We already knowwhat matters most.The hard part is living it.
Humeia did not begin as a business plan. It began as an observation, made over three decades that started in social work
and moved through classrooms, boardrooms and government reviews.
The observation was the people who struggled most weren't short on talent or intention.
They had simply lost their connection to what they actually valued, especially once the pressure was on.
The foundation no one was building.
I saw it first as a social worker, before I saw it anywhere else: what people said mattered to them and how they actually behaved were often worlds apart. Not because they didn't care.
Caring and acting on it are two different skills and only one of them tends to get taught. Helping people find their way back to alignment, between what they valued and the decisions they were actually making, was some of the most rewarding work I've done. That gap didn't stay confined to casework. I saw it again in leadership teams, in classrooms, in government reviews, amplified by noise: competing claims on what's true, endless information with nowhere to put it and a culture that quietly rewards whoever speaks loudest rather than whoever is right.
Values became something people said they had, not something they could point to in their own behaviour.
My father taught me one thing early: the truth doesn't take sides. It doesn't perform and it doesn't need you to agree with it to still be true. That idea shaped how I came to see values, not as opinions to defend, but as a foundation to build on.
Without one, people rarely get swept away by a single bad decision.
They get worn down, slowly, by a thousand small ones.
What you value most is how you think.
How you think is what you do. What you do is how you act.
How you act is who you are.
Karen Bachmann
Why formation was never the problem.
I watched online learning go from something built to change how people think, to something built to move as many people through a video as possible. Somewhere in that shift, the parts that actually made learning work, curiosity, friction, the discipline of sitting with a hard problem, got treated as inefficiencies. What replaced it was cheaper, faster and forgettable.
The self-help world made the same trade. An app tells you to breathe, meditate, or visualise your goals and calls it change. But a single practice, repeated without a foundation underneath it, doesn't hold. Real change isn't a moment. It's a thousand ordinary choices and what makes people choose well, consistently, is knowing exactly what they value and having practiced living by it. That's formation. Not information. Not a habit stacked on top of nothing. A foundation, built daily, that makes the hard choice the easy one.
Grounded in Truth
Not opinions dressed up as values. Backed by evidence-based research, not consensus.
Built for Real Life
Two minutes, not two hours. Practised between meetings, in real life, not on a retreat.
Designed to Last
A foundation, not a trend. Formation compounds. Fads don't.
Karen Bachmann
FOUNDER, HUMEIA
I have made a study of the space between what people know and what people do. It started with a Bachelor's degree in Social Work, in rooms where the gap between someone's values and their behaviour was not theoretical. It showed up in real decisions, under real pressure, with real consequences.
That simple but critical observation became the question I spent the following thirty-five years answering: how do you help people actually live what they already know, not just understand it better?
My career has grown largely within project management and adult learning and education, at a scale most people never see. I devised and led the training and recruitment centre behind the London 2012 Olympic Games and the Westfield Stratford construction sites, preparing thousands of people for work that built both, an honour I still carry. Heading a team of experts at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, I fulfilled a long-held ambition as co-author of Fostering Changes, an evidence-based training manual for foster carers validated by a subsequent randomised controlled trial, now used throughout England and published in German, one of the few programmes in the field with real evidence of change behind it. I also led the introduction of the Goods and Services Tax for the thoroughbred and greyhound racing industries, achieving full compliance across its systems and over $153 million in prize money payments within three months.
Humeia is almost the culmination, certainly a gathering, of that expertise. Not another framework for understanding yourself better, but a daily practice for closing the gap between what you value and how you behave, especially when the pressure is on.
Built on Evidence, Not Trends.
Fostering Changes, the training manual I co-authored, was validated by an independent randomised controlled trial, which demonstrated real evidence of change for foster carers, not just our good intentions to train them. Those years working at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience embedded in me that real behaviour change actually gets built on well-researched method, not on whatever happens to be trending.
It's that critical evidence-based research that has set the standard Humeia is built on: real outcomes over felt insights, longitudinal evidence over one-off snapshots and reporting that tracks whether formation is actually happening, not just whether the app was opened. Trends come and go. Evidence has to hold up long after the trend has moved on.
None of this is here so you'd know more about me.
It's here so you'd trust why Humeia asks what it asks of you: to stop collecting more information
and start building the foundation underneath it.
