You have built a significant career. Something has shifted. And the tools that got you here are not getting you through the door.
You are experienced, capable, and well regarded by the people who know your work. You are not struggling because you lack ability. You are struggling because the gap between what you have actually achieved and what the external market can read about you has never been wider.
You may have applied for roles you know you could do and heard nothing. Or you have reached final interview stages and cannot understand why the decision went another way. Or you have a clear sense of what the next chapter should look like and no real idea how to get there from where you are standing now.
That collision between competence and confusion is the most common thing I work with. And it is almost always solvable, once someone who understands both the internal landscape and the appointment system is in the room with you.
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Who is this for
If any of this sounds familiar, you are in the right place.
You have been in senior leadership for long enough that your identity and your role have become almost indistinguishable. A restructure, a change of leadership above you, or a quiet but persistent sense of drift has left you questioning not just what comes next, but who you are outside the context of the work you have always done.
Or you know what you want. A step up, a board position, a portfolio that reflects who you have become rather than who you happened to grow into. You have the experience. You cannot seem to get traction.
Or you have been applying. Carefully, selectively, to roles you are genuinely qualified for. And the silence, or the polite rejections, have started to feel like evidence of something you cannot quite name.
In every case, the problem is rarely what it appears to be on the surface. It is almost never about capability. It is almost always about how that capability is being communicated, and whether the narrative you are presenting to the market reflects the professional you have actually become.
This is the work.
Who Heather is and why it matters
I have spent over thirty years on the other side of the table.
I am Heather I’anson. I founded I’anson Burns after a career in board-level recruitment and executive search, during which I built and sold businesses, sat inside senior appointment processes across sectors, and watched highly capable professionals fail to get through doors they should have walked through. The gap between quality and visibility has always frustrated me. It still does.
That insider understanding of how appointment decisions are actually made, what panels respond to, what creates hesitation in a headhunter reading a CV, what shifts when a candidate walks into a room knowing who they are, is at the centre of everything I do. It is not theoretical. It comes from thirty years of sitting in those rooms and understanding the dynamics from the inside.
The other dimension of my work is less conventional, and I make no apology for it. Senior career transitions are identity transitions. The professional architecture you have built over decades, the way you understand your own contribution, the story you carry about what you are worth and where you belong, does not sit outside the practical work. It is the practical work. I integrate executive coaching, strategic career positioning, and shamanic-rooted practices into an approach I have come to call Career Death and Rebirth. It is not for everyone. For the people it is for, it changes things.
I work with a small number of individuals and organisations at any one time. The work is personal, rigorous, and grounded in both emotional intelligence and commercial reality.
The Two Worlds
Working with individuals
I work with senior professionals, typically at director level and above, who are at a genuine career crossroads. The work ranges from focused, practical support with CVs, applications, and interview preparation, to the deeper identity and positioning work of Career Death and Rebirth, my flagship 1:1 programme.
If you are not sure where to start, the right entry point depends on where you are in the process. The Senior Appointments Masterclass offers twelve weeks of sustained, expert support for those actively navigating a senior appointment. The entry layer products are designed for those who need immediate, practical help with a specific part of the process.
All of it is grounded in the same principle: the market needs to be able to read you at the level you have actually reached.
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Working with organisations
I work with organisations managing senior exits, leadership transitions, and the development of executive teams. This includes executive coaching for individual leaders, Supported Exits for those navigating redundancy or restructure, bespoke leadership development frameworks, and senior pay benchmarking.
The work is commissioned by HR Directors, People Directors, and senior leadership teams who understand that how an organisation handles transition says something significant about its culture and its values as an employer.
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What changes when the work is done
I had been describing what I had done rather than what I had changed. I had been underestimating my experience for so long that I had started to believe that underestimation was accurate. Heather helped me look at my career differently, through the outcomes I had delivered, the problems I had solved, the value I had genuinely created. That shift changed how I wrote about myself, how I presented myself, and how I began to think about what was next.
The pattern I see most often in the work is a shift in ratio. Applications that were going nowhere begin generating conversations. Conversations begin generating interviews. Interviews begin generating offers. Not because anything fundamental changed about who the person is. Because the market could finally read them at the level they had actually reached.
If this has resonated, there are a few ways to go further.
You can explore the individual client work and find the right starting point for where you are right now. You can read about the Career Death and Rebirth programme if the deeper work is what you are looking for. You can find out about organisational support if you are commissioning on behalf of your people. Or you can simply get in touch and have a conversation.
Most of the people I work with do not arrive through a checkout page. They arrive because someone thought of them when they thought of me, or because something they read made them feel less alone in what they were carrying. If that is what brought you here, I am glad you came.