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 method that gave the actor a complete toolbox for stagework. To me, it meant developing trust in my instincts, and being courageous enough to follow them. My work on camera and stage 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
In 2008, I opened a studio for professional actors, which over the years produced award-winning films, made several success stories out of my students and staff, and launched my corporate public-speaking coaching. This creative venture was not just commercially successful: it was changing lives. I wasn’t teaching them to act, but to be bravely present. It was more than arts education; this approach was a way of leading.
Curious to understand how humans develop, I studied education with scholar Eleanor Duckworth at Harvard. I became a practitioner of the critical exploration approach to learning by working from each learner’s unique point of inquiry. Together with a committed practice as a Buddhist meditation guide, I turned the inquiry to discover my own understanding, inward. I learned to stay present with the questions of being “enough” that I had tried to outpace, and explore the root of the belief beneath them. Together, these experiences shaped my work with leaders in understanding themselves and finding their own voice. But first, I had to find mine.
From performing worth to being worthy
In 2016, I met my husband and we moved to Costa Rica to start a family. During this time, we founded an international nonprofit, Madre Tierra Foundation, to focus on root cause work in climate and education, reforesting parts of Costa Rica and founding 2 schools.
Having worked with tens of thousands of people over decades, leaving work to become a mother in a different country caused a collapse in my identity. Motherhood exposed inner self-doubt that my accomplishment hadn’t, despite my efforts, resolved. My instinct was to gain professional standing, but the answer wasn’t in work, but in my private world in becoming a woman who felt at home in her own skin.
During the pandemic, I became sober and began training with a human development professional to “grow up” as an adult, to validate myself in who I am, not in what I do.
As I reshaped patterns of insecurity and control, my marriage and identity changed. I saw firsthand that what pain shaped in me was able to be transmuted into strength, and so emerged my approach with leaders.
Building organizational culture
As I brought the True Influence Method™ to clients, I discovered I had an innate gift of perception. I was able to see the meaning beneath and use my training background to be present to others and shift patterns. With clients and in public leadership roles I began giving voice to the important connection between the private world of the leader and the impact on what gets passed on in their legacy. It allowed me to be straightforward in what I stood for. I had my voice.
I trained women leaders in speaking and saw transformation after transformation. They found their worth and stood in it, set better boundaries and above all, trusted themselves.
My studies in human development and impact investing gave me new data for building the architecture of Healed Leadership tools. The question then became, who must I become to work with the moguls and titans of industry as partners in changing how humanity lives and leads?
Healed Leadership
My “why” is heartfelt: that no one suffer from struggling inside as I did, when our world needs their unique voice and solutions so badly. Billions of people are lonely and lack purpose, many of us using AI to run our lives, but it truly is what we carry within ourselves, not what’s online, that expands possibilities.
Today, I am using this Healed Leadership framework to redefine “leadership” based on what is now needed. I am bringing the tools for leaders to build the muscle of conscious choice, turning their lived experience into a meaningful contribution. I am a partner in shaping what others inherit from our solutions to promote the future generations.
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