Introduction
At five years old, growing up in rural Portland, Jamaica, Akasha decided he wanted to be a healer. By the time he reached university, that instinct had been quietly filed away, because in his culture men did not become therapists, they became accountants or engineers. He built a career in banking instead, and describes it as the loneliest, most counterintuitive two years of his life. This episode follows what happened when he finally listened to that early instinct anyway: leaving banking with no savings, funding his own coach training by asking people he had coached for free to finally pay him, and building a career and a doctoral research focus around how people, particularly people from marginalised and Afro-Caribbean communities, grow, heal and see each other clearly.
A five-year-old who wanted to be a healer
Akasha traces his instinct for this work back to childhood in rural Jamaica, close to the land, close to his grandmother, and drawn even then to the idea of healing people. He never told an adult, assuming the response would not support the idea, and instead went into business and computing at university, a path he says had nothing natural about it for him but matched what young men around him were expected to do.
Discovering coaching inside a banking career he hated
Akasha lasted a little over two years in banking. What kept him there was providing for his family. What pulled him out was noticing he came alive in conversations with colleagues about their own career transitions, conversations he was having for free, on top of a job that felt like it was costing him something significant. He describes his soul intervening on his more cautious, security-focused thinking, and eventually he left with no financial cushion at all.
Funding his own transition by finally charging for his gift
To afford an expensive ontological coach-training programme in New York, commuting monthly from Bermuda with zero dollars in his account, Akasha went back to a list of twenty-five people he had coached informally for free and told them he was now charging a hundred dollars an hour. He describes the fear physically, his voice tightening, his skin prickling, through the first five conversations. All five said yes. That income funded his flights and tuition, and by the end of the programme he had roughly twenty paying clients, more than most of his cohort who had started a month earlier than him.
Self-love as a leadership discipline, not an indulgence
Akasha frames self-love as an acronym: leading yourself, observing yourself, valuing yourself, and empowering yourself to take the next action. He is careful to separate this from ego for its own sake, describing it instead as operating from something larger than the self, whether that is called soul, spirit or God. His argument is direct: self-discovery and self-love are not optional extras but the actual prerequisite for finding and living out a purpose, in leadership or anywhere else.
Studying how marginalised communities grow and develop
Akasha's doctoral study at a graduate school in Santa Barbara, rooted in integral theory, combined developmental psychology with social justice, focused specifically on how people from marginalised and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds grow, make sense of the world, and heal. He is blunt about the gap he found: most existing developmental theory was written by people who do not look like the communities he serves, including his own students in Grenada, where he teaches developmental psychology. He describes part of his responsibility as adding new voices and lived experience to that body of theory, rather than discarding it outright, while resisting any pressure for marginalised communities to prove themselves against a dominant academic standard before their own ways of knowing are taken seriously.
What his son and his grandmother taught him about love
Two relationships anchor how Akasha talks about love in practice. His grandmother, who he says had over two hundred grandchildren and great-grandchildren, taught him abundance through prayer, to ask plainly for what he wanted, and to believe that love could be given generously to everyone without running out. His teenage son, born with cerebral palsy after doctors gave a difficult prognosis, has become what Akasha calls his own teacher: a thoughtful, intentional teenager who challenges the idea that people should wait until retirement, or until they finish school, to live out their dreams.
Leading across difference by slowing down
Asked how he brings love into work that is often confrontational, covering bias, race and difference, Akasha describes a discipline of slowing down enough to actually see another person, rather than offering a glancing, performative acknowledgement. He references the Zulu greeting Sawubona, meaning "I see you," as the spirit he tries to bring into every workshop, coaching session or classroom. He is careful to note that talking explicitly about love can itself feel triggering in some professional spaces, since it can sound like a way of glossing over real pain, and says the word matters less than the discipline of actually listening and making room for people to be heard.
A dream for the Caribbean, and a faith of his own making
Akasha describes a dream of opening a learning and healing space in the Caribbean where people can practise seeing and being seen, framing it as a kind of oasis in what he calls, in the religious context of Grenada specifically, a desert of dogma. Asked directly about his own religious identity, he describes it as a blend he has assembled himself from Christianity, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism and Rastafarianism, acknowledging value and limitation in each.
