How Good Can It Get

I’ve wrestled with this one for years: when do I give myself grace, and when do I push through?

After burnout, your internal alarm system can get out of whack. Some women feel like everything is forcing. Others feel so numb that nothing registers at all. No one can watch you work and tell you whether you’re in flow. You’re the instrument, and this episode helps you tune it so you can feel...

When a woman comes to me after burnout, I ask her what she wants for herself. Most of the time, she can’t answer.

Maybe you can’t either.

She can tell you exactly what her team needs and what her boss expects. Her own desires are much harder to find. That long pause says a lot. Burnout is the work wound our culture has finally named, and underneath it, so often, is self-abandonment...

I’ve said “I’m burned out” in the same breath as “I’m tired.”

Maybe you have too.

In the past few episodes, we redefined growth as capacity expansion. This week, I’m looking at what happens when our capacity gets pushed past its edge for too long.

Burnout might be the most overused word in work culture right now, and I think it’s one of the least understood. We use it as a catch...

I used to believe growth came from pushing harder.

This week, I've been redefining growth as capacity expansion: the capacity to hold more of my own truth and to stay with myself when life gets full. That definition leads to a better question. If growth is capacity, what actually expands it?

In this episode, I share my answer in two parts.

The first is environment. So many of us l...

I'm becoming suspicious of the way I've defined growth for most of my life.

For 20 years, I lived inside reports. As managing partner, COO, and chief strategy officer, I watched revenue, headcount and expense trends, and the "successful" direction of every line was up. Flat meant a problem. A sharp decline meant a crisis.

Somewhere along the way, I started measuring my own life the same way. M...

I know what it feels like when the thing you built becomes the thing you have to leave.

Ashlei Rolloff got the email on her day off. The million-dollar agency she had built was being divested and spun out to her. On paper, it was a gift. Inside, it showed her how much of her worth had been tied to her VP title and her output.

In this episode, Ashlei shares the grief that came in waves and the ...

I signed up for something a few weeks ago that my body was already saying no to... and I said yes anyway.  

Fresh off the Growth Day Conference, I've been sitting with the word growth. Somewhere across 20-plus years of work, I started treating growth and more as the same thing. More clients, more partnerships, more posts, more speaking engagements, all stacked on top of what I already carry.  

Then a founder archetype sur...

I've drafted email replies in my head while someone I love was telling me about the best moment of their day. Guilty.

Maybe you've been there too. You walk through the front door (or up the stairs, if you work from home) and realize you never actually left work. Your body is home, and your mind is still in the 3:00 meeting, rewriting what you should have said. Then the shoes and backpack in the entryway se...

This week felt heavier than most, and I don't want to pretend otherwise.

Every time I opened a news app, there was another story where something went terribly wrong for a woman, and the people who were supposed to help...didn't. None of those stories were mine. And my body carried them all week anyway.

In this  episode with our new, shorter format, I'm naming what I believe gets activated...

I came back from a summer that expanded me in ways I'm still catching up to, and the first thing I felt was a pull to make sure I wasn't leaving any of you behind.

Before I tell you where we're going, let me tell you where I've been. This summer held executive retreats I got to lead, a hypno-breathwork Level Two certification, and a whole lot of work that stretched what I thought I was capable of.

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