09/30/2026
It’s been a little over a week since I got back from my first Create & Cultivate conference. I’d been itching to get back into a conference space since my favorite conference, Yellow Conference, wrapped up a few years ago, and I was excited to see current and former clients and colleagues there.
A few highlights:
* Before the conference, I attended a Flodesk event hosted by Joanna Waterfall, Yellow Conference’s founder and now Head of Partnerships + Community at Flodesk. Seeing people I met at Yellow years ago, while also meeting incredible new leaders, was a highlight of the whole trip.
* Being in a space with 4,000 people was energizing for this extrovert. I’m probably not the target audience for this particular conference, but I loved seeing the 2026 version of conversations I’ve studied for years.
* My favorite session was a leadership panel featuring women who are OGs in tech and corporate leadership, talking about navigating AI disruption and how they’re leading their teams through it.
* I’m a big people watcher, and I learned just as much from observing how participants and C&C leaders responded to logistical challenges, as well as how people gave and received feedback.
* Across the sessions, I kept noticing the same conversations coming up: perfectionism, burnout, delegation, wearing too many hats, owning your worth, charging your worth, ambition. These are recurring themes at nearly every professional conference I’ve attended. I’ve studied them, taught them, and learned from them. And I’ve come to believe that the lessons we keep learning again and again are part of a developmental cycle.
More coming soon: a piece on feedback, a framework exploring the intersection of the developmental life cycle and the leader/entrepreneur life cycle, and a piece on understanding what drives your ambition.
