Ngoni Diana Johns is a Zimbabwean-born British speaker, poet and author who turned a four-year medical mystery into a movement. Founder and CEO of Chiedza Innovations Ltd, she built her early career across Wellington Management, Bank of Montreal, Barclays and Travelex where she helped deliver the business’s first £1 million revenue milestone and achieved 100% mystery shopper scores armed with a First-Class BSc in Accounting & Finance from the University of Chester and 11 CIMA exemptions. There are people who survive their story. Ngoni Diana Johns built a company out of hers. Ngoni at 19 was recognised nationally through the Peter Jones Enterprise Programme and won the Brentwood Chamber of Commerce Award for Enterprise, having led a national business networking event as a teenager. She earned a BTEC Distinction in Enterprise & Entrepreneurship and went on to graduate with a First-Class BSc in Accounting & Finance from the University of Chester, collecting 11 CIMA exemptions, the Chester Difference Excellence Award, and recognition as a Student Academic Representative along the way. Her career then crossed some of the world’s most demanding financial institutions Wellington Management, Bank of Montreal, Barclays and Travelex where she was recognised for innovation through the #TVXInnovate initiative, helped deliver a bureau’s first £1 million revenue milestone, and achieved 100% mystery shopper customer service scores.
In late 2021, the body that had carried her through boardrooms and exam halls began, without warning, to fail. Weakness. Loss of eyesight. A heart that kept its own unsteady time. She carried her changed body into rooms built to care for it and was repeatedly dismissed told, more than once, that it was “probably anxiety. ” It took four years for testing to finally confirm what she had been living: multisystem dysautonomia, MCAS, POTS, endometriosis, and a confirmed adverse reaction to the COVID-19 vaccine. In that time she lost her career, her savings, and nearly her home.
She refused to disappear into the label. Instead, she took everything her finance career had taught her about systems, structure and scale, and aimed it at the one problem no one had built for: the aftermath. She created the S.A.F.E.R.TM Framework and the Aftercare MandateTM Believe, Track, Continue, recovery and advocacy models for everyone a system loses once the crisis has ended and the casseroles have stopped arriving. These frameworks now anchor Chiedza’s full ecosystem: a Heart·Mind·Body coaching practice grounded in nervous-system-paced healing, The Quiet Arcade, a five-room therapeutic gaming platform built on ethical, pressure-free design and a live schools implementation of the Aftercare Mandate delivered in partnership with the Nzimande Foundation in South Africa. She is currently building out Chiedza’s board governance and investor-readiness infrastructure, including a full EIC Accelerator application positioning The Quiet Arcade for international growth.
Ngoni is the published author of Chiedza: Reflections on Darkness, Light, and the Moments in Between (2019) and Standing on Our Last Bones (2025), featured in House of Mutapa and celebrated across a growing global readership, with a third title, Chiedza: The Body That Still Believes, forthcoming. As a speaker, Ngoni moves rooms rather than simply addressing them bringing corporate precision, hard-won emotional intelligence, and a wit that insists healing doesn’t have to be heavy. Her signature keynote, Invisible Battles, Visible Futures, delivers the sentence that turned her own life back on: recovery is not return, it is reconstruction. She is a devout Seventh-day
Adventist who believes healing is layered, not linear, and that becoming is a daily return, a philosophy she now builds into every stage she stands on.
We carry more than memory. We carry each other.
