I have lived, worked, and led in systems that don’t honor life. I have spent years trying to distance myself from them and from the concept of leadership itself…until I remembered that leadership can look like caregiving. Leadership can look like mothering, like holding space, and like healing.

This is my story…I began my professional journey in traditional leadership roles—as a teacher, then as an administrator. I pursued degrees in public health and education, driven by a desire to serve and uplift my community. During this time, I was also navigating life as a single mother, balancing immense responsibility at work and at home. Leadership, in those spaces, meant being strong, competent, and constantly giving—often at the expense of my own well-being. But I kept going because it was what I knew. It was all I knew.

Eventually, right before the pandemic, I reached a breaking point. I stepped away from institutional roles and left behind what had once defined me professionally. I wanted nothing to do with leadership anymore. I craved something more human, more healing. That’s when I found my way into the world of lactation support, childbirth education, and life coaching. These spaces felt intimate, raw, and real. I was no longer leading from a podium—I was walking alongside people in some of their most vulnerable moments.

But then, my own world cracked open. My baby died in 2021.

Grief, in its purest form, rearranged everything. It made it impossible to keep moving in the same ways. I quickly realized that the way our culture teaches us to “cope” or “manage” grief just wasn’t sustainable. I didn’t want to just survive my grief—I wanted to be transformed by it. I wanted to find a way not just to keep going, but to regenerate—to let this loss carve new meaning, new capacity, and new life into my path.

That journey led me back, in an unexpected way, to leadership.

Not the old kind. Not the kind that burns you out or asks you to leave parts of yourself behind. I’m exploring what I now call rewilded leadership—a way of showing up in the world that centers wholeness, interconnectedness, and healing. It’s leadership rooted in grief, in motherhood, in embodiment, and in the natural cycles of life. It asks not what we can extract from ourselves or others, but what we can tend to, grow with, and sustain.

Now, I’m bringing this rewild lens to my work, to how I parent, and to how I live. I’m no longer trying to escape leadership—I’m redefining it. I’m planting something new.