Is Your Past Success Threatening Your Future?
Have you ever been at the “top of your game” and still felt like you were failing?
The shift is rarely obvious.
You start believing that being in charge is the best way to get what you want.
You stop believing something is good unless it gets praised.
You sense that “something’s off.”
You have a nagging sense that something important is being postponed.
These are just some of the ways the shift shows up.
Why is this happening?
We crave certainty, predictability, and stability. We cling to our past because our future is often too bright to see without feeling uneasy, and too undefined to navigate with familiar tools.
What’s the cost?
While we’re clinging to our past and doubling down on what has worked before, we start losing our sense of creative abundance. Success becomes an identity instead of an outcome. We narrow who we think we can become, what we dare to build, and who we choose to bring along for the journey. Our ambition, which was previously fueled by purpose gets hollowed out into a drive for validation from others. We start to recede, to drift, to pull back.
This sounds awful, what can I do about it?
Recognizing your particular shift and what it’s costing you is a big and important first step. Storytelling is a powerful tool to help you on this journey.
I'm an advisor, a novelist, a podcast host, and a board director. To people who haven't worked with me, that can look like a lot of different things. It isn't. It's one question, asked in different contexts: what is the real story here, and what does it cost when no one tells it?
Here are three different beginnings to choose from as you embark on writing your next chapter. A “choose your own adventure,” if you will. And if this overview has given you enough to strike out on a different path of your own making, that’s great! I’ll be here cheering you on and ready to help if you get stuck.
If you’re still not sure where to start, get in touch and we can take it from there.
Authorship is an act of leadership
Stories Work
The stories we tell aren’t merely for entertainment. They’re world-building, life-changing. Stories determine who gets resources, who gets heard, whose work gets taken seriously, which organizations become household names.
When I went to college, I thought I’d become a screenwriter or a psychologist. I became a corporate attorney, then a C-Suite executive, a board member, a creator, and a founder. I’ve seen the costs of misalignment across law, finance, media, health tech, and cultural institutions. I’ve seen careers rise and fall. I’ve experienced those costs myself.
When there’s a gap between the story an organization or a person believes and the one the world observes, it compounds until it becomes too wide and too expensive to ignore.
Closing that gap is the work.
Not for branding, not for an earnings call, not for a performance review. For true alignment, for innovation, for sustainable cultures, businesses and careers.
ORGANIZATIONS
My organizational clients are cultural institutions and mission-driven organizations across industries trying to build something simultaneously sustainable, profitable, and aligned to their stated reason for being. When financial models don't fund the mission, talent decisions contradict the culture, or the strategy contradicts the story the organization is telling, the gap compounds quietly until it becomes a reputational or operational crisis.
INDIVIDUALS
The individuals I work with are navigating the gap between the story they've been living and the one they need to write. The stakes are just as high. Unexamined, that gap keeps you in the wrong room too long, pushes you toward the safe move over the right one, and lets someone else's read of you become your ceiling.
Storytelling in public
I’m Here Too
Strange is the child who plays tax collector instead of doctor. I thought nothing of what others might say was an eccentric childhood. For me, “I” was implied and unproblematic.
Until…
Well-intentioned friends, classmates, bosses, colleagues, fellow writers, artists and strangers on the subway continued pointing out what a rare and articulate bird I was.
I found myself shrinking in self-doubt. Maybe if I made certain parts of me smaller, more normal, more predictable, I’d have an easier time of it. I tried. I tried again. But you know how that story ended.
With the help of some smart and compassionate therapists, friends and family members, I remembered that exuberant little girl I used to be. The little girl who didn’t even think about making apologies for who she was. The little girl who was too busy living her life. Making big moves. Making big mistakes. As herself. Not as who someone else wanted her to be. That little girl was a rare bird, but that’s the point.
We all have a chance to make our own mark, our own impression. Big or small as it ends up being. What a freeing realization that has been for me. Don’t get me wrong. It’s been a long and circuitous road getting to the place where “I” feels authentic and where I don’t apologize for the way I walk through the world.
It took me a long time to get to here, a place where I will be seen and heard. But now that I’m here, I’m eager for some company. Through essays, conversations, and the I’m Here Too Podcast, I look forward to sharing my journey with you and giving you an opportunity to do the same.
Off we go!
Write the story you want to read
Fiction
“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison
I write stories that explore how creativity, identity and ambition shape who we become and what we dare to build.
My creative roots are in visual storytelling. I studied Art History and Visual Arts at Princeton University, where I deepened my creative writing, video, photography, and documentary practice, a curiosity that began in childhood and continues to shape how I see the world. I also attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Each of these experiences taught me how observation, empathy, and storytelling are essential to leadership and culture building.
My work today continues to draw from those early lessons: seeing clearly, listening deeply, and building from what’s true and what has yet to be revealed.