This is where I try to sort through the truth of it all with grit, grace, and a lot of humor.
I write about helping people see what’s real and what’s really possible. I stand against inherited scripts and generational cycles that tell us who we are and what we can be.
Everything I write circles back to the three things that shape how we self-lead and live:
Presence, Purpose, and Power.
Presence is how we show up.
Purpose is why we keep going.
Power is what we reclaim when we choose both.
Sometimes that looks like a short essay on clarity and boundaries. Sometimes it’s a glimpse into my writing. And sometimes it’s just me, sharing what it took today to keep moving forward.
I don’t write on a schedule. I write when there’s something worth saying.
Essays on Presence
Reflections on showing up fully, even when the world is loud.Essays on Purpose
Explorations of meaning, direction, and the courage to choose your own path.Essays on Power
Stories about reclaiming voice and agency, and creating what’s possible on your own terms.Book Updates
Behind the scenes notes on Lead Like You Mean It. Drafting, revising, celebrating, and occasionally wrestling with words until they tell the truth.Personal Reflections
Stories and snapshots from everyday life, like coffee on the deck, scary movies, and bourbon nights. The small moments that remind me why presence matters.
We Were Never Meant to Lead Like This
In a world that prizes hustle, high visibility, and polished power-moves, staying still feels countercultural. Yet the truth I keep discovering as a leader, technologist, and human is this: the most potent work happens in the quiet spaces between doing and being.
In this piece, I walk through what it means to step off the performance treadmill, lean into the edges of our strengths (yes — even the ones with shadows), and listen instead of always speaking. It’s a reflection on grit and grace, on alignment more than achievement, and on trusting the voice inside you that doesn’t demand applause—it simply waits.
If you’re tired of leading from the stage and ready to lead from the room, this post is for you. Bring your questions, your contradictions, and your curiosity. Let’s sit with them together.
It is easy to forget how recently in our history women have been allowed to lead at all. A century ago, most women could not sign a mortgage, manage a bank account, or walk into a boardroom without an escort. Today, women hold roughly 32 percent of executive roles in the United States, according to McKinsey’s 2024 Women in the Workplace report. That is progress, yes, but it is also proof that most of us are still newcomers in rooms built by and for someone else.
We are often the minority at the table.
We know it.
They know it.
And we learn to perform accordingly.
From an early age, girls are taught to read a room before they ever learn to trust their own voice. We are rewarded for making people comfortable, praised for being adaptable, and quietly punished when we are not. By the time many women arrive in leadership, performance has become muscle memory. We have learned how to be palatable, how to manage perception, how to hold authority without appearing “too much.”
“We inherited a leadership script written for someone else, and the cracks are showing.”
As a woman who has spent her career in senior leadership, I have watched brilliant women fracture themselves trying to fit inside systems that were never designed for them. They perform strength in cultures that reward stoicism. They soften their truths to stay likable. They translate empathy into data just to be heard.
It is exhausting.
And it is unsustainable.
We inherited the wrong script. One that equates leadership with control, authority with volume, and composure with worth. A script that says feelings are liabilities and intuition belongs at home, not in the boardroom.
But the cracks are widening, and light is getting through.
The Leadership Gift of Space: Finding Clarity Beyond the Busyness
We mistake busyness for proof of leadership, as if a packed calendar and a flood of emails equal impact. But busyness doesn’t build clarity—it erodes it. The real gift of leadership is space: a pause before the yes, a moment to breathe, a boundary that protects what matters most. When leaders make room for clarity, energy, and presence, they not only lead better—they invite everyone around them to do the same.
Making room for clarity, energy, and authentic leadership
I used to think the best leaders were the busiest ones. The ones who could glide from meeting to meeting, answer emails at lightning speed, and keep their calendars crammed so full that every square inch of the week looked like a game of Tetris. Busyness felt like proof: proof of value, proof of commitment, proof that you were doing leadership “right.”
But the truth? Busyness doesn’t always mean impact. More often than not, it means exhaustion.
When our days become a blur of back-to-back commitments, we confuse motion with meaning. We fill every gap, squeeze in one more call, say yes when we should have paused. It looks productive from the outside, but inside it drains clarity, erodes presence, and leaves us leading on fumes.
The gift—the secret we’re rarely taught—is that leadership actually expands in space.
The last two months were full in a way that asked me to set something down so I could show up where I was needed most. Now that the season has shifted, I can feel myself returning to the page with more steadiness, more presence, and a different kind of clarity. I’m not picking up where I left off. I’m beginning from who I am now.