Wayfinders Executive Coaching

🐹 Are you ready to step off the hamster wheel of busyness that soooo many professionals are running on?

📛 Are you ready to trade in your merit badge of exhaustion for more freedom, more focus, and more time for what matters most?

😳 What would you do with an extra hour a day???

This September, we’re exploring how to focus our effort, create the conditions for good work, and tend what matters most, so we have more time to actually enjoy our lives.

Because productivity isn’t the goal.

It’s a tool that creates space for:
A beautiful life.

Who’s in? 🌾

“Find out who you are and do it on purpose.”

— Dolly Parton

This is much harder than it sounds.

It requires self-awareness. Self-knowledge. Self-acceptance. And perhaps most radically, self-celebration. We hear a lot about believing in yourself. But, Dolly offered us something as big as her hair: Amplify yourself.

Take what is most uniquely YOU and turn up the volume.

Dolly certainly did. She leaves behind a legacy of love, impact, grit, generosity, service, and unapologetic self-expression. She didn’t diminish herself in order to serve others. She became more fully herself and used that enormous life to make other people’s lives better.

Service without sacrifice.

What a beautiful model for leadership. And for life.

Find out who you are. Celebrate the hell out of her. And then bring as much of her as you possibly can to the world. A living disco ball.

That’s how I want to live. And it’s how I hope to inspire my clients to live:

With intention. With impact. With influence.

Thank you, Dolly. ❤️

And I will allllllllwayyyyyyysssssss loooooooooooove youuuuuuuuuu! 🎶💖✨

My dad used to pay me to foul people.

Seriously.

When I was in high school, he offered me $5 for every foul I committed and $25 if I fouled out of a basketball game. At the time, I assumed he was trying to make me a more aggressive player.

Looking back, I wonder if he was trying to help me unlearn something much bigger - society’s definition of what it means to be a “good girl.”

By the time we reach adulthood, “being a good girl” sounds like:

✨ Be likable.
✨ Work harder than everyone else.
✨ Be dependable.
✨ Defer to authority.
✨ Wait your turn.
✨ Don’t offer your opinion until you’re asked.
✨ Take no credit. Let your work speak for itself.

Notice something?

Almost every one of those measures success by what other people think of you.

None ask:

⭐ Who do you want to become?
⭐ What do you value?
⭐ How do you define success?

Maturity isn’t just about gaining knowledge or growing older. It’s also about defining success for yourself and discarding the definitions that were handed to you before you were old enough to choose them.

I never became especially competitive or physically dominant 🙃

But, if my dad was trying to teach me that I didn’t have to spend my life being a “good girl,” he absolutely succeeded.

Because the greatest gift he gave me wasn’t permission to foul, it was the permission to define success for myself and the confidence to achieve it. And, that lesson is worth far more than $25.

I was talking with a client recently about how she defines the good life. As we explored the question together, I noticed something about myself: I feel richest when I have the time and space to linger.

☕ In a coffee shop with nowhere to be.

📚 Over a good book.

💥 With a client who is having a breakthrough.

🕯️ Around a dinner table with friends as the candles burn low.

I feel poor when I am rushing from one thing to the next, worrying about how I am going to get everything done, stretched as thin as a brittle rubber band.

The older I get, the more I realize that richness has very little to do with money and everything to do with spaciousness. For me, a rich life is an abundance of time.

🌀 Time to think.

🌀 Time to connect.

🌀 Time to savor.

🌀 Time to be fully present in the life I've worked so hard to create.

Perhaps that's why I love summer so much. The days themselves seem to exhale. More daylight. More room to breathe. More permission to savor. Mother Nature gives us a little extra daylight this time of year.

What a gift.

So as we approach the longest day of the year, I invite you to consider:

✨ What makes you feel rich?

✨ What would it look like to create a little more space for that?

And if you're struggling to answer those questions, you're not alone. Many of my coaching conversations travel there. In addition to strategy, productivity, and revenue growth, we deeply explore what success, fulfillment, and a rich life actually mean. Because once you know what matters most, it can illuminate the path forward and clarify priorities.

✨ If you're ready to create more spaciousness, alignment, and intention in your life or leadership, let's talk. ✨

Here's to the rich life.

Coaching is a forcing mechanism.

Not because I tell you what to do, but because I help move you past inertia.

A client of mine had refused to use AI for months. They were curious, but busy. Interested, but intimidated. Stalled in the starting gate.

So during a session, we identified a few places where AI could support them, created a few starter prompts, and they agreed to experiment with it for 30 minutes.

Three weeks later, they told me their AI agent is now saving them 4–6 hours of work on every deal. And now they have the capacity to think more strategically about how to further leverage AI in their deal flow.

But here’s the important part:

They did the work. Coaching made the action possible.

It was the forcing function that got them past the starting blocks and into motion.

This is true for so many things in life:
the hard conversation,
the career pivot,
the boundary,
the business idea,
the first step.

So often, what we are avoiding is not actually impossible. It’s just uncomfortable.

And once we begin, we realize the race we were avoiding is one we are fully capable of winning 🏇🥇🏇

Don't shoot the messenger . . . but soooo many attorneys are trauma bonded to stress 😬

I saw a version of this years ago when I was a foster parent.

Children who grow up in chaos will recreate chaos… because it’s what feels normal. It’s what feels safe.

Calm doesn’t register as safety.
It registers as dangerously unfamiliar.

So they unconsciously create the conditions they know how to navigate.

And I see this pattern in the legal profession all the time. Stay with me here...

Lawyers trained in high-stakes, high-pressure environments begin to associate stress with success. Urgency with importance. Exhaustion with value.

So when things slow down…

They don’t feel ease.
They feel anxiety.

They start to spiral:
Am I doing enough?
Am I falling behind?
Is something wrong?

And often, without realizing it, they recreate the very pressure they say they want to escape.

Not because they’re broken.
Because it’s familiar. Because it feels safe.

But here’s the truth:

You can be successful and get your hair done on a Thursday.
You can be effective without working until 11pm.
You can build a thriving career that includes both bet-the-company trials and picking your kids up at 3:30pm.

If you feel unsettled in a moment of calm, it doesn’t mean something is wrong.

It may mean your nervous system is learning a new way of being.

And that takes practice.

So the next time things slow down…

Don’t rush to fill the space.

Stay there.

You might discover that stillness is not the absence of success.

It’s evidence of it.

I’m currently on retreat with my coach, and I just have to say:

🥰 I love who I am becoming 🥰

There is something both mysterious and a little thrilling about the process of coming into yourself. Becoming a person you never quite planned to be… and are genuinely excited to meet.

A woman who knows what she wants and is still figuring out how to get there.
A woman who is fully formed and still unfolding.
A woman who genuinely enjoys her own company and yearns for deeper connection.

About a year ago, I went to see a medium, and I was PI**ED when she told me I was in the middle of my transformation.

I had already been doing the hard work of change for more than three years. I couldn’t believe there was more ahead of me.

But now, I get it. I’m still evolving. And what a gift that is.

In earlier chapters of my life, I was driven. By ambition. By urgency. By the belief that if I just achieved enough, I would finally feel successful. Accomplished. Complete.

But I never did. Because becoming isn’t about adding more. It’s about peeling back.

Unbecoming the versions of myself that were built to perform, to prove, to protect… so I could return to who I actually am.

Soft.
Sturdy.
Sacred.

And yes, some days I miss my old armor. The predictability. The security. The kudos.

But what I’ve gained is quieter and far more powerful.

Autonomy.
Spaciousness.
Alignment.

I’m not working to build a life anymore.

I’m learning to live inside the one I already have.

I’m becoming more myself every day.

And, I hope you are too.

✨ Rejection is redirection ✨

I felt this most deeply in October 2009, when I lost my job with a big mortgage and a toddler in daycare… and the rejections kept coming while my savings dwindled.

Frustration.
Doubt.
Loneliness.
That quiet voice asking, “What’s wrong with me?”

And then, a shift.

What if this isn’t happening to me… but for me?

Rejection has a way of forcing reflection.

In some moments, it showed me I wasn’t on the right path.
In others, it revealed where I needed to grow to get where I truly wanted to go.

And eventually, I landed at Baker Donelson… where I had a meteoric rise to partner.

Every “no” created space for that better “yes.”
Every misstep invited me to look inward and strengthen my definition of success.
Every setback pushed me to evolve.

Now, I encourage my clients to stop asking, “Why is this happening?”
And instead ask, “What is this here to teach me?”

Rejection doesn’t define you.

It refines you.

Train your mind to look for the lesson, not the loss.

Because sometimes the closed door isn’t rejection…

It’s redirection toward the future you’re meant for.

The “women competing with women” trope is so old. And so tired.

And honestly, it doesn’t match my lived experience at all.

My biggest sponsors, advocates, and cheerleaders throughout my career have been women. When women support each other, incredible things happen.

It was my honor, privilege, and genuine joy to celebrate Aiko Bethea’s first book alongside a room full of talented, thoughtful, ambitious women who showed up to listen, learn, support, and celebrate her.

Lifting her higher than she can go alone.

That’s what it’s about.

So let’s retire the scarcity mindset.

Because when a woman like Aiko rises, she doesn’t take a seat.

She builds a whole new table.

PS - If you are interested in doing a one and done book club with me for Anchored, Aligned, Accountable, shoot me a DM. Its message of self-knowledge and self-leadership resonates across every stage of life. Whether you’re a stay-at-home mom or a CEO, someone is looking to you to lead with warmth, integrity, and intention. We'll be reading it over the summer and gathering to discuss it in August. I'd LOVE to be in conversation with you about it 📚✨

Who run the world? Girls.

And increasingly… they run their own companies.

According to Wells Fargo and the WIPP Education Institute, women now own over 40% of U.S. businesses, generating $2.8 trillion in annual revenue and supporting 12.6 million jobs.

Between 2022 and 2025, women started 3 million new businesses.

Let that sink in. Millions of women chose to leave traditional workplaces and bet on themselves.

And here’s the part BigLaw and big business should be paying very close attention to:

62% of new entrepreneurs cited control of their schedule as the number one reason they started a company.

Not status.
Not title.
Not even income.

Control.

Autonomy is no longer a perk. It’s a requirement.

So as organizations navigate this post-DEI world, there’s a hard truth to face:

Women don’t need to stay.

They have options. Real, viable, profitable options.

If you want to retain high-performing women, you cannot dial back flexibility and expect loyalty to fill the gap.

You have to build environments where autonomy, trust, and humanity are not add-ons, but baked into the culture.

Because the question is no longer:
Will women stay?

It’s:
Why would they?