Becoming Works

08/28/2026

HR professionals face big challenges in balancing metrics, outcomes, organizational priorities AND equipping high-functioning, satisfied, healthy workforce teams! I loved meeting so many committed professionals at - we strategized together how to connect performance to identity disruptions across the career journey. It’s a tough and sometimes thankless job - grateful for the opportunity to translate identity-first leadership and workplaces to HR real life! Super fun to have my amazing assistant Seilah Pickering who did an amazing job running support!

08/25/2026

’Twas the night before
And from all through the state,
HR pros came to the ’Ville,
To pause from making workplaces great.
Ready to learn, connect, and have a little fun-
While I tweaked my slides … again…
(yep, the Enneagram One 🤓)

I’m SO excited to meet, learn with, encourage, and hopefully inspire these amazing HR pros with ideas for practical integration of my identity-first leadership approach!

08/19/2026

Is your leadership style in a pro flow state? Work-related flow state (absorption + deep focus) and its cousin, employee engagement, are one part organizational and one part employee / leader self. A recent study by Geldenhuys et al. (2026) demonstrated connection between self-leadership and work-related flow- yes!

AND:

If flow is the desired outcome and self-leadership is the tactical, behavioral ex*****on, then IDENTITY-FIRST LEADERSHIP is the foundation. It builds the capacity for both the leader AND the organization to identify best-fit strategies for increased work-related flow state.

I shared my thoughts with Christian of connecting flow to decreased burnout and the need to expand this conversation to the organizational level. Link in the first comment- !

08/14/2026

In case you missed it!

Organizational Psychologist Natalie Pickering offers us some great information on how we can keep the human side involved when it comes to using AI for business! Please take a moment and watch our …

08/14/2026

Tune in to Daytime Tri-cities for my segment on AI in the workplace and important conversations organizations need to be having! See you in the morning!

07/30/2026

I've had a few variations of this conversation with high-performing leaders in recent weeks. It's a painful reality when you've accepted the leadership role, taken the career pivot, joined the new team and discover that amidst your new responsibilities is... a mess.

It might be a burned-out team or broken trust. Maybe there are remnants of unresolved conflict and deep wells of change resistance surrounded by weeds of non-psychological safety.

The instinct is to jump right in and fix it. But I'm an advocate for pressing pause not only to strategize (my Enneagram 1 is shining through) but also to ask some important questions: How do I? How have I stepped into a mess like this? Some leaders start with creating structure systems. Some focus on building relationships or asking questions. Some quickly see the patterns.

Your leadership identity shapes how you naturally respond -- and this is a strength. But it can also be where many leaders begin to lose themselves. They bring questions to coaching like: Why can't I get this team moving? or Why don't they trust me? or Why can't I fix this? and even deeper, Maybe I'm not the leader they need. I respond by suggesting if there are other questions for us to consider...

The trap for leaders is the automatic ingesting of a team or organizational identity that isn't theirs... yet. That story remains to be written, but defaulting to "why can't I..." is an automatic internalization that needs to be checked. You inherited the responsibility but the story and the history happened before you.

There's a big difference between taking responsibility and taking it personally.
One builds leadership. The other erodes it.

The goal isn't to become a different leader because the situation is difficult or because the messy demands it-- although and of course different situations require some agility-- but I believe the more worthwhile and foundational keep-it-forever goal is to become a more intentional version of yourself.

While you don't get to choose what you inherit, you do get to choose how you lead and who you're becoming as you tackle that mess.

07/25/2026

I trademarked my business name (shew, get help with that one!) - Becoming Works- because it does and I am. And I’m savoring my week with 75 leaders whose takeaways stopped me in my tracks and brought tears to my eyes. Making space for the deeper, real work of what I have coined ///identity-first leadership/// will transform performance. every. time. They tell me so. And I’ve watched it. I’m humbled to have a front row seat to the transformation of leader lives.

And Charleston you are lovely but I’m glad to be back to my cooler mountains 😅!

07/19/2026

I had the privilege of coaching and learning from 35 amazing leaders last week- I’m on the road to Charleston to bring my identity-first leadership and workplaces approach to 75 more! I love this stretch of I-26. The mountains remind me of leadership.

From a distance these mountains I’m driving past look solid and strong and unshakable.

But beneath the surface there are tiny invisible shifts from erosion or pressure and eventually, a landslide may suddenly collapse and culminate from years of unseen movement.

We often blame leadership landslides on burnout or conflict or change resistance-
But those are rarely the beginning of the story.

Pressure doesn’t create a leader’s identity. It reveals it— I hear it in every coaching and consultation and training session. I see it firsthand- I experience it myself. This is why I believe and my work prioritizes leadership development that begins with identity, not performance.

Like the question echoed in Fleetwood Mac’s song Landslide Which may or may not be on my current driving playlist!) , change has a way of inviting us to look inward before we look outward.

That’s what we’re going to do this week in Charleston, SC!

06/10/2026

It’s a beautiful day to share identity-first leadership, teams, and organizations with 13 executive healthcare leaders! Performance and metrics? Certainly!

Who we become as leaders and organizations navigating metrics pressure? How identity-first is the foundation for trust and synergy?

It’s the not so secret sauce for intentional, grounded leadership.

Metrics will follow.

05/29/2026

My latest article on identity-first coaching and a practical tool are hot off the press!

A practical tool you can easily incorporate into your coaching for weaving identity into a goal-based approach.