anjalee was raised with a typical immigrant mentality – safety and certainty are paramount. For a high achiever, only a few ‘noble’ professions could guarantee that, namely medicine, engineering or law.
So in spite of her talents in English, performing arts and modern foreign languages, Anjalee went off to Bristol Medical School after her A-levels, and went on to work as a doctor for NHS hospitals in the London Deanery.
But the profound sense that medicine just wasn’t right for her persisted. She found herself dreading work each day, finding it impossible to decide on her speciality training pathway, and feeling burnt out, bored and exhausted. But she felt stuck – she longed for change, but had no idea what she could do, or where to even start. At the time, there was little information available about alternative career options for doctors. She feared the unknown almost as much as she feared what other people would think and say if they knew about her doubts.
She began an anonymous blog to vent her feelings: Disillusioned Medic. She found solace in her writing, and as other doctors reached out with similar stories, she felt less alone.
Fate intervened: a health scare and a summons jury service provided Anjalee with unexpected downtime to reflect on her life. She realised she couldn’t continue to lose herself in a profession that made her so unhappy. She resigned her post and went into marketing, in which she continues to work to this day.
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Becoming a coach
Following her departure from medicine, Anjalee eventually revealed her true identity. As time went by, she received more and more requests for help from those who resonated with her story, especially after her interview in The Guardian during the COVID-19 pandemic. She began to coach not only doctors, but other high achievers in vocational jobs, academia and prestige professions.
Drawn to her validating and empathetic ‘bedside manner’, coachees would share their secret hopes and fears, their daily struggles, and the pain from their past that continued to reverberate through their present. Through her delivery of hundreds of hours of coaching to dozens of clients, Anjalee began to see patterns emerging for the significant majority of her caseload.
She began to study childhood trauma, including Childhood Emotional Neglect, C-PTSD, narcissistic abuse, sickness in childhood, intergenerational trauma cycles, Attachment theory, and trauma in minority populations, such as ethnic minorities, neurodivergence and LGBT+ communities. Through developing her expertise, she became one of the few voices exploring how childhood trauma impacts career choices and development.
Anjalee continues to find deep fulfilment in helping her clients make the link between their emotional past and their professional present.
“I became a doctor because of that old cliché of wanting to help people, so part of the pain of leaving medicine was feeling like I wasn’t going to do that anymore….
I wish I’d known then what I know now:
helping people isn’t necessarily rooted in your career; sometimes, it’s simply about bringing the truest version of you to light, for in doing so, you’ll start illuminating the way for those still wandering in the dark.”
