Who is Rochelle?
Rochelle Trow is a transformational coach, HR executive, and author with more than 25 years of international leadership experience across pharmaceuticals, consumer health, FMCG, semiconductors, and manufacturing. As the founder of The Change Canvas, she has built a leadership ecosystem that enables professionals to thrive in high-pressure systems without losing themselves.
Her work weaves together three decades of corporate leadership with her own story of burnout, reinvention, and returning to wholeness. Today, she is recognized not only for her pragmatic expertise in leading transformation, but also for her commitment to helping others lead with clarity, courage, and authenticity.
Her career and her writing are anchored in one mission: to help leaders build the strength to stay without abandoning who they are.
The Roots of a Leadership Journey
Rochelle grew up in Durban, South Africa, during apartheid. Those early years left an indelible mark: a strong sense of fairness, dignity, and the recognition that leadership must serve people, not just systems. She recalls being acutely aware of how structures either excluded or uplifted, a lens that would later define her approach to HR and leadership.
After earning a Bachelor of Social Science from the University of Natal, she began her career in retail management before moving into HR at Unilever. It was there that she first saw the transformative power of people strategies aligned with business outcomes. This early period taught her how culture, when neglected, can erode trust and when nurtured, can unlock extraordinary results.
Rochelle went on to earn a Master’s in International HR Management from Cranfield Business School, equipping her with both the academic grounding and the global perspective to thrive at senior levels. Over the decades, she held executive HR leadership roles at Unilever, GSK, Astellas, Takeda, and Onsemi, leading teams both globally and across Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Her colleagues came to know her as a leader who could enter disrupted systems and restore credibility. Whether guiding multi-country restructurings, negotiating with European Works Councils, or reshaping HR operating models, she was trusted for her ability to balance strategy with empathy. Her career was as global as it was diverse, reflecting not only her skill but her belief that leadership must be both systemic and human.
Leading Transformation at Scale
Across her corporate career, Rochelle has navigated some of the most complex environments in modern business. At Unilever, she established global academies that reshaped how leaders were developed and strengthened organisational capability. At GSK, she worked on integrating businesses following a major joint venture, aligning people, culture, and structures during a time of significant change. At Astellas, she led transformation across a decentralised region, harmonising approaches while building credibility in highly regulated markets. At Takeda, she sat on the European Executive Leadership Team, shaping people strategy across 37 countries and guiding transformation in a complex environment.
What sets Rochelle apart is that she has operated not only on global HR leadership teams, shaping the function itself, but also as part of business-facing executive teams, advising presidents and senior leaders directly. This dual perspective driving functional transformation while influencing business strategy at the top table became a hallmark of her leadership.
But what distinguished her most was not just the scale of the challenges she managed it was the way she approached them. She became known as a leader who could listen deeply, bring clarity to complexity, and align human needs with business imperatives. Her work consistently demonstrated that values-led leadership was not a “soft” option, but a driver of sustainable performance.
The Shift to Coaching
By the time Rochelle reached the executive table, she had achieved what many professionals aspire to: influence, recognition, and the ability to shape organisations at scale. Yet privately, she was reckoning with the cost. Burnout, divorce, and the quiet ache of misalignment forced her to confront what success had come to mean.
“Professional success means little without self-trust,” she reflects.
This realisation marked a turning point. Rochelle retrained as a coach, earning her CPCC coaching certification, and began supporting leaders one-to-one. Coaching revealed a truth she had lived but never named: that leadership isn’t simply about driving results, but about learning to stay whole in systems that often demand otherwise.
What began as personal reinvention became a professional calling. Rochelle discovered that her lived experience the very struggles she once felt she had to hide were the most powerful tools she had to offer others.
The Birth of The Change Canvas
In 2025, Rochelle founded The Change Canvas. More than a business, it is an ecosystem for transformation, designed to meet professionals where they are.
- Self-assessments and free tools act as quiet mirrors, helping people notice when fear, exhaustion, or misalignment are driving their choices.
- Books and journals provide reflective spaces that encourage presence, not performance.
- One-to-one and group coaching help leaders realign who they are with how they lead.
- Interim HR leadership allows organisations to benefit from Rochelle’s executive expertise while navigating periods of change.
The Change Canvas is intentionally layered. It ensures accessibility for individuals at different stages of their journey, from the professional who downloads a free reflection tool, to the executive team seeking interim HR leadership.
Her philosophy is simple:
“You don’t need a better company to become a better leader. Real leadership begins with building the strength to stay without losing yourself.”
Awakening to Wholeness
Rochelle’s personal journey is told in her memoir, Awakening to Wholeness: A Life Unmasked. Written not as a manual but as a mirror, the book shares her experience of burnout, identity loss, and ultimately, reinvention. Readers across the world describe it as deeply relatable, offering not steps but solidarity.
Her companion journal, Embrace Your Truth: A Journal for Personal Growth, provides structured prompts that encourage reflection and self-discovery. Both resources are freely available at rochelletrow.com, underscoring Rochelle’s belief that tools for growth should not be locked behind paywalls.
Together, the book and journal have reached thousands globally, praised for their honesty and accessibility.
A Portfolio Career
Today, Rochelle frames her life as a portfolio career a balance of passion and pragmatism. Alongside coaching and writing, she continues to provide interim HR leadership for global organisations. She recognises that income and purpose don’t always come from the same source and she embraces this reality as part of living a whole, integrated life.
She has also served as both board advisor and board member, bringing her expertise in culture, leadership, and transformation to governance contexts.
In September 2025, Rochelle was selected by Rise & Thrive Global as one of only 36 Culture Catalysts worldwide, a fellowship delivered in partnership with Melbourne University and guided by HR thought leader Dave Ulrich. This program positions her at the forefront of global HR research, exploring how leaders can build psychologically safe, human-centred workplaces. For Rochelle, the fellowship is not only recognition of her expertise but also an opportunity to contribute to shaping the future of work.
A Life Beyond Work
Beyond her professional achievements, Rochelle is a mother of 16-year-old twin boys and a proud cat mom to two British Shorthairs, Simba and Lina. She has travelled extensively throughout her career and personal life, carrying a global perspective into every boardroom and coaching session.
Her life reflects the philosophy she teaches: wholeness isn’t about perfection, but about integration weaving together career and calling, family and leadership, presence and performance.
Looking Ahead: From Career to Calling
As Rochelle looks to the future, she continues to expand The Change Canvas and refine her suite of reflective tools. She is also actively contributing to the Culture Catalyst fellowship, co-authoring research that demonstrates HR’s role in shaping cultures of psychological safety and resilience.
Alongside this, Rochelle is working on her next book, Wholeness at Work. While Awakening to Wholeness reflected her personal journey, this new work turns to corporate life. It asks: How do we remain authentic in systems that reward performance over presence? The book does not offer prescriptions, but instead invites professionals to notice, pause, and choose differently to survive, adapt, and thrive without abandoning themselves.
For Rochelle, this is not just another project. It is part of a broader movement: helping leaders reclaim their voice, reconnect with their values, and create workplaces where wholeness is not a dream, but a daily practice.
Empowering Lessons from Rochelle Trow
- “Success without self-trust is just performance.”
- “Fear isn’t always danger sometimes it’s just a smoke alarm.”
- “You don’t need a better company to become a better leader.”
- “Wholeness isn’t about striving it’s about remembering.”
Editorial Note
Rochelle Trow’s story is a reminder that leadership is not about abandoning ourselves for success, but about integrating who we are with how we lead. Through her work as an executive, coach, and author, she is shaping a new paradigm of conscious leadership one where clarity, compassion, and courage redefine what it means to thrive.
