My Personal Journey to Nova Mentis 

My name is Llewellyn, and I’m the founder of Nova Mentis, a company whose mission is to help people uncover purpose and direction in their lives. But the story of how I got here doesn’t start with clarity. It starts with disruption.

Back in 2019, I moved to the UK to take on a new role in cybersecurity with a company called Carbon Black. It was exciting at first: new country, new opportunity. But by early 2020, the pandemic hit, and like so many others, I suddenly found myself in isolation, alone in a tiny flat, working from home, far from friends and family.

Professionally, though, things were moving fast. Carbon Black was acquired by VMware, and my role as a pre-sales consultant had me engaging customers across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. But here’s the problem I kept running into: every sales call started with surface-level information, “the customer needs antivirus.” And when I’d jump on a call, I’d find myself scrambling, shifting my approach mid-conversation because the client’s true needs hadn’t been properly uncovered.

That frustration led me to build something new: a cybersecurity assessment tool. It was based on the NIST cybersecurity framework, and in just a few minutes, it helped clients self-assess their strengths and weaknesses. Better yet, it mapped their gaps directly to the right solutions. Suddenly, instead of guessing, our sales teams had clarity. Instead of pushing, we were guiding. That little tool didn’t just solve my immediate problem, it snowballed. Before long, I was building over 70 assessments for VMware, rolling them out across partners, distributors, and even Dell’s channels, generating tens of thousands of insights.

That was the professional story. But at the same time, the personal one was unfolding, and it was a lot messier.

During those long lockdown months, I faced some of the lowest emotional and mental points of my life. Alone in a foreign country, cut off from family, I found myself struggling to even get out of bed some days. I tried speaking with a psychologist through the company’s employee assistance programme, and the very first question I was asked was, “Have you thought about killing yourself?” That question stopped me in my tracks. It was blunt, and it forced me to reckon with how bad things had become. It also exposed something important: the help on offer felt clinical and generic. As a result I tried to find wisdom in the great books and philosophies of Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Carl Jung, Ram Dass, and Lao Tzu, and while they were profound, none of it was personalised to my situation.

And that’s when the two stories collided.

Professionally, I had discovered the power of assessments, a structured way to uncover where someone really is today and how to move them forward. Personally, I desperately needed a framework like that, something to help me make sense of where I was, what I wanted, and how to get there.

That collision became the seed for Nova Mentis. And today, it’s growing into Nova Nexus, a platform designed to do exactly that: to help individuals define their desired reality, measure their current reality, and bridge the gap with clarity and direction.

At its heart, Nova Nexus is built on the same principle I learned in cybersecurity: people move forward when they see the gap between where they are and where they want to be. In business, that gap drives buying decisions. In life, that gap drives growth.

So here we are. A professional lesson about qualifying clients, and a personal lesson about qualifying myself, merged into a single mission: helping people and businesses find purpose and direction, one step at a time.