I was born in New York, raised in Texas, and have had the opportunity to travel around the world. I attended 13 different schools from kindergarten to 12th grade, and have lived in 40 different houses over my lifetime. I was raised by a single mom and learned to be on my own at a very young age while raising my younger sister. I have experienced both socio-economic privilege & have lived in poverty. In my early life, all I understood was instability and uncertainty. It was challenging, but it shaped my resilience.

In college, I needed an extra physical education credit and fell into a class called Stress Reduction through Movement. This class shifted my personal healing journey and set the foundation for my life’s work. This class was rooted in somatics and an understanding of how the body keeps score, holds trauma, and impacts our emotions, behavior, and actions. I began to realize for the first time how I had “normalized” my trauma and how active my nervous system was – this affected my relationships, my health, and my experience of life. All the work I have done both personally and professionally has carried a thread of somatics & this is why my speaking and training work is so transformational. 

I have always been a deep feeler. Some people might call me an empath and I have spent my adult life learning to have more “feeling” boundaries, so I don’t take on too much. I can tackle anything in the emotional realm. Conflict is my playground and challenging relationships are my specialty. Being able to embrace so many emotions (both mine and others’) has allowed me the ability to hold space for individuals, teams, and organizations to transform.

My nature is to observe and learn, but my real gift is in extrapolating what I have learned into new ways of thinking. To extrapolate is to be able to project, extend or expand known data into an area that is unknown. It has allowed me to be on the cutting edge of change and to be a leader in my field. The topics I teach are not new, but the way I present and educate them is different. I have had the opportunity to work with thousands of people testing my hypotheses, and refining and evolving my work to have more impact.

I had a deep inner world at a young age. I had thoughts I didn’t feel I could express and understandings about people that were too dangerous to share. So at 6, I started journaling. It was the beginning of a lifetime journey to increasing my self-awareness and emotional intelligence. From there I started reading self-development books, took courses, and eventually taught self-development practices to others. My “free time” was always spent learning more about how we work, from education to conversations. And I have loved every minute of it.

The answer to ALL transformation is raising our emotional intelligence

Want to better navigate conflict? Raise emotional intelligence. Want to have better leadership or more culture cohesion? Raise emotional intelligence. Want to eliminate burnout? Raise emotional intelligence. Want to stop quiet quitting? Raise emotional intelligence. Want to stop climate change? Raise emotional intelligence. Want to stop crime, abuse & neglect? Raise emmotional intelligence. At the heart of all transformation is the need to raise self-awareness and empathy and that is the core work of emotional intelligence. 

Real growth is a removal process NOT another thing on our to-do list

I have helped thousands of individuals and businesses grow. What I learned over the last two decades is that growth is more of a removal process than another thing we need to “do”. The more layers we add on to our gifts & genius (individuals) or our core mission & vision (organizations), the more we stunt our growth. Letting go of what is no longer working, being discerning about what is aligned and what is not, and removing the things in the way of our growth is key to building a great life, a great team, or a great organization.  

Empathy & compassion are our nature & our inherent gifts

This is really important!!! So many trainers and teachers of emotional intelligence talk about empathy and compassion as something we need to learn. We don’t need to teach empathy & compassion because they are our nature, instead, we need to remove what is in the way of our innate capacity for empathy & compassion. My work begins with the idea that everyone already knows how to access compassion & empathy, they already have innate emotional intelligence – what needs to shift is the way their evolutionary biology is operating. In other words, their innate instinct to survive is hijacking their nervous system and getting in the way of their innate skills to honor themselves & work well with others. 

Restoring dignity, belonging, and safety is an important step

Dignity, belonging & safety are inherent needs, just like air, water, food & shelter. When we have been denied dignity, belonging, or safety, our instinct to survive kicks in and no amount of “reasoning” or control can overcome our evolutionary biology to survive. We are teaching emotional intelligence, DEI, and topics like burnout from the wrong lens. Before we can change the way we operate, we have to restore a sense of dignity, belonging, and safety in ourselves. Before an organization can ask their employees to change, they need to work to restore dignity, belonging, and safety in their environment. This is an important step missed in most change work. 

There is an intersection between individual & systemic change

We can’t fully transform as an individual without taking into consideration the broader social, economical and political systems that impact our individual experience. We also can’t engage in systemic change without taking into consideration the impact on the individual. Even within family systems or organizations, there is an intersection between individual change & systemic change. Let’s take something like reducing burnout – changing organizational systems is important to reducing burnout in your workforce, but without raising the self-awareness of the employee or manager to understand their capacity for stress or providing them with tools for navigating conflict or change, changing systems alone won’t get the job done. You also have to take into account systemic attitudes and unconscious bias that can influence the environment, culture & experience of the employees. Understanding this intersection is an important part of my work.  

Emotions are our superpower & we have to embrace them

Emotions get a bad rap & over the decades we have been taught to leave our emotions out of our workplace, our decisions, and our thinking. But emotions are an amazing part of our human experience. Emotions not only motivate us, but they also motivate others. Emotions provide information about ourselves and offer threads we can pull for growth & transformation. Emotions are at the core of compassion and empathy. Being more emotional is a benefit to every aspect of our lives. We don’t need to learn to control or suppress our emotions, we just need to learn to embrace them, honor them, and use them for good. Emotional intelligence isn’t about “managing” our emotions, but instead, it is about befriending them. This is a game changer for your organization & for the world.