A writer first.  Championing your self-discovery and actualization.

Somewhere in my thirties, the story changed.

Around 2013, I started noticing something in the leaders and thought leaders I coached: brilliant people who couldn’t articulate what made them different. That noticing became Package Your Genius — a framework for helping people identify, shape, and share their life’s most meaningful contributions with the world. For fifteen years, this has been the work of helping people build — the summer side of what I do.

Then, during the pandemic, I noticed something else. My coaching clients weren’t just struggling to articulate their genius anymore. They were exhausted by it. Looking for meaning and an outlet of my own, I started writing essays and reported pieces again, and landed freelance articles on burnout in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. After a conversation with author Tina McElroy Ansa, who told me, “Don’t write another article when you really want to write a book,” I got serious about finding a longer-form home for these ideas. The Rest Revolution was published by Wiley in November 2024, followed by a year-long mental health reporting fellowship through the Carter Presidential Center, writing about the mental health challenges of midlife high achievers for Forbes.

On ambition, and the pendulum.

Here’s something I know to be true about the people who find their way to my work: you are not trying to stop achieving. You are trying to stop achieving at the expense of everything else.

High achievers live on a pendulum. On one side is the pull toward creating something new and meaningful. On the other is the crash — the season where ambition outruns your actual human capacity, and the whole system pays for it. Most of us spend our lives swinging between the two without ever learning how to slow the arc.

I write in The Rest Revolution about the wisdom of seasons — that no season is wasted, and we cannot keep skipping winter rest any more than we can skip summer growth. High achievers are very good at summer and very bad at winter. Package Your Genius has always been my summer work. Learning to guide people through actual rest — including, more recently, through sound and somatic facilitation — has become my winter work. Both are essential. Neither is complete without the other.

Where it’s all going

These days, I toggle between telling important stories as a freelance journalist, delivering storytelling and imposter-syndrome workshops for Fortune-ranked corporate clients, ghostwriting and framing big ideas for executives, and guiding groups through sound and somatic restoration. My goal now is to help people align their ambition and their visibility with their real human needs for joy, connection, and rest.

I believe the work I do ultimately serves to increase equity, combat erasure, and open closed minds — making the world a more tolerable place. That’s true whether I’m helping someone find the words for their genius, or helping them find the stillness to sustain it.