I used to keep two versions of myself.
I'm done with that.
While deep in revisions of my 2021 published book Unfussy Life, with that inner voice still whispering no one wants to read your stories, I had a dream that shook me awake. Heart pounding, I looked around the room to make sure I was still alive.
In the dream, I was trying to speak. Except the words wouldn't come. I opened my mouth — and nothing.
I've had plenty of dreams about losing teeth and walking into class without pants. But the no-voice thing — this was new.
I'd open my mouth, grasp my throat, eyes wide in horror. I couldn't speak.
In that moment, I understood: not speaking, not writing, meant dying.
I started sinking — into the bed, through the floor, sinking into death — where I'd cease to exist.
Then I woke up. Saw my husband beside me. Realized it was a dream. Phew!
Never again would I keep my writing hidden in a Google Doc. My stories were meant to travel. Yours are too, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
For years I kept two versions of myself. The polished professional who knew how to find the right words for everyone else. And the writer with her own stories, her own voice — the one I kept tucked away.
Silence wasn't new to me.
Speak when you're spoken to.
If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.
You'll make them mad if you say that.
Everyone will see you — and when they notice you, you open yourself up to judgment.
I put that book down for three months around the time of that dream.
Then I finished it.
And wrote another.
And another.
And I’m just getting started.
The long way here.
I spent 13 years in corporate communications at BlackBerry, Slalom, and Navigant. I handled crisis response, change management, and proposals that won millions in new business. In rooms where a single wrong word was a big deal, I learned to find the clearest possible sentence under pressure.
I also learned how fast everything I built could all disappear. After multiple layoffs, I left corporate in 2017 and started over.
Starting over is a skill I've had plenty of practice with. I immigrated to the US from Canada, moved more than 14 times across 5 states in 23 years, and built a business while homeschooling my kids. Every move taught me the same lesson: you can lose the office, the city, and the title. Your voice, your stories … are the only things that come with you.
After leaving the corporate world, I created the next chapter. I first wrote in other people's voices. Then I spent a decade helping leaders, founders, and authors stop writing like a press release and start sounding like themselves.
Crisis-trained and intuitive.
Same obsession. Different fabric.
Turns out it was never just those two things, either.
My childhood dream was to become a rich, famous designer and live in Paris. I filled binders with sketches and watched fashion shows on repeat, obsessed with how the right clothes in the perfect fabric could make someone impossible to look away from.
I never actually left fashion behind. I just changed mediums. These days I help people find the cut and shape of their own voice — the thing that makes them unmistakably themselves.
What I know now
The leaders who aren’t writing aren’t doing so because they’re lazy or don’t have time. It’s also not a lack of ideas, either. It usually isn't even writer's block, though most people blame it.
Leaders aren’t writing because someone from their past — a seventh-grade English teacher, a bad boss, or a parent — trained them out of it.
It usually happens somewhere between “Speak when you're spoken to,” and “Say whatever you need to get them to like you.”
Why they don’t write doesn’t really matter, though. What matters is when the sanitized version of their voice shows up in the work. In the strategy deck that's technically correct and still doesn't land. In the book that's been "coming along" for seven years. In the LinkedIn post they wrote and deleted eleven times.
The leaders doing the most interesting work already know what they think. They just need to stop editing themselves into vanilla writing.
That's the work. And that’s your voice, at full strength.
Today
I'm a communications consultant, speaker, and author of Writing with the Moon (2026), Intuitive Writing (2023), and Unfussy Life (2021). I host the How Women Write podcast and founded The Intuitive Writing School.
📍 Tampa, Florida. Working globally.
Fractional communications leadership →
Speaking & training →
Looking for writing mentorship, book coaching, or programs? That lives at The Intuitive Writing School →
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