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 Day I Realized I Was Performing, Not Living
A quiet reflection on the moment you realize you’re performing instead of living. Discover how awareness begins with discomfort, truth feels like freedom, and life starts when you stop pretending and start becoming yourself.
There was a time in my life when I could walk into any room and become whoever I thought was expected.
At work, I was competent. At home, accommodating. In friendships, endlessly agreeable.
I didn’t even notice the shape-shifting at first. It just felt like survival.
But one night, sitting at my kitchen table after everyone else had gone to bed, I caught my own reflection in the dark window and realized I didn’t recognize her. Not because she had changed, but because she had disappeared.
That was the night I understood something quietly devastating. I had built a life that looked right from the outside but didn’t feel like mine on the inside.
I was performing. Not living.
For years, I believed being “good” meant being easy. Easy to work with, easy to love, easy to rely on.
I said yes when I wanted to say no. I smiled through exhaustion. I apologized for wanting space.
I told myself it was maturity. That this is what adults do.
But what it really was, if I’m honest, was fear.
Fear of disappointing people. Fear of being misunderstood. Fear of being seen as selfish or ungrateful.
I had mistaken acceptance for belonging.
And it worked, for a while. Until the pretending became heavier than the truth I was hiding from.
Awareness rarely arrives with fireworks. It creeps in softly, disguised as discomfort.
You start noticing that certain conversations drain you.
You start feeling like a guest in your own life.
You start resenting the very things you once called “blessings.”
That’s when you know a script is cracking.
Mine began to crumble the day I realized I couldn’t remember what I actually wanted anymore.
Every decision and every reaction was filtered through someone else’s expectation.
And somewhere along the way, I stopped consulting myself.
The hardest part wasn’t admitting that I had been performing.
It was deciding what to do with that truth.
Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
You can’t go back to playing a role that no longer fits.
You start to recognize that all the versions of you that people love are only half-truths.
And you start to grieve the life you built for applause.
But underneath the grief is something fierce and alive. A whisper that says, you were never meant to keep pretending.
That whisper becomes the first act of courage.
Today, I don’t perform as much. I still catch myself sometimes, slipping into old habits of pleasing or performing, but I notice faster.
I pause. I ask, “Is this me, or is this who I think I should be?”
That one question has changed everything.
It’s uncomfortable, yes. People notice the difference when you stop editing yourself.
But the relief of being real outweighs the risk of being misunderstood.
Because the truth is, you can’t live fully and perform at the same time.
One will always suffocate the other.
Reflection Prompt:
Where in your life do you still feel like you’re performing?
What might happen if you stopped?
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.