Leadership:
At graduation I was commissioned as a 2LT in Army Aviation and became one of the first women to fly Apache helicopters, serving on three continents and leading two flight platoons and a line company.
In the midst of school and flying came skydiving, scuba diving, big-mountain climbing and long-course triathlons.
Education:
To turn all that into something practical, I earned my MBA at the Tuck School at Dartmouth, and led outstanding teams and worked with excellent people in the medical devices industry and technology.
I started an MDiv (part-time), and decided not to pursue it, returning to my love of words with an MFA in creative writing.
I take that experience in leadership and courage and devote my work to speaking, research and writing, as well as online and bespoke facilitated leadership journeys for leaders at The Grit Institute. Through keynotes, my books, and leadership journeys I work as a corporate partner to deliver my most important lessons over those years in the cockpit and the board room to organizations across the country.
These stories and lessons connect to the needs of audiences in every industry speaking about courage and transformation, leadership, creativity and grit, and how we can use storytelling with our teams and organizations to succeed in times of change, overcome resistance, and inspire and transform.
My writing wrestles with life by way of words to explore possibility.
After a family tragedy, I left the corporate world to write my first book North of Hope: A Daughter's Arctic Journey, and with that return to story, I never looked back.
The Grit Factor: Courage, Resilience and Leadership in the Most Male Dominated organization in the World, was published by Harvard Business Review Press in September 2020.
Current published and pending work is primarily in non-fiction, both journalistic and creative, as well as poetry. My essays, poems and a short story can be found in various anthologies. See more at this link.
Outside of work, I’m proud of more than a half decade of work to found and run the board funding and building a new library in our community. I help teach writing at our local schools, and my husband and I co-founded and lead Methow Episcopal Fellowship, going strong and growing eight years in!
My domestic skills are sorely lacking, though I love it when there’s time to explore new recipes and have people to dinner. Lifelong loves have included art and classical choral performance, as well as getting into the mountains on two wheels, two skis or two feet as much as possible with my family and our dog Bonnie.
P.S. Details at LinkedIn are here.
