I was a latchkey kid starting in kindergarten – a poster child for the generational plight of mothers who worked past school bells and before there was such a thing as an after-school program. My alarm clock went off at 7:45 am and I had to be at the bus stop exactly 30 minutes later. My mental checklist kicked in young – first, brush my teeth; then, get dressed; don’t forget the Pop Tart in the toaster! I intuitively figured out what to do and where to be, even though I could not tell time. Day by day, year by year, I grew (myself) up.
At the eager age of 17, I set foot on the immaculate and manicured campus that is Stanford. Until then, all I had known were the hallways of my public, Northern Virginia high school and the classmates whose parents were in the military or held political office – a place I never felt like I belonged. Here, I knew no one and had no clue what I wanted to study – orientation was full of starry-eyed students from across the country and the world: some former Olympians, some Europeans, some from Texas, and others with far more sophisticated palates than my own. Somehow, though, I experienced a strange conscious awakening – a feeling that I can only describe now as the comforting familiarity of an unfamiliar environment. It was just like home, and yet nothing like it. I loved it.
I found myself gravitating towards people and places rich in complexity. Two weeks after graduation, I started my first job as a policy analyst at the Progressive Policy Institute, a DC think tank devoted to helping find a “Third Way” between the left and the right. Much of my current inner work is on finding this (sometimes) elusive third way. While conceptually intriguing, I quickly got bored of the theoretical and took a hard right to serve as a humanities teacher at the KIPP Academy in the South Bronx, a chapter in which I also became a mother at the tender age of 26. To keep my brain occupied during maternity leave, I took a GMAT class, scored well, and given my love of learning and of my undergraduate experience, I enrolled in the joint MBA / MA program back at Stanford. I became fascinated in organizational behavior and systems thinking and found my way to McKinsey and Company, where I enjoyed a front row seat to solving some of the thorniest issues facing the business world’s most esteemed leadership teams.
Ultimately, I craved the depth and richness of a one-to-one or one-to-few dynamic, so I jumped off the proverbial carousel of consulting to take a deeper dive than I ever had before. I spent 14 years building out my dream job – a meaningful coaching practice working with incredible clients. It gave me the freedom to structure my life around what mattered most—especially as a parent.
Most recently, I felt the tide change and was ready for something new. Enter: Trium. Again, I found myself in a beautifully unfamiliar territory, and the rest is history.
