I turned out my pockets.

The Short Version

Until August 2025, I didn’t exist online. I had scrubbed myself from the internet years earlier and lived in protection. I was invisible on purpose. I left a dangerous marriage and chose hiding for a season.

That’s not the headline. But it is foundational to everything I do now.

I emerged publicly because hiding became more exhausting than telling the truth. And because I couldn’t separate the work from the story anymore.

The Arc

The survival came first. Then the rebuild.

I was a trad wife before it was cool. I gave birth to six kids in eight years. Homeschooling, cloth diapering, mommy blogging. I tried to be perfect. I never cussed, put on a good smile every Sunday, kept everything beautiful on the surface. But then the police showed up and the surface shattered.

It took me a few years, but eventually I left. It got ugly quickly. Very ugly.

The kids and I fled the state.We moved into state protection. I scraped every trace of us off the internet and started over.

Ted found me. We built a life. At his urging, I went back to college, walked into a career I never planned and discovered I was good at making organizations run. I became COO of BMC Accounting. Ted and I co-founded GYST Organizational Health. I completed lay counseling certification, trauma-informed self-defense training and a six-month leadership intensive that reshaped how I understand my own story.

Along the way I realized something. The skills you develop surviving a dangerous home are the same skills you need to diagnose a dysfunctional organization. Pattern recognition. Boundary enforcement. Reading a room before the room reads you. Knowing when to hold steady and when to move.

I didn’t plan this convergence. But I stopped pretending the personal and the professional were separate things.

What I Keep Coming Back To

Lead Yourself First. You can’t lead anything until you’ve looked in the mirror. I spent years getting deeply serious about my own boundaries, my inability to say no and my habit of mistaking martyrdom for leadership. Every talk I give and every page I write grew out of that work.

Find your Highest and Best. Not where everyone else wants your energy to sit. Where it actually belongs.

Good Before Great. Perfectionism kills momentum. I know this because I’m a recovering perfectionist who had to learn to release the work when it is good enough, not when it’s flawless. (Craig Groeschel calls this GETMO, Good Enough to Move On).

And question the Myth of Busyness. Because you own 100% of your time, and you are spending it exactly as you choose. That’s the book I’m writing, and it’s the conviction underneath everything I teach.

Where I Am Now

I share my personal story. I speak on self-leadership, organizational health and resilience. Ted and I run GYST together. I’m writing The Myth of Busyness. I tell stories that land because they’re real, not because they’re polished.

Faith is the most important thing in my life. I am wife to the most astonishingly good (and handsome) man. We have nine children that make me proud and make me smile. I am a writer. A lover of birds and all things absurd and obscure. I am narrow and deep, not wide and shallow. It took a long time to get here.

I keep the sacred spaces deliberate. Not everything needs to become content and not every pocket needs turning out.

But the ones that matter? Wide open.