Meet Amy Hackett-Jones

I wasn’t always the Peace Whisperer.

For years, I lived into my smallness: quiet, hardworking, striving, but never truly aligned. I was praised for effort, but measured by the wrong metrics. Outwardly, I was successful – COO roles, global travel, strategy and leadership – but inside, achievement brought no joy, only exhaustion. It was achievement without peace, performance without presence.

Until one instant changed everything.

I caught an edge in the French Alps and slammed into a steel pylon. It saved my life — on the other side was a sheer drop into a precipice — but it broke me. Crushed vertebrae. A hip shattered in three places. My body in pieces, my spirit suspended in shock.

I was airlifted off the mountain and told, in the clinical language of doctors, that my life as I knew it was over. Six months in bed. Years of recovery. Endless pronouncements of what I would never do again. “You’ll never run,” they said — words that cut deeper than the injuries themselves. For someone whose identity had always been tied to movement, freedom, and speed, that sentence didn’t just break my body; it crushed my soul.

For seven years, I lived under that shadow. Outwardly, I worked, travelled, achieved. Inwardly, I was fragmented, silenced, disconnected from the part of me that felt most alive.

Then came Cape Town. After a 17-hour overnight drive from Johannesburg, I stepped out of the car, stiff and aching, and laced up my running shoes almost on instinct. I told myself I’d jog once around the block, just to stretch, to move. But as the sun rose over the Atlantic to my right and cast its first light across Table Mountain to my left, something stirred. Step by step, something long-buried woke up inside me. Those hesitant strides turned into a rhythm, a pull, a remembering.

By the time I stopped, I had run 40 miles – all the way to Cape Point, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet majestically.

That day cracked me wide open. It was the beginning of everything that has come since. It showed me that Peace isn’t passive but the anchor that steadies us when everything falls apart and our dreams are shattered. It showed me that Power isn’t force but the life-force that returns when we align with truth. And it showed me that Presence – the simple act of listening deeply to what is here, now – can transform everything.

After that run to Cape Point, I knew I couldn’t go back to living small. My body had remembered something my mind had forgotten – that I was never broken, only waiting to realign.

I moved to Panama, a place buzzing with possibility, where old worlds and new collide. It was there I trained meticulously to rebuild my body. Three months of precision, discipline, and patience – learning to move again in ways I hadn’t for years. The stretch, the setbacks, the tiny breakthroughs – each one was a lesson in trust and focus.

Six months later, I entered my first triathlon. I didn’t expect much. But to my astonishment, I placed second – just behind the European Champion. For someone told she’d never run again, it wasn’t just a finish line. It was a reclamation. A reminder that limits are rarely final, unless we accept them.

At the same time, my professional path was accelerating. I became COO to visionary founders, building start-ups across industries, blending strategy with culture, structure with soul. I discovered that leadership wasn’t about control but about creating environments where people could flourish – the same lesson my body had taught me.

And then, in a chance encounter at the British Embassy, I met Hawk Carpenter, a teacher of ancient wisdom. For nearly a decade, I apprenticed with him, studying cycles, presence, and the deep patterns that shape human life and leadership. His teachings opened me to truths that no corporate training could offer: that transformation is not about adding more, but about stripping away what is false; that real change comes from presence, not pressure.

Piece by piece, I rebuilt not just my body, but my way of being. Panama became my crucible. Triathlons honed my discipline. COO roles sharpened my strategic mind. Shamanic apprenticeship deepened my intuition. Each strand wove together until I could no longer separate the personal from the professional, the spiritual from the practical.

Through it all, I kept choosing:

Peace over panic.
Power over force.
Presence over performance.

Again and again, those choices became my compass.