These are the principles that guide my work and life. I'm writing them to clarify what matters to me, and to be transparent about what shapes how I show up. If this resonates, you're probably the kind of person I want to work with.
Principles
Care For Your People
Workplaces can do real good in the world beyond the product or service they sell. Not through mission statements, but through how people are actually treated. When employees can use their strengths, be challenged to grow, work in a healthy environment, get paid fairly, and log off at a reasonable hour to have dinner with family or loved ones – that matters. If a thousand people can say that about their employer, that's a thousand people walking around with more wellness in their lives. I want to help create more workplaces like that.
Earned Leadership
I've watched people shrink themselves under leaders who wielded power without care, and it changed how I think about leadership. Leadership is the responsibility to care for the people affected by your power, not authority for its own sake. I use whatever influence I have to draw out people's gifts, to help them thrive. Sometimes that means leading from the front, sometimes from behind, and sometimes stepping back so someone else can move forward. When I remember that leadership for is the people in my care, everything else follows: the decisions I make, the culture I create, and what becomes possible for all of us.
Courageously Honest
Discovering who I am – what’s important to me, what's mine vs. what I've absorbed – has been some of my hardest and most fulfilling work. It’s brave to look inward and see myself clearly, especially when what I find is uncomfortable. And maybe even another layer of courage to let other people actually see it, too, and then keep acting on what I find, even when I'm not sure I'm ready. This honesty is how I find what's true for me. When I know myself deeply, I feel it in my bones. There's a rightness no external validation can replicate.
Think and Feel Deeply
I think deeply, and I feel deeply, and I've learned these don't have to be in tension. I want to understand patterns and ask hard questions, but I also want to feel the full range, to be moved, to connect. The most interesting work I do happens when both are present. This integration – my head and heart, analysis and feeling – is where I come alive. It's messy and sometimes contradictory, but it's honest. And it's what allows me to hold complexity while still being moved by beauty.
Presence as Practice
Being fully present is both simple and surprisingly rare, but real presence makes it possible to actually see each other, to feel with someone instead of just understanding them intellectually. It's a practice I return to again and again, and it’s also a form of resistance against the pressure to move fast, to treat every moment as transactional. When I slow down enough to be fully with someone, that's when my empathy becomes care.
Keep Wonder Alive
Moments of awe, frisson, being moved by something I can't quite name – I've learned these matter as much as any accomplishment or success. We've been trained to produce and perform instead of simply being present to what's here. But when I slow down enough to notice the light at a certain time of day or a line in a book that stops me cold, I'm reminded that not everything meaningful shows up on a to-do list. This practice of paying attention, of letting myself be moved, keeps me human.