By SGN | 15 Jan 2026
“I’ve had seven jobs, none of which I had the hard skills for.”
Crystal got her start in finance, despite possessing a law degree. She’d gate-crashed an investment bank’s recruitment talk to steal canapés. When discovered by the banking recruiter, she was offered a job instead. She’d managed to impress with her audacity and nimble thinking.
For all her quick-wittedness, she still felt like an outsider in the world of finance. “I didn’t come from a family that knew what banking was, and was oblivious to the world of commerce and banking as they were,” she recalls.
Finding herself in the deep end, Crystal had to quickly learn the unspoken rules that governed how bankers operated. This included how to behave in meetings, and how to influence others.
These experiences helped her realise that she was unwittingly educating herself in all aspects of social and emotional intelligence.
“This is something I believe all leaders need, especially in the age of artificial intelligence,” she shares. “In this era of deep tech, we need to double down on deep human skills.”
Crystal’s foray into leadership properly took off only once she quit finance, and moved to the Australian countryside to focus on her family. She lived on a farm in Mornington Peninsula for about five years, raising her children and attending retreats.
There, she set up a business called Legacy Retreat, aimed at teaching people, particularly leaders, the art and science of self-mastery, self-management, and inner leadership.
“A lot of clients might have been leaders in the outside world, but their internal worlds were a maelstrom of control issues, personal addictions, and bad interpersonal relationships,” she shares. While they were succeeding externally, their inner compass was really lacking.”
Over the course of her career, she realised that genuine power starts from within. And now, she helps others get their own power back.
Championing human development
Over time, Crystal’s workshops reached thousands of people, including executives, CEOs, and students who gained valuable lessons from her.
“I am endlessly inspired by my community. Every morning, I’d wake up and receive messages from people who’d update me on their life stories – maybe they’d apply a piece of advice they’d seen me give on a TikTok to their own lives, or they’d gotten a promotion,” she shares.
When followers began calling Crystal their “work bestie,” she made it her brand — and her candid advice quickly went viral.
The origins of Deep Human
In 2015, a client from Legacy Retreat suggested that Crystal bring her work to a larger audience. They introduced her to a team at the National University of Singapore (NUS), and shortly after, she was invited to head the NUS Centre for Future-Ready Graduates, an organisation dedicated to helping students gain critical life and career skills.
“I loved being a bridge between students and the real world of employment,” she recalls. After being in conversations with hundreds of employers, about hiring interns or hiring from NUS, Crystal felt like she better understood the hiring landscape, at the time.
Shortly afterwards, she and her husband, clinical psychologist Gregor Lim-Lange, started Roots and Wings, an NUS programme aimed at imparting emotional intelligence skills to students. Crystal would invite recruitment teams from major names like JP Morgan, Citigroup, Google and Siemens to witness the duo teach.
These workshops quickly became popular amongst companies. At that moment, Crystal realised there was a blossoming demand for knowledge on socio-emotional intelligence and leadership skills.
She asked NUS’s administration if she could engage in consultancy work with these companies, whilst simultaneously running programmes for university students.
This was unheard of for non-academic instructors. But in a rare move, NUS made an exception for her – on the condition they received a share of her earnings.
But circumstances started rapidly changing for Crystal.
At first, the money she earned from consultancy far exceeded what NUS was paying her. Differences arose over how the programmes should be administered, which encouraged Crystal to venture out on her own. She had already secured interest from ten biopharma companies, who wanted her and Gregor to do leadership training, so she felt confident in her decision.
Shortly afterwards, Crystal and Gregor decided to start Deep Human, an organisation offering neuroscience and psychology-based leadership training workshops, retreats, and events for individual and corporate clients alike.
Supporting deep personal growth that lasts
While Deep Human was being set up, Crystal had been successfully running Forest Wolf, a leadership skills and training company designed specifically for corporate clients.
Under the Deep Human banner, she offered Forest Wolf’s signature leadership, communication, and speaking programmes to non-corporate audiences.
The first iteration was so successful that she decided to turn the sessions into a regular occurrence, called Deep Human Club.
This would encompass a six-month personal transformation and mentorship journey, where participants would be trained by Crystal and Gregor.
“We’re currently on season three of the Club. Whenever we opened up VIP registration, we sell out within a day – sometimes hours,” she says.
“People are hungry for personal growth and learning. Everyone is curious about how they can future-proof themselves, especially during a recession, and lead a happy and meaningful life at the same time.”
On the other hand, corporate participants of the Deep Human Club demand that Crystal do more than the typical senior leadership coaching and offsites. “We started offering highly-customised solutions.”
Speaking of a “grief retreat” she organised for senior leaders of a company, she explains: “The company had closed down a site, and the team did not know how to process those difficult emotions.”
“On another occasion, we were invited to operate like forensic detectives, and investigate what happened when a series of safety precautions were disobeyed, and what the underlying factors leading to these incidents might be.”
Navigating cultural nuances
In her work with participants across both Forest Wolf and Deep Human, Crystal noticed a series of trends pertaining to how people behaved.
“The Singaporeans and Asians I taught tended to be more risk-averse and conflict-avoidant, and less proactive compared to other nationalities,” she comments.
This observation came about during her work with Project Zodiac, an Economic Development Board initiative to train Singaporean talent and leaders in the Biopharma sector.
“In a high-risk industry like biopharma, you need to be able to make risky decisions and deal with high-risk, high-stress environments,” she explains. “The feedback we received from top names like Pfizer, Roche, and Novartis mentioned that Singaporeans tended to look for external guidance, or waited too long to make decisions.”
She realised that Singaporeans needed to be encouraged to develop resilience and a growth mindset that encompassed a “never-say-die” spirit. However, attempting to rewire people’s deeply-entrenched beliefs and mindsets, especially those shaped during early childhood, was no mean feat.
In contrast, other nationalities Crystal worked with often showed up differently.
“For example, people in Australia are outspoken, and don’t respond well to rules imposed on them. Instead, we’d say that we were collaborating with them to come up with guidelines. There, things must be approached from an angle of co-creation.
In contrast, Singaporeans like rules and structure. “They need a lot of guidance, in terms of specified concrete and practical outcomes, cheat sheets, takeaways, slides, and handouts,” she shares.
When it comes to addressing ingrained behaviour, Crystal relies on a mixture of techniques from psychotherapy, which involve shifting and transforming limiting beliefs.
“It’s not that easy to tell people to just have a growth mindset, and leave it at that,” she explains. “Which is why we focus on reprogramming your beliefs and mindsets.
“For instance, instead of just teaching you a conflict resolution model, we start our workshops by examining how you handled conflict during childhood, and how conflict was dealt with in your family.”
“We look at why people behave the way they do, and how their behaviour shows up across life and work. Hence, our approach to leadership training is more profound and fundamental, compared to others in the market.”
Enriching her personal growth
Amidst building her clients up and ensuring their personal growth, Crystal double-downs on the importance of facilitating her own.
She describes herself as a deeply grateful person. “Greg and I have a gratitude practise, where at the end of the day, we share what we’re grateful for. This always includes each other.”
Besides these regular rituals, Crystal also keeps a journal for self-reflection. She often journals alongside a dear friend; Rachel Lim, co-founder of Singaporean women’s apparel brand, Love, Bonito.
“So many successful women I know rely on this practice of daily, weekly, quarterly, and monthly reflection to keep themselves on track, so we can meet our goals, and not lose track of ourselves and our values,” she mentions.
“Journalling is a guided way of holding ourselves accountable.”
The state of leadership in a modern world
Having trained and coached thousands of leaders, Crystal is well-acquainted with the immense challenges they encounter.
“The pressures leaders face are unprecedented. Thanks to social media, they are constantly in the limelight,” she says.
“One wrong word or misstep can lead to them or their company being cancelled online, which in turn can adversely impact their company’s stock price. It’s a high-stakes situation these days.”
And today, people have exceedingly high expectations of their bosses and leaders.
“When people are struggling with their mental health, they need a leader to look up to during hard times. And sometimes, they expect their bosses to be their everything: confidante, best friend, mentor, guru, guide, therapist, and counsellor, all rolled into one,” she explains.
And in situations like these, company leaders may turn to experts like Crystal for help.
“It’s a great feeling when senior leaders confide in me information they have not admitted to anyone else, and ask me to help them process it. This is a position of great privilege, that I do not take it for granted.”
As long as interpersonal relationships abound, Crystal’s work will always be prized.
“Whatever we teach about social and emotional intelligence will never go away. Knowing how to resolve a difficult conversation with empathy, will always be relevant, when it comes to dealing with other humans.”
About Crystal
Also known as “Singapore’s Work Bestie”, Crystal Lim-Lange has more than a decade of experience in facilitating personal development workshops catered to a diverse audience. She is also the founder of Deep Human and Forest Wolf, two organisations leveraging psychological thought leadership to help people unlock their full potential.
Connect with her here.
