I spend a lot of my time helping leaders and businesses articulate their story. I believe deeply that every leader, and every business, has a story worth telling.

What I don’t talk about as often is how long it’s taken me to fully claim my own.

For most of my life, if you had asked me for my word, it would have been courage.

Courage was the thing I reached for early.
Not because I wanted to be brave, but because I had to be.

I lost people I loved at a young age.
I was sent to boarding school at 13.
I learned early how to self-regulate, self-soothe, and self-advocate, whether or not anyone else was ready to do that for me.

Courage followed me across countries.
Into unfamiliar cities.
Into rooms where I said yes before I knew how it would work, trusting that somehow, I would.

Courage carried me through divorce.
Through loving someone with a serious illness, where uncertainty wasn’t theoretical, it was daily.
Through grief, endings, and periods where parts of me changed before I had language for it, and I kept moving anyway.

Courage was saying yes to work opportunities that stretched me.
Moving from government into commercial environments.
Learning new systems, new languages of leadership, new ways of proving value.

Courage was also walking away.
From a deeply toxic work environment that no amount of resilience could justify.
From a version of success that required me to numb parts of myself to survive.

And courage was saying yes, again, to myself.
Starting my own business.
Showing up every day for something I built from the inside out.
Choosing uncertainty over erosion.

For a long time, courage was enough.

But this past year, something shifted.