Truth under pressure
My early career was in youth work and founding a nonprofit, while I also pursued a career as a professional actor. I trained in New York and Los Angeles in the Meisner Technique, an emotional honesty technique similar to Method Acting. Acting taught me to listen closely, trust my responses, and tell the truth under pressure. It introduced a question that would follow me into leadership: What allows us to feel safe enough to be fully ourselves?
Leading through inquiry
I wanted to understand how humans develop, which led to studying education at Harvard and scholar Eleanor Duckworth’s critical exploration approach to learning, based on each learner’s unique point of inquiry. My study of how people discover and develop their own understanding, together with my practice as a Buddhist meditation practitioner and guide, turned that inquiry inward. I learned to stay present with the questions I had tried to outpace and explore the root of the belief beneath them. Together, these experiences shaped how I work with leaders to listen, understand themselves, and find their own voice.
Building organizational culture
Founding and leading schools, raising funds, becoming an impact investor, and leading communities of women entrepreneurs gave me places to discover what I stood for and how I wanted to lead. During these years, I met my husband, and we moved to Costa Rica and founded our international nonprofit, Madre Tierra Foundation, and later another school, to be part of the greater good for the community.
I have toured as a speaker and trainer for several decades now and worked with tens of thousands of people. My experiences with others changed me: I became convinced that purpose exists in everyone, but many are disconnected from it. The question then became, if no one knows me now, who would I need to become to awaken people to the purpose within them, on a scale that could change how humanity lives and leads?
From performing worth to being worthy
I became a mother while living abroad in what felt like a fairytale life, yet motherhood exposed patterns that achievement had never resolved. During the pandemic, my alcohol addiction surfaced. I entered sobriety and committed to repatterning through maturity with a human development expert. I wanted to feel at home within myself, so my family could feel at home being themselves.
As my marriage and identity evolved, I saw firsthand that what shaped me didn’t determine what I pass on. In fact, I discovered an innate gift: perceiving the meaning beneath someone’s experience and helping them articulate what they know but haven’t yet been able to say.
Healed Leadership
That work changed my understanding of leadership: what we carry within ourselves influences what we make possible for others.
The method I created builds the muscle of conscious choice: turning lived experience into a message that carries your business purpose, and turning that understanding into a greater contribution. This work is my “why” at a time when loneliness is at an all-time high and we are using AI to run our lives. The work we do within ourselves shapes what others inherit, not just for our team, customers and organization, but in the lives of those people and the generations who follow them.
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