Empathy Before Expertise

Professional training gave Elna the frameworks to understand mental health. Her personal journey taught her how carefully those frameworks must be carried.

Today, she works across counselling, workplace wellbeing, youth mental health, advocacy and broader efforts to strengthen mental health systems. Yet she believes the most important thing she brings into any room is not a title.

It is her humanity.

“I know what it feels like to think you’re alone,” she says. “That’s why I want people to know they don’t have to be.”

Whether she is speaking with university students about anxiety, coaching professionals through burnout or engaging communities on mental health stigma, Elna begins with empathy. She understands that people do not always arrive with the correct words for what they are experiencing.

Some arrive apologising for their emotions. Some have spent years being told to toughen up, pray harder, work harder or stop overthinking. Others have become so accustomed to survival that they no longer recognise their distress as something deserving attention.

Elna listens for what exists beneath the words.

Her approach communicates a simple but powerful message: you do not need to explain your pain perfectly before you deserve support.