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Why integrity is at the heart of leading ourselves well

Integrity is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot. It has taken on another meaning in an era filled with misinformation, bypassing, and polarisation. Not only is integrity an ideal to work towards, it is also a choice. And without it, we can forget leading ourselves well and in the process create ripples of wholeness across our world. Here's why saying yes to integrity is the life-blood of an embodied changemakership in turbulent times.

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Emily Johnsson
Nurturing changemakers for a whole world.

I often talk about integrity in the same breath as self-leadership.

And that’s because we are not intentional about integrity, chances are that we slip demonstrably off the mark and actually cause unintentional harm to both people and planet. The very opposite of what we want to do.

I want us as changemakers to claim integrity, collectively. Because without integrity there is no changemakership.

To me, integrity is at the very heart of raising our hands and saying YES to being changemakers.

It is saying “I am not perfect, but I am enough, and I accept myself unconditionally here and now. AND there is room for healing and for growth, all at the same time”.

It’s about being honest, true, transparent and real. It’s about knowing what we are all about and then going about our lives and businesses and projects in alignment with that.

It’s about becoming more conscious that what we do and don’t do through our choice of lifestyle and consumption, affects other people and the ecosystems of the world – both near and afar, now and in future.


Integrity is the start of a life well lived and the gift of a better death.

It’s the start of learning to look after ourselves even better – mind, body, heart – so that we can feel whole and thrive inside and out, show up with focus and energy for the long-haul and be present and enjoy our lives, no matter what.

It’s the start of learning to relate to others in open-hearted ways that allow a deeper connection, healthier boundaries, more authentic interactions and of being seen, heard, held and supported. It’s saying yes when we mean yes and no when we mean no. And the courage to choose to be ONE person in all areas of our lives, sharing our true colours.

It’s about standing up and speaking up and translating our values into action. To interrupt harmful ways of being and doing, whether in ourselves, or in the world around us, even – and especially when – it’s not comfortable.

We can all do better when it comes to integrity, but holding it as our most important intention is key.

This is essential if we want our clients, customers, colleagues, collaborators, audiences to understand if they can trust us and feel safe with us.

And it is, when all is said and done, about welcoming the peace that comes from being able to look deeply into our own eyes at the end of each day and feel like we did our best, in the name of wholeness.

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Emily Johnsson | November 25, 2023
Self-Leadership
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About Emily & White Supremacy

Emily is a space holder and self-leadership coach to changemakers. She has over 20 years experience in the field of human development, learning and growth, and leads the coaching and consultancy company Wish Tree since 2011. Her work centres around wholeness – whole humans, whole communities, whole organisations, whole ecosystems. A whole world. Her changemakership is therefore dedicated to clearing distortions and fragmentations that relate to our perceptions of separation.

Emily has been exposed to and ‘sat with’ systemic issues around race, racism, privilege and injustice her whole life. She was born in Camden, London, in the late 1970s to a Swedish immigrant single mum and spent her first formative years in a highly culturally and ethnically diverse setting. As a baby, Emily and her mum lived in a bedsit in a shared house with a Black British family. Her first memory of Father Christmas was of him as a Bangladeshi man. Emily’s mum worked with refugee families and in Children’s Homes in inner city London, and since she had no access to child care opportunities, Emily joined her at work. For a while, Emily had an older Black British foster sister called Debbie. She was very often the only white child in the community of children of which she was a part.

Emily moved to Sweden with her mum as a child and as a teenager became involved with, and led, antiracism youth work in her local town through her school and council-initiated networks in the 1990s.

Her mum, who was active in the peace-and- environmental movement and who had been involved as an ally in the civil rights movement in the US on her travels there, introduced her to Black feminist and activist writers such as Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Audre Lord, and actively taught her about white privilege, white supremacy and the truth of colonialism. She was also taught about the importance of learning from Indigenous wisdom keepers in order to heal and evolve as humanity, and to (in those days) stop climate change.

In contrast, on her father’s side, Emily is of British Colonial descent. Emily’s grandmother was born in Zimbabwe to Scottish sheep-farmers. Her grandfather came from a poor English background but won a scholarship to Cambridge University to study law. As many young British men of his time who sought “adventure, a good job and travel”, Emily’s grandfather joined the colonial service in the final days of the British Empire, and served in several African countries as a high-ranking colonial officer. He spoke Zulu and Emily’s father spoke Swazi and Swahili before being sent to Britain as a child to attend boarding school, thousands of miles away from his parents.

Although Emily did not grow up with her father or his family, she eventually came to know them and have a relationship with them, which involved taking responsibility for understanding and healing her own familial and ancestral relationship to colonialism and white supremacy.

In this process, she came to see, feel and understand first hand and close up, the deeper psychological workings of the system of white supremacy, the colonial mind and its intimate links with narcissism, perfectionism, patriarchy and extractive economies and behaviours.

Between 2003-2015, Emily worked as a learning researcher and Access, Diversity and Inclusion enabler in the Arts & Cultural Sector, deeply rooted in the Convention of the Rights of the Child and the Human Rights Convention. She worked across the U.K and Scandinavia contributing to a number of large scale change projects, self-evaluation initiatives, conferences and trainings such as “Access for All”, “Inspiring Learning for All”, “Belonging – the Voices of London’s Refugees”, “The West Indian Front Room”, “Kultur och Fritid för Alla”, “Vidgat Deltagande”, “In this curriculum I don’t exist”, “In between two worlds – London teenagers’ ideas about Black History, Belonging and being British” to name a few. She worked with a wide range of marginalised communities as well as with leaders and directors holding white privilege, facilitating necessary and brave conversations challenging the status quo.

Emily has worked across many cultures and languages around the world from Sri Lanka to South Africa, Costa Rica and India to Romania and Denmark, continuously reflecting on and challenging white saviour tendencies. In this process has come to observe how white supremacy and racism works differently in different countries depending on context and history.

In 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, Emily became a loud voice in the Wellness industry by calling in leaders bypassing white supremacy through ‘love and light’ rhetoric, exceptionalism, colourblindness and virtue signalling. She closed down several online coaching circles because white participants were unwilling to dive deeper into their own internalised white supremacy, and rendered the spaces not only additionally unsafe, but traumatising for BIPOC clients. Her platform and large facebook community for coaches and wellbeing facilitators centred BIWOC-led anti-racism conversations as a response.

Emily is a skilled and fiercely loving coach and space-holder with many years experience of creating safe spaces for accountability, healing, integration and growth to take place.

She is dedicated to her own ongoing learning, healing and unlearning of covert white supremacy. Examples of this are continuous learning from a wide range of anti-racism educators, authors and activists from around the world.

This bio has not been written with the intention of centring Emily in the context of Me & White Supremacy, but to transparently share about her background, values, skills and experience in order for you to make a conscious decision to choose her as a space-holder, or not.

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