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.
When “Having It All” Starts to Feel Like Losing Yourself
You do not have to burn your life down to begin again. Most of the time, the unraveling starts quietly. A deep breath before a meeting. The ache on a Sunday night. The moment you realize you are smiling for everyone but yourself. Meant for More is about what happens next. It is the slow, steady work of listening to your own truth again.
If you have been wondering whether the life you built still fits, take the Meant for More quiz to see where you are in your story. Maybe you are waking up to awareness. Maybe you are learning agency. Maybe you are already living your truth in quiet action. Wherever you are, it is the right place to begin.
The quiet unraveling that leads you back to the person you were always meant to be.
It starts quietly.
Not with burnout or breakdown, but with the kind of fatigue that seeps in under the surface. The kind that makes you take a deep breath before walking into a room and smile when you don’t really feel like smiling.
You tell yourself you’re fine. You’ve got the career, the relationships, the house, the degree, the checklist. You’ve “arrived.” But inside, something hums—a quiet ache that doesn’t match the life you worked so hard to build.
It’s the ache that shows up when you finish a big project and feel relief instead of pride.
It’s the ache that lingers when someone praises you for being “so composed,” and you realize what they really mean is “so contained.”
It’s the ache that whispers at night, when the house is finally quiet, Is this all there is?
We don’t talk about that part enough—the unraveling that comes wrapped in achievement.
Because the truth is, many of us have learned to live by scripts that were handed to us before we ever had a chance to write our own.
Scripts about what success should look like.
Scripts about how good women lead, love, and endure.
Scripts that reward us for being agreeable, accommodating, and endlessly capable.
And for a while, those scripts work. They get us applause, access, even admiration.
But over time, they cost us something bigger: ourselves.
When “having it all” starts to feel like losing yourself, it’s not failure. It’s feedback. It’s your soul tapping you on the shoulder and asking, Is this still true?
That’s what Meant for More is all about—not blowing up your life, but finally listening to it.
Where Are You in Your Meant for More Journey?
A quick reflection to help you see which part of your story you’re living right now, and what might come next.
You don’t need to overhaul your life to begin again.
You just need to know where you are.
This quiz will help you see which stage of the Meant for More journey you’re in right now:
Awareness: You’re starting to notice the script you were handed.
Agency: You’re beginning to trust your own voice and make new choices.
Action: You’re living your truth in small, powerful ways every day.
There are no wrong answers, just honest ones.
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.
Stop Performing, Start Integrating: A New Way to Lead
There’s a quiet ache that shows up in leadership—the dissonance between how well you perform on the outside and how misaligned you feel inside. Most leadership models teach us to double down on performance: polish harder, move faster, endure longer. But performance alone fractures us.
The ache isn’t failure. It’s a compass. It’s pointing us toward another way of leading—one rooted in integration, not performance. The Integration Compass offers four simple moves—Presence, Power, Purpose, and Alignment—that help us return to wholeness in real time.
Leadership doesn’t need more polish. It needs more presence.
👉 Read the full post: Stop Performing, Start Integrating: A New Way to Lead
There’s a moment in nearly every leader’s life when the outside doesn’t match the inside. On paper, you’re checking all the boxes. Your performance is solid, maybe even exceptional. You’re responsive, polished, quick on your feet. You’ve learned how to carry the weight of expectations with a steady smile. And yet, beneath the surface, something doesn’t line up.
I call it the ache.
The ache is that quiet tug in the body, the restless dissonance you feel when the version of yourself the world rewards doesn’t match the truth you carry inside. It doesn’t roar; it whispers. And for a long time, I ignored it. I mistook it for stress, or fatigue, or just the cost of being a high-achieving professional in a demanding world. But over time, I realized the ache wasn’t a flaw to be fixed. It was a compass.
Looking back, I see how hard I worked to outperform the ache. I believed that if I just rehearsed more thoroughly, prepared every possible scenario, smiled a little brighter, polished a little harder, I’d finally feel the alignment I craved. But performance never brought peace. It only deepened the fracture.
The truth is, most leadership models were designed inside the very systems that create the ache in the first place. They emphasize productivity over presence, polish over honesty, endurance over wholeness. They train us to wear resilience like armor and call it success.
For years, I lived inside that paradigm. And for years, I grew more tired, more restless, more disconnected from myself. The ache became my teacher. It pointed me toward a different kind of leadership—one not built on performance, but on integration.
That’s where the Integration Compass was born.
The Integration Compass doesn’t promise to map every step of the journey. Instead, it orients you. It reminds you where true north lies when the landscape of leadership feels confusing or overwhelming. Its four quadrants—Presence, Power, Purpose, and Alignment—offer simple, repeatable moves you can make in real time, in real rooms, with real stakes. They are not performance hacks. They are un-performance practices.
And that distinction matters. Because while performance fractures us—splitting who we are from who we think we need to be—integration restores us. It brings the whole self back into the room.
This blog is my invitation to you: to stop performing, and start integrating. To notice the ache, not as a weakness, but as your own internal compass pointing toward a truer way forward.
Breaking Scripts I Didn’t Write
There’s a strange moment of realization when you look at the path you’re on and think, Wait. Who wrote this story? Because it doesn’t sound like me.
The problem with those scripts is they don’t leave much room for your own voice. They keep you busy performing, but not alive creating.
This week, I’m practicing one simple question with everything on my plate: Am I doing this because I choose it, or because I think I’m supposed to?
And if it’s the second one? That’s my cue to pick up the pen and start rewriting.
There’s a strange moment of realization when you look at the path you’re on and think, Wait. Who wrote this story? Because it doesn’t sound like me.
For a long time, I thought I was following my own script. I had the lines memorized, the cues down, the gestures polished. But somewhere along the way, I slipped into a role that had been written for me—or worse, a role no one actually wrote at all. It was cobbled together from expectations, “shoulds,” and the invisible pull to do things the way they’ve always been done.
The problem with those scripts is they don’t leave much room for your own voice. They keep you busy performing, but not alive creating.
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.