I am a strategist. Also, I am a mother, a womb holder, a cyclical being who bleeds every month. The corporate world taught me to leave most of myself outside the room. I no longer do.

I spent a decade in corporate strategy and business development, sitting with leaders at the point where vision meets truth, helping them see clearly and act decisively. Then something broke open. I left the corporate world and entered a different kind of territory in my psyche. Years of devoted practice across ancient traditions that changed everything I thought I knew about intelligence, power, the body and what it means to be a woman building something in this world.

Since 2020 I have worked with hundreds of women. Entrepreneurs, artists, creatives. Women with substance, with ambition, with a growing sense that something essential was missing from the way they were working and living.

Here is what I know now. Your hormones are not a handicap. Your cycle is not an inconvenience. Your body knows things your mind hasn’t caught up with yet. These are not soft ideas. They are the most precise instruments you own, if you know how to read them.

Business taught me how to read markets. Something ancient taught me how to read myself. I work at the intersection of those two worlds. The real work begins when you are done with either/or thinking and live both/and.

We live in a world that runs on a straight line. Performance. Optimisation. The relentless forward march. The feminine principle — cyclical, receptive, deep — has no place in this architecture. And the cost of that exclusion is not abstract. It lives in the body. It surfaces as exhaustion, disconnection, the quiet sense that something essential has been left behind. The business world was not designed for a body that cycles, gets pregnant, gives birth, or moves through menopause. Every one of these is treated as an inconvenience, a disruption to the straight line.

I was born and raised in Istanbul, educated at Alman Lisesi and then METU, before moving to Germany for my graduate studies in economics at the University of Mannheim. London came next, seven years of building myself from scratch in a city where I knew no one, in a language I had to earn. It was London that gave me English, and English that gave me access to the wisdom teachers who changed everything.

I came back to Istanbul carrying more than I had left with. A different relationship to my body, my work, and what I was actually here to do.

I am a mother. The passage through pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum was a death practice. More transformative than any tradition I had studied. It cracked something open. That too lives in this work.

I love my morning coffee and my pages. I love spaciousness, travelling and art. I love tapas and a good convo that gently tips into provocation. I love my family deeply and I love my solitude equally.

I live in Moda, Istanbul with my husband and my son Deniz.

Experience

2020 — Present Founder · Istanbul

2019 — Senior Business Development Manager SquareTrade · London

2016 — 2019 Business Development Manager Euromonitor International · London

2013 — 2015 Strategy Manager Akbank · Istanbul

2011 — 2013 Consultant Deloitte · Istanbul

Education

2009 — 2011 MSc Economics University of Mannheim · Germany

2005 — 2009 BSc Economics METU · Ankara