If you’ve ever responded to someone saying something nice about you with “if they only knew who I really was” in your head, then this post is for you (and something I wish I knew years ago). I got off a call recently and sat at my desk just thinking, probably for longer than the […]

I googled “am I in the right career?” at midnight. More than once. I remember laying in bed, when I couldn’t sleep, typing that into the search bar (poor sleep hygiene and all). The piece I remember most is the desperation and loneliness of those moments, the quiet of the rest of the house being […]

Is this a crisis or a turning point? Two Doors That Look the Same From the Outside At twenty-one, I had two pieces of paper. One said law school. The other said grad school. Both had pros and cons lists so long they’d stopped being useful and started being ritual — something to do with […]

I understand inertia far too well. Not just the textbook version, an object at rest stays at rest, but the other half that my science teachers drilled into me with equal conviction: an object in motion stays in motion. I used to think that threshold moments, those moments where you know you need to make […]

I will never forget the time someone once told me that I was too compassionate and I “cared about people too much” to be a good leader. That I’d need to develop a thicker skin and be “scarier” to ever move up in my career. They basically told me compassionate leadership was a scam. I […]

A few weeks ago, I was having a conversation with my husband about what makes someone a good people-first leader. He’s a middle manager, so this is a topic we come back to often, and somewhere in the middle of that conversation I found myself trying to name a pattern I’d been seeing for years […]

Most organizations that think they’re doing inclusion well aren’t. And the gap between believing you’re an inclusive leader and actually being one doesn’t show up on the good days. It shows up the moment things get hard. You may have seen this pattern in places that have visible markers of DEI commitment: a committee, pronouns […]

Every organization has a story about why their good people left. The official version usually involves something tidy. A better opportunity. A career change. Personal circumstances. Sometimes it’s framed as a loss but an inevitable one, the kind of thing that happens in every organization and doesn’t really mean anything about this one specifically. The […]

I’ve been asking a question my entire life: am I the only one who sees a problem with this? In classrooms, in boardrooms, in leadership meetings where I’d look around the table and feel the weight settle into my chest before my hand went up anyway. Most of the time, I was not the only […]