The Moment My Corporate Training and My Inner Life Stopped Being Separate
For most of my corporate career, I kept two parts of myself in separate rooms.
The formally trained designer on one side. The intuitive, spiritually curious person on the other.
This is the story of what happened when those two worlds began to feed each other, and why it changed everything about how I work.
The designer came first
I grew up in Argentina with a natural affinity for the visual: proportion, colour, the way a well-considered composition could communicate something a paragraph couldn't. I took the work seriously and built a career on it.
Sixteen years in corporate design, including fourteen at Procter and Gamble, taught me discipline. How to work at scale, how to hold a brand across complexity, how to translate vision into something coherent and commercially effective. I was good at it and I valued it.
But there was always another current running underneath.
The inner life ran parallel, privately
From early on I was drawn to practices that worked differently from the rational and the analytical. Meditation, contemplative inquiry, ways of knowing that came through the body rather than the mind. In Argentina this felt natural, woven into daily life. In a corporate studio in London it felt like something to keep to one side.
So I did. For years the two worlds coexisted without meeting. The designer showed up to work. The rest happened elsewhere.
The moment the two worlds converged
Leaving corporate life cracked something open. Without the structure of a large organisation holding the shape of the day, I had space to ask different questions. About the work, about what I actually wanted to build, about what kind of designer I was becoming.
I found myself in rooms, and later on retreats, with women who were doing something similar: bringing together professional expertise and a deeper, less easily named intelligence. Teachers and practitioners who worked at the intersection of the precise and the intuitive. That period of immersion was, in retrospect, less a detour from the design work and more a direct route into the heart of it.
The question I kept returning to was not spiritual. It was practical: what would it look like to bring the full quality of my attention to a design process? Not just the trained eye and the strategic mind, but the capacity to sense what a brand actually is beneath what a client can articulate about it?
What emerged was a different kind of process
Embodying Your Brand Essence grew from that question. A guided inquiry that combines thought-provoking questionnaires, meditations, and deep collaborative sessions to surface the clarity every design decision builds from.
It is not a mystical process. It is a precise one. But it draws on both sides of what I bring: thirty years of professional design and strategic expertise, and the quieter, more attuned capacity to sense what is true about a brand before it has been fully named.
Clients describe it as a perceptual shift. What they arrive at is not a new idea about their brand: a clearer, more embodied sense of something already present in the work, surfaced and made usable.
Why this matters for the people I work with
Many of the founders and leaders I work with have made a version of this journey themselves. They have left corporate structures, or are in the process of leaving. They are building something that reflects who they have become, not just what they know how to do.
They want a website that holds the full depth of that. One that carries the real quality and atmosphere of their work at full depth. One that speaks for them clearly before they speak for themselves.
That is what becomes possible when both sides of the process are fully present: the commercial expertise and the intuitive depth working together, not in separate rooms.
If you are curious what this looks like in practice, the Brand Essence Meditation is a free fifteen-minute guided practice and a good first taste of the process.
Nora Rose Zinerman is an Art Director, Brand and Website Designer with over 30 years of experience. She works with founders, leaders, and creatives; from first website to full redesign.
Based in Surrey, UK. Working globally.
About Nora
