I’m not good at calm. Are you? I’m good at capable. I’m good at productive. I’m good at holding it together long enough to get through the meeting. Calm? That one takes effort. Because calm isn’t my default. My default is fast. Fast thoughts. Fast responses. Fast feelings. Someone sends a spicy email? My nervous system drafts three replies before my brain catches up. So no    I’m not naturally calm. But I read somewhere that corporate life is realizing your job is 30% execution and 70% emotional navigation. No one trained me for that! Reading the room. Managing tone. Not escalating when someone else does. Not letting someone else’s urgency become your panic. That’s hard people! Here’s what I am learning: Calm isn’t a personality trait. Calm isn’t quiet. Calm is controlled chaos. Calm isn’t perfection. Calm is not letting someone else’s mess rent space in your head. It’s the pause before I hit send. It’s the breath before I defend myself. It’s the decision not to match s...

We have something at my work called Pause for Purpose. At the beginning of meetings, we stop just for a moment and recognize something meaningful. Sometimes it’s a team that showed up during a natural disaster to help families get back on their feet. Sometimes it’s employees volunteering in the community. Sometimes it’s people doing extraordinary things when the world gets messy. And I love that we do that. I really do. Because in corporate spaces, we talk a lot about values. But when you pause the agenda to honor service, real human service, that tells people those words aren’t just printed in the company newsletter. They are practiced. This matters. Since I’ve become a leader, things have happened. My perspective has shifted. I’ve been exposed to the why behind the time off. I’ve spent more time listening to a bigger group than just my handful of usuals about their kids, their bad mornings, their big wins, their big losses. And something happened recently that shifted the way I think...

While everyone else is panic buying gym memberships and promising to become an entirely different person by February, I’m rolling into this new year exactly as I am. Unapologetically. Intentionally. And with zero interest in your vision board that implies my current self isn’t enough. I am not broken, so there is nothing to fix. There is this wild assumption that January 1st should trigger some metamorphosis, like we are all caterpillars who have been waiting for permission to become butterflies. But you are already the butterfly. You have been one all along and the only thing you need to shed is the belief that you are supposed to be someone else. I have spent years building the person I am. My habits, my boundaries, my non negotiables, the way I take my coffee, the way I handle my business, the relationships I have cultivated, the ones I have walked away from. That wasn’t accidental. And I am not demolishing it because a calendar flipped. This Year My time with family is sacred and n...

I heard a song recently that talked about growing down, and the words have echoed in my mind ever since. We are told to climb, to reach, to aspire upward. But what if we have the metaphor backwards? A tree's vitality doesn't come from its highest branch, but from its deepest root. What if true growth is not about elevation, but foundation? Because in the natural world nourishment comes from below. It is from the roots sinking deep, unseen, steadfast and strong that sustains everything above. There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from craving a seat at tables we were never meant to sit at. We contort ourselves, soften our edges, create versions of ourselves that might finally earn approval. We wait for permission to exist fully, thinking that up there wherever “there” is we will finally feel whole. But growing down reveals a different truth. The truth that the table itself was always the problem. The validation we have been seeking and the acceptance we have been c...