Leadership consultant, strategic coach and former corporate finance high-flyer Remi Olajoyegbe describes how she came to launch a ‘modern-day mystery school’ for women changemakers. She talks to Liz Hall

 

Launching ‘a modern-day mystery school’ for women may seem quite a leap for a former Goldman Sachs high flyer but for Remi Olajoyegbe, bridging the ancient and modern world to offer transformational healing spaces for women is less of a pivot and more of a homecoming.

For Olajoyegbe, who’s been working as a leadership consultant and strategic coach to C-suite leaders since leaving the City a decade ago, the Isumataq Collective sees a long-held vision come to fruition. It’s one which has emerged from personal experiences delving into ancient wisdom approaches as she recovered from burnout and navigated profound grief. And it’s a natural extension of the transformational coaching she’s been doing with C-suite leaders underpinning strategic outward-facing coaching with deep inner work.

 

The descent and the call

As part of her personal healing journey, she has worked with indigenous communities and their medicines as healing modalities for many years, and has delved into systemic and family constellations, meditation and other approaches. Olajoyegbe first sought out what she calls the “new old ways” to help herself. Then what began as survival tools and spiritual anchors for herself became a vocational calling to share the wisdom with others.

During Olajoyegbe’s high-powered career in finance, she raised billions in capital, climbed the ranks of investment banking, and received many accolades, including being named one of Financial News’ 100 Most Influential Women in European Finance in 2008. 

During that 11-year period in finance, first at Goldman Sachs and then running the same capital markets syndicate business globally for Renaissance Capital, she also found time to consolidate her love of food and dining with her community, by co-founding The Palmerston, an award-winning London Gastro Pub. 

From the outside, her life shimmered with success. Inside, however, she was unravelling. Despite spending years
at the top of her game, she was “haunted by a deep void of dissatisfaction.”

“I was receiving all these accolades, all the success, but it wasn’t really touching the sides. I remember going to see my mum, and there was this big awards dinner, and I was being really flat, and she said, ‘Aren’t you proud?’ And I said, ‘You know what, Mum, I don’t really feel very much about it.’

“I’d been striving, unconsciously, to really become successful in my field. And in that ascent, the void of success became more and more apparent. When it’s not anchored in something deeper than career and material ambition, success merely amplifies the void rather than filling it.”

However, like so many high-achieving women, Olajoyegbe didn’t recognise burnout when it came, and pushed on. 

“Consumed by career, I was unable to navigate the pain of my personal life that lay behind the polish of perfection.”

Then came the painful blow of losing her first child, Eloise, who was stillborn in 2011. In addition to losing Eloise, she also miscarried a son at five months, and lost both parents, her mother dying just before the birth of her daughter Ruby, who is now 11 years old. 

When Olajoyegbe eventually stepped away from the City, she entered into what she describes as ‘the descent’.

“Eloise changed my life. [Her death] was incredibly difficult and kicked off the next cycle, [one of going] into the belly of the beast. But I wouldn’t change it – it was one of the most defining moments of my life and she completely reoriented me to what was really important. 

“What Eloise did for me was bring to the foreground how much I wanted to nurture another. I just didn’t know how I was going to get there. It was a challenging journey because it was my own personal desire to mother, but [the loss] also really opened up this nurturing aspect of my nature, which had always been there but I hadn’t put my finger quite on it. 

After Eloise died, Olajoyegbe participated in some 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats, which helped her “drop into the grief”.

“Grief became my companion for 10 years solidly. Grief, which is so fundamentally misunderstood, particularly in our Western culture, is an essential part of life we need to have a relationship with, rather than something we should be just fixing and sorting.” 

 

Coaching

When she emerged from the City, as part of her healing journey, Olajoyegbe decided to retrain as a coach. This made sense for her as for years she’d been nurturing and supporting others behind the scenes, including clients and young people coming through the ranks. 

“There were lots of junior people who’d come into an institution and not quite know how to navigate it. Somehow, they’d make a beeline for me, and I’d help them. I also supported clients – working on their deals, on bringing a company into a public format so other people could buy it, required knowledge and sensitivity to the different personality types.

“As I’m talking to you, I’m thinking, wow, the amount of different people that I’d have to meet and either hold through something or hold something for them, or help settle. [I was using] a real mixture of skills of listening, reflecting back, helping them find solutions when they were in quite exercised moments.

“And so there was this natural aptitude of supporting and helping which is great and also has a shadow side, as we all know!”

She began coaching leaders, somewhat informally, setting up more formally in 2017, with her coaching practice, I am Remi, coaching many senior female leaders across sectors. She gathered more skills including in Systemic Constellations, and later Family Constellations, when she realised “everyone’s bringing their family systems to work!”

 

Realising her vision

Olajoyegbe then felt drawn to “create something that enables people to go on a deeper journey that speaks not just to the ‘I’, but to the issues that we collectively feel and meet, and which democratises coaching. 

She believes the world is shifting and women are being called forward and need to focus on personal healing for collective transformation, on self-actualising and benefiting from sisterhood collaboration to create more sustainable systems. 

The Isumataq Collective takes its name from isumataq, an Inuit word meaning ‘the keeper of the sacred space in which wisdom reveals itself.’ It’s inspired by mystery schools of old which were rooted in ancient traditions and esoteric knowledge, guiding initiates along a path of self-knowledge and self-mastery to support women to awaken and deepen into the unknown, the Mysteries. But it brings in a new twist, drawing too on modern wisdom and knowledge, including coaching and mentoring, Systemic Constellations and innovative psychological and leadership tools. 

Core too is community building to create a safe space for learning and transformation for women. Other approaches include meditation, systemic constellations, somatic practices such as breathwork, sound healing and grief rituals. As one of the co-founders of Medicine Festival, a four-day spiritual wellbeing and cultural event launched in 2020 that brings together indigenous elders from around the world, Olajoyegbe has a wealth of contacts with practitioners across many disciplines. 

 

Democratising elite support 

Through the Collective, Olajoyegbe wants to make elite coaching more accessible to women, supporting greater numbers of “awakening women leaders of all stages and ages” to move through blocks, foster resilience and wellbeing, and collectively step up as changemakers. 

Olajoyegbe works with some of the most senior women in the world. But what about the extraordinary women who are not quite ‘senior enough’ in to qualify for coaching, she wondered? “I’ve heard it a thousand times – ‘I wish I could work with you, but I can’t afford it.’ This platform is my answer to that.”

Thus, the Collective is intentionally affordable. There’s also a corporate package, allowing forward-thinking organisations to support multiple women at once. 

“I wanted to create something which… addresses all the other extraordinarily talented women [who aren’t at the highest levels] who would want to, but can’t, access an elite type of coaching in and around leadership. 

The platform, which launched in March 2025, offers a 13-month programme of Coaching Shorts. Each module invites participants into a deep inquiry exploring anything from ancestral trauma and grief to prayer, burnout, and female relationships. Also on offer is an immersive one-month option including guided meditations, Systemic Constellation exercises and reflections from Olajoyegbe, a deep-dive two-hour circle session with all the cohort to explore the month’s theme, which includes coaching, a quarterly retreat with guest coaches and practitioners, and a private community space for check-ins, celebrations and resourcing between calls. 

Through the Collective’s Hope Starts With Her pledge, 5% of profits are earmarked to support under-resourced women and children.

 

Collective healing

She shares how one client, after being in a women’s circle, felt able to show emotion to her mother and really mean it, which Olajoyegbe found very moving. “Those sorts of movements move things inter-generationally. That’s the thing that we need to really be aware of, that in us doing the work in community, we’re not just doing the work for ourselves, we’re doing it for everyone – for society’s children. We’re moving the field. And that, for me, feels like a really good collective goal.”

“I feel like our path to self-mastery is constantly through pain points. Realising that we’re more regulated than we used to be, that we can respond more choicefully than we used to, realising there are other perspectives. 

“The more we do that work, the more we find ourselves in a better position to manage the complexities of life. Self-mastery is being able to show up in situations and feel you can manage yourself, that you can contribute, allowing another to have an opposing opinion. One of the things I see often, and again, it’s a check for me all the time too, is our instinct to make another wrong. It’s so deeply lodged. Isn’t it wonderful when we can just go, gosh, actually, that person has a different opinion to me, and I’m not right. 

“The more I know, the less I know. The more we can know to understand that we don’t really know anything, the better. That attachment to a point of view, a world view, brings so much suffering, doesn’t it? Because we’re hanging onto it for dear life. 

“I’m trying to bring coaching to a different point of human awareness. Because we can easily become dehumanised at these times and take stances that don’t allow us to unblock.”

 

Background

Olajoyegbe is the daughter of a Nigerian father and an Assamese (NE India) mother, which has cultivated an innate sensitivity to the principles and importance of diversity and inclusion, she says. Olajoyegbe continues to take inspiration from her late mother when it comes to leadership.

“My mother has been one of the most influential women in my life, for all the obvious reasons and for some less obvious ones. She was an incredible leader and an incredible people seer. She was quite mystical in the way that she would just know things about people. She didn’t even know that it was a gift as such.

Her parents were well educated and aspirational immigrants who met and married in 1970s London, and worked hard to ensure their offspring had the best start. Being an unusual mix, culturally different and having to assimilate, was in hindsight an initial test of Olajoyegbe’s early strategic and leadership skills.

Humans have always fascinated Olajoyegbe, prompting her to study them – she has a BA in Sociology and Anthropology and a Masters in Social Policy and Social Research from the London School of Economics.

 

Deepening

Participating in many indigenous wisdom ceremonies, engaging in two decades of therapy and the systemic constellations work has helped her understand “I can work on myself, but then there’s a whole field of stuff that’s going on beyond my consciousness, some of which I’m personally identified with. All of us are chasing aspects of the field consciously or unconsciously.

“My practice started to change and deepen in line with what I was becoming able to hold in leaders. I was able to garner the attention of very senior leaders, and win clients very easily.

“My clients would want to go into much deeper spaces and so we would do both that and the strategic work such as around how they wanted to position themselves and have greater impact in the world, in their lives, for outward-facing work.

Typically, she’ll use processes such as systemic exercises, parts work, polarity work, which many coaches embrace, but she’s clear what she offers sometimes transcends conventional coaching models.

“When it comes to a lot of traditional coaching programmes, they don’t really light me up necessarily. I’m interested in the deeper layers. So that always tends to lead me into the esoteric realms.

“I’ve never loved the term coach. I felt it was a bit of a straightjacket for me, because I work in all different layers. 

“Many labels have been set up to potentially demystify what is essentially a very mystical being – a woman. And I’m really bored of that. 

“Every single one of the clients I’ve worked with are on a kind of continuum of mysticism and magnificence, but they’ve all been drawn to different elements, whether it’s coming to sit in circles, [engaging in] deep meditation, working with their internal parts [or whatever it is], there’s always been a deeper layer to each and every one because we’re not just this forward facing success story.

“And I just felt, ‘Well, I do this deep work with all these clients, all behind the scenes, under the appropriate label of strategic and systemic coach, because that’s palatable and more plausible for many. And yet, there’s a really deep unfolding that happens and it’s consistent. It’s how I get the change.”

When Olajoyegbe got to the point where she could no longer keep up with the amount of work coming her way, she came up with the idea of the Isumataq. 

“I wanted to build an online temple for women to come together in community and to do healing work in the form of coaching and mentoring, either guided by me or other facilitators, and also held by each other with this collective wisdom which doesn’t even get a look in normally because we’re so busy compartmentalising ourselves to fit into the system and to not be too ‘woowoo’.” 

Prior to launching the Isumataq Collective, Olajoyegbe had already started to run deep-dive retreats for women “who just needed a bit more space and room to explore the edges of themselves, the neglected parts, and to be in community. And I still do that work in different forms. And it was really, again, super potent.”

 

Sisterhood

“The women would leave feeling buoyed by the possibility of closeness, of nourishment, of truth telling, of being able to share challenge and difficulty with each other.

“We’d create this beautiful holding vessel that was safe, [drawing on] that female empowerment that’s in my lineage, and which isn’t, I’m sad to say, in every female line. And as I’d hear these stories, and I’d be like, ‘How can we relearn? How can we reteach each other that it’s safe?’

 “And when we sit shoulder to shoulder as women, we suddenly go, ‘wow, look at all this comparison sickness. Look at the way we’re pitched against each other.’ There’s all this talk of sisterhood, but it’s a very tricky, complex place, and there’s a lot of toxic positivity around how we should be, and yet we’re not set up to win. It’s exhausting. It’s tiring, and it doesn’t serve any of us. [Then it becomes] ‘Okay, what are we going to do about that?’ ”

 

Sustainability

The project is self-funded so it’s key for Olajoyegbe to both build momentum and scale up, and to pay attention to sustainability, including around self-care. 

“The cost is a lot, not just in terms of what’s been invested, which is my service, and I’m really very happy to say I’m working for the Goddess. But I need to find ways to sustain it so that it can grow and I can take on more people to help with the load. I work a lot, I’ve got an 11-year-old, and I sold my house in London three years ago to take on a run-down fish farm. We’ve been rewilding it, and I’ve created a little retreat space, and I’ve built a temple to the Goddess on the land, which is where I do some of my circle work. So that’s been a massive undertaking as well. But these things take time.”

One day when she was feeling insecure, the very next day, she received a message from a woman who like Olajoyegbe had lost her daughter 14 years ago and also grieved her on the shores of Lake Hennessey, where Olajoyegbe had spread Eloise’s ashes. 

“You couldn’t make it up. It was one of those moments of we are all one, here you go, just remember, you’re not alone. And it really helped steady me.

“So I’m showing up to create a body of work that feels accessible, pulling from wisdom teachers and obviously referencing them. If Isumataq means ‘the keeper of the sacred space within which wisdom reveals itself’, are we not then all an Isumataq? Do we not all have the potential to be that, to be our own guardians, to hold enough space so that essential things can emerge into that space?  

“For me that’s really exciting. And when I see it, it’s undeniable. I know you’ll have seen that emerge in another human being because you’re holding them in in a particular way. I’ve got the best job in the world! 

 

Find out more

• I am Remi: https://iamremi.co.uk/
• The Isumataq collective: www.isumataqcollective.com