Personal Growth

A client of mine lost her job recently. But that's not where this story actually begins. She had reached out to me a few weeks BEFORE it happened. Before there was anything concrete to point to. Before she had a single piece of evidence she could put on a table and say, this, this is what I'm worried about. She reached out because she had a feeling. The kind that lives in your body before your brain has caught up to it. The kind that wakes you up at 3am and doesn't give you

It's summer. And if you're reading this from an office that is half-empty, or a desk that feels quieter than usual, or a calendar that - for the first time since January - actually has some breathing room in it: I want to say something to you directly. You can leave early today. Not because you've finished everything. You haven't. You never will. The to-do list does not end - it just changes shape. Not because someone told you it was okay. Nobody is going to tell you that. B

I remember the exact moment I realized I was in over my head. I was sitting at my desk with a job brief in front of me, a list of target companies on my screen, and the phone — feeling, in that moment, like the most terrifying object in the room. I had been working in executive search for a few years by then. I knew the industry. I knew the process. I had sat in on hundreds of candidate conversations, managed the logistics of searches from beginning to end, supported senior c

A reader wrote to me after the last edition of this newsletter. She said she'd tried it. The Courage Challenge — one hour of complete presence with someone she loved. No phone. No half-attention. Just her, fully there. And she said it was harder than she expected. Not because she was distracted. But because when the distractions fell away, something else surfaced. A restlessness she couldn't quite name. An urge to fill the silence. A strange discomfort with just... being ther

I lost someone recently. It was sudden. There was no warning. No time to prepare. No final conversation I knew would be final. One day they were here. The next — without explanation, without transition, without any of the things we tell ourselves we'll say when the time is right — they were gone. And that's the thing about sudden loss that nobody warns you about. It doesn't just take the person. It takes every future moment you had assumed was still available to you. The coff

A few months ago, I sat across from a client of mine who had spent seventeen years building an impressive career at a global firm. She was smart. Accomplished. The kind of person whose LinkedIn profile makes you feel slightly behind on your own life. She had recently left her role — by choice — to explore consulting. AND she was stuck. Not on the logistics. Not on the pricing or the outreach or the contracts. She was stuck on a question she hadn't expected to find so hard: Wh

I recently attended several panels about the job market. Different industries, different speakers, different perspectives. And yet the message was surprisingly consistent. The market is tough. AI is accelerating change. And many of the rules we used to rely on are dissolving. Again and again, the discussion turned toward the same question: What actually makes someone stand out now? Not surprisingly, the answer wasn’t just technical expertise. The people who will thrive in th

You’re asked a simple question. “What do you do?” “What have you been working on?” “What are you proud of lately?” And suddenly… your brain short-circuits. You know you have words. You use them all the time. But in this moment? Gone. You start talking, then stop. You hear yourself saying “um” more than usual. You’re halfway through a sentence and already wondering how to soften the ending. Your mind is racing: Don’t sound braggy. Don’t make it weird. Don’t take up too mu

At the beginning of a new year, excitement is supposed to be the default emotion. Fresh calendars. Clean slates. Big intentions. But for many people, the feeling is quieter than that—almost muted. Not because nothing is happening, but because they’ve just lived through a year filled with noise. Constant advice. Endless opinions. Metrics telling you what matters. Expectations you didn’t choose. Other people speaking with certainty about paths you’re the one expected to walk.

We often talk about burnout in terms of external forces — crushing workloads, relentless demands, toxic cultures. And yes, those things are very real, as I just explored in my recent article The Cult of Overwork - Burnout as a Badge of Honor. But after 20+ years working closely with leaders, creatives, and high performers in fashion and lifestyle industries, here’s something else I’ve learned: Sometimes, burnout doesn’t just come from what’s being done to us. It comes from w