Personal Story

Years of struggling to fit in. Unhappiness. Negative feedback. These all culminated into a single moment where I shattered: “What happened? I checked all the boxes!” At my lowest point, I reached out to someone I hardly knew for support and began to explore this word, vulnerability, something that a few years prior was terrifying. I steadily climbed the corporate ladder for 24 years making my way up from entry-level engineer to senior program manager. I checked off all the boxes, always feeling behind, overworked, and stressed. It was a perfect recipe for burnout. A high-profile, politically sensitive project, difficult meetings, and subsequent feedback landed me on the floor of my living room feeling shattered in a million pieces. Then it hit me. I was the common denominator in every situation where I had difficulty working with my colleagues. Yikes. It took my own emotional and spiritual unraveling to get to the point where I realized I was out of alignment with my purpose. Embracing vulnerability opened me up to a whole new world of following my intuition and working with energy. Instead of a human do-ing, I became a human be-ing. What felt like burnout and breakdown of everything I knew, turned out to be an illuminating gift.