Introduction
Jayne Doherty had just been promoted to board level. The salary was good, the trajectory was clear, and by every external measure she was winning. And then, on maternity leave with her third child, the thought arrived anyway: I'm not fulfilled.
That single sentence undid a decade of careful planning. Jayne had built her adult life on a formula that worked, degree completed on schedule despite a teenage pregnancy, professional qualifications stacked one after another, promotions delivered on time. The formula kept producing results. It had stopped producing meaning.
What she did next, resigning from a high paying corporate job with no clients and no safety net, is the part of her story most people know. What led up to it, and what it cost her to keep going once she'd made the leap, is the part worth sitting with. This is a conversation about identity, faith, burnout and the quiet decision to stop being everything to everyone but yourself.
A teenage pregnancy and the making of a leader
Jayne grew up in a strict, faith led household, the daughter of a local preacher and a nurse, one of five children. Education wasn't encouraged, it was demanded. "I don't care what industry you want to operate in, what qualification you want to do," her father would say. "I just want you to be the best."
That environment gave her discipline. It also, by her own account, left her short on confidence and used to being told what to do rather than trusting her own judgement. The first person to break that pattern was her sister Deborah, who defied the family's expectations to become a fashion designer. Watching Deborah do it planted a seed: maybe there were other paths.
Then, in her first year of university, Jayne came home pregnant. She describes it as the moment she thought would be the end of her, the disgrace she couldn't undo. Her father's response became one of the defining moments of her life. When she told him she was considering a termination because she saw no other option, he told her, simply, that she would not do that. In that moment, she says, he showed her what his faith actually meant, not through scripture but through how he lived it.
From there, Jayne built her own strategy. She finished her degree in summer school so she could graduate with her peers. She learned to drive. She planned, month by month, the life she wanted to give her daughter. The habit of turning a setback into a plan, rather than a story about herself, became the operating system for everything that followed.
Climbing into a gilded cage
Jayne's early career was a study in proving herself. She was the only Black woman in a corporate environment working long hours, taking on extra qualifications for a competitive edge, and making her mostly white male bosses richer while feeling increasingly invisible. "They didn't see me," she says. "They didn't care about me. I was just there to fulfil what they needed."
The cost showed up at home too. To build her career, she made the difficult decision to send her daughter Jada to stay with family in Ghana for six months while she and her husband David established financial stability. It worked, they moved from a rat infested hostel into a proper flat, but the sacrifice sharpened something in her: every future decision would need a clear return, not just a title.
By the time she reached board level, she had done everything the plan required. And that was precisely the problem. The plan had been about proving something to everyone except herself.
The voice she couldn't shake
The shift happened slowly, then all at once. During her third maternity leave, Jayne started "seeking God like never before," trying to name the discontent she couldn't shift. She tried to talk herself out of it. She even applied for a higher paying, closer to home role, telling herself that if she got it, that would be her sign to stay in corporate life. She got the job. It changed nothing.
The real moment came walking to work near Liverpool Street, headphones in, mid conversation with herself about what to do next. A single line arrived, unprompted: Jane, do you trust me or not. "That was it," she says. "I knew that was that was it." She handed in her resignation that same day, certain that if she waited even one more day, she'd find another excuse.
She hadn't told her husband she'd resigned. She hadn't told anyone the full plan, not out of secrecy but out of fear that someone else's doubt would become her own. "I was so close to not doing it," she admits, "that if somebody had said Jane, don't do this yet, I probably would have listened."
Learning care from the ground up
Jayne didn't go into healthcare because she knew the sector. She went into it because her mother, a nurse of over thirty years, wanted to start something of her own, and Jayne saw an opportunity to combine her mother's clinical expertise with her own business skills. Trinity Healthcare was registered, policies written, an office set up in a spare bedroom, while Jayne was still on maternity leave.
What she hadn't planned for was becoming the front line staff herself. Before she could hire and manage a care team, she had to learn to do the job, catheter bags, personal care, wound dressing, everything, taught by her own mother. It was, in her words, the complete opposite of the corporate glamour she'd left behind. It was also, she now says, the making of the business: she couldn't set standards or spot problems in a team she'd never done the work herself.
Building a business people don't leave
Trinity Healthcare grew without a marketing budget or a sales strategy. It grew on word of mouth, referrals passed from one family to the next, and on a culture that treated staff the way Jayne wished corporate life had treated her, with fair pay, respect and genuine care when something went wrong in their lives. The result: for two full years, no one left the company.
That retention became the competitive edge Jayne hadn't planned for. In an industry known for high turnover, consistency of care became Trinity's unique selling point. "We just simplified it," she says. "We didn't try and do anything too fancy. Excellent care with compassion. That's all we did."
Selfish leadership: the boundary that saved her
For years, Jayne ran on empty. "I was so focused on being everything to everybody but myself, and I started becoming resentful to the people that were closest to me," she says. She wouldn't ask for help, wouldn't lean on anyone, and quietly expected people to notice her needs without ever naming them.
Burnout forced the change. She began protecting small, non-negotiable pockets of time, twenty minutes alone in a parked car, a hair appointment, a drive by herself, and stopped treating them as indulgent. She talks about a talk she once gave with a deliberately provocative title: good leaders are selfish. Not selfish in the sense of taking from others, but in the sense of protecting the capacity that lets you give anything at all.
The other half of that lesson was structural, not personal: learning to work on the business rather than in it. Hiring managers, trusting them to make decisions, and stepping back from the detail she'd been too close to see clearly. "Any business that relies solely on you, it's not a business," she says. "You're still employed. In fact, you're not even employed, you're chained."
Taking it home: Ghana, purpose and legacy
Jayne's giving back to Ghana didn't start as strategy, it started as habit, sending pre-loved items home as a child with her parents. As Trinity grew, that habit became something more deliberate: donations, then clean water projects for villages, then, eventually, a clinic run as an extension of Trinity's UK operation. Fee paying private clients fund free healthcare, maternity services and screenings for people who can't otherwise access them, a model she compares to how the NHS cross-subsidises care.
Building in Ghana hasn't been simple. Jayne describes working with contractors unused to taking instruction from a woman, being read as decorative rather than in charge, and the slower pace of infrastructure and transparency. She's clear eyed about the frustration and equally clear that stepping back isn't an option. "We're only here on assignment for a period of time," she says. "After we've gone, then what. Our time has to stand for something."
Alongside Trinity, Jayne co-founded Brown Skin Network, a community supporting Black women into leadership and through their professional and personal journeys, born from her own years of isolation as a visionary without a network of people who understood her ambition. She's also co-founded a vodka brand celebrating West African culture, developed with a business partner over roughly a year, working with growers and distilleries to build a socially conscious drinks brand in a category with very few women.
What leadership means to Jayne now
Asked to define leadership, Jayne doesn't offer one line, she offers a list: service, continuous growth, sacrifice, risk taking, reflection, accountability, unlearning, and enjoying the work. "Leadership is empowering those around you to step into that leadership role as well," she says.
The deeper shift, though, is personal. After years of leaning into what she calls masculine energy to fulfil the role she thought a CEO had to play, she's learned she doesn't need to perform an extreme version of anyone, boss, provider, achiever, to be effective. "I don't have to be so hungry for the next goal," she says. "The numbers don't always have to be on an upward trajectory to know the service is still being delivered well, the team is still empowered."
At thirty-seven, she describes finally liking, and loving, herself, without qualification. Not as an arrival point, but as ground to build the next chapter from.
