Introduction
Sabrina Ben Salmi remembers a coaching session where her coach asked a simple question: what do you buy when you go shopping? She realised she couldn't answer it. Her trolley was full of her children's favourite foods, her ex-husband's favourite items, everything for everyone else. Nothing for her. "I was everything to everyone," she says. "But who am I to myself? And the truth was, I didn't know." She was 31. This is the conversation about what it took to find that voice again, and how she has since built a family, and a mission, around it.
Becoming Everything to Everyone and Losing Herself by 31
Sabrina describes a slow erosion that most people would recognise: daughter, wife, mother, friend, sister, a life built entirely out of roles rather than identity. It wasn't a crisis that surfaced it, it was an ordinary coaching question about a shopping list. "I was a people pleaser. I would do whatever was fashionable for everyone else, but I wasn't there for myself. And that was really when the rebirthing started to happen."
The Seven-Year-Old Who Dreamed of a Bridge Between Rich and Poor
Long before any of that, Sabrina was a child in East London, noticing that billboards and prices looked different depending on which part of the city she was in. At around seven, she drew a bridge in her mind, a way for wealthy people and less affluent people to cross over and exchange what they each knew. "I'm a true believer that it's not about money. I think we all have something to learn from someone else." She traces her lifelong pull toward people and purpose back to that image, and to a childhood marked by illness, rejection and a search for meaning: "There must be a reason why I'm here."
Dyslexia, Shame and the Book That Changed Everything
Diagnosed with dyslexia in her twenties, after years of being told she was simply "odd," Sabrina initially hid the diagnosis, worried people would assume she couldn't read. The shift came at a two-week transformational course, where she stood up unprompted in front of a room and said, "I'm going to write a book." She hadn't planned to say it. "That book changed my life in terms of who I was becoming," she says, and it became the start of reframing dyslexia not as a limit but as part of her story as an author and publisher.
Single Motherhood, Domestic Abuse and Learning to Keep Getting Up
Sabrina became a single mother at 22, the outcome she'd feared most, having watched her own mother work three jobs to raise her. She also describes living through domestic abuse, and the particular loneliness of an abuser working to dim the parts of you that other people are drawn to. "I was beaten up in life. I just kept on going. It felt like I was getting knocked down twice and getting up ten times." The turning point, she says, wasn't a single moment of clarity, but the shift from her life being about her to her life being about her children: "Giving up isn't an option, failing isn't an option, staying still isn't an option."
The Phone Call That Changed How She Worked
The moment that forced a real change came on an ordinary evening, calling home from a training session and finding out her son was having an asthma attack, and that none of the adults present knew. "It felt like I had died. My soul just left me." She called an ambulance from the car. That night convinced her she couldn't keep leaving her children while chasing her own development elsewhere, and she began folding them into her work instead of separating the two, opening her office door, asking their opinions, building a life without the "hot mess" of trying to balance two disconnected worlds.
Building a Family Around Six Dreams and One Mission
Sabrina's household now runs on what she calls "one family, six dreams, one mission": each of her five children pursuing an individual interest, from cultural connectivity to finance to mindset and leadership, unified by a shared family purpose to help other families heal. She's deliberate about not shaping her children's dreams for them, instead creating what she calls an incubator where they stay childlike and curious for as long as possible. "We don't know our talents until we are immersed. What we think we can do is one thing, but what we need to search for is what we don't know about ourselves."
Leadership as Authenticity and Servitude
Asked to define leadership, Sabrina doesn't reach for a management framework. "Leadership for me is authenticity," she says, describing it as the ability to activate other people rather than needing to be the one who always knows best. She points to servitude leadership, the idea of showing up to serve rather than to be served, as the thread running through her work with clients and her approach to raising her children. "If we all vibrate at our unique, authentic self, we finally present as the unique puzzle piece to the bigger puzzle."
