About the Founder

The story behind Modern Consciousness® and the thinking that shaped it.

The Thinking Behind Modern Consciousness® Began Long Before It Had a Name

I never set out to create a philosophy.

Modern Consciousness® developed over time, and I kept refining it because I knew there was something important in the work. But for a long time, I struggled to explain what made it different. Coaching, personal development, mindset work… none of those familiar categories quite captured what I knew it was.

Eventually, I realized I might be trying to answer the wrong question.

It wasn’t simply:

How do I explain Modern Consciousness®?

There was a deeper question underneath it:

Where did the thinking behind it come from?

And that question sent me on a quest through my own life.

I began looking at the choices I’d made, the businesses I’d built, the opportunities I’d pursued, the things I’d walked away from, and some of the more difficult periods in my life. I wasn’t looking for a neat story. I was genuinely curious about what had driven those choices and whether anything connected them.

That’s when I began to see something I had never consciously recognized before.

My life had changed dramatically over the years. I’d worked in completely different industries, built different businesses, taken some unusual risks, changed direction more than once, and navigated some pretty significant life transitions.

But beneath all those differences, something was surprisingly consistent: the way I engaged with life.

I questioned things. I wanted to understand what was really happening rather than simply accept the obvious or someone else’s explanation. I turned over rocks. I looked for connections between things that didn’t always appear connected. I learned by getting involved, asking questions, and figuring things out.

And when something no longer made sense based on what I had come to understand, eventually I was willing to change it, even if that meant walking away.

I wasn’t consciously following a philosophy. I didn’t have a framework for any of this.

It was simply how I moved through the world.

The industries changed. The mind behind them did not.

Only in retrospect could I see that long before Modern Consciousness® had a name, I had been living many of the principles that would eventually shape it.

I didn’t sit down one day and invent them. I lived my way into them.

ONLY IN LOOKING BACK COULD I RECOGNIZE THE WAY OF THINKING THAT HAD BEEN SHAPING MY LIFE ALL ALONG.

A Life Shaped by Understanding

Once I began looking for the pattern, I could see it everywhere.

My career has never followed a conventional path. I’ve moved through technology, government consulting, federal acquisition, construction, entrepreneurship, and hospitality. I’ve stepped into industries I knew very little about and somehow found myself taking on opportunities I probably wasn’t technically qualified for.

That wasn’t because I believed I already knew what I was doing.

It was because I believed I could figure things out.

Early in my consulting career, I was offered an opportunity with Booz Allen that required me to understand not only what they wanted from me, but what I wanted my life to look like. I negotiated an unconventional arrangement that allowed me to do meaningful work while raising my children on a llama farm in rural Virginia.

Yes, there really were llamas.

Years later, I had the idea to lead the acquisition of a $50 million software company without putting personal money into the deal. There was no roadmap sitting on my desk. I had to ask questions, understand the moving pieces, challenge assumptions about what was possible, and work with people who knew things I didn’t.

And then there was my construction company.

It was successful. We had work. We were making money.

And I closed it anyway.

The decision didn’t make much sense if I looked only at the business. But the business wasn’t the only thing that mattered. My life had changed. My priorities had changed. And when I looked at the larger picture, keeping the company no longer made sense for the life I wanted to live.

Closing it also meant making decisions that affected people who had trusted me. We completed every project we had committed to, and every employee stayed through the completion of their project — including the employees on the very last job.

To this day, that remains one of the things I’m proudest of in business.

Different industries. Different circumstances. Very different decisions.

But underneath them was the same instinct:

Understand what is actually happening. Understand what matters. Look at the larger picture. Then decide.

I didn’t have language for it at the time.

I was simply living my life.

FOR MUCH OF MY LIFE, I HAD LOOKED OUTWARD TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WAS IN FRONT OF ME.

EVENTUALLY, THAT SAME CURIOSITY TURNED INWARD.

When Understanding Turned Inward

For much of my life, my curiosity had been directed outward.

I wanted to understand the business, the problem, the opportunity, the people involved, the system I was working within, and what I needed to know to make a thoughtful decision.

Then my 28-year marriage ended.

Like many people navigating a major life transition, I initially focused on rebuilding the external pieces of my life. Where would I live? What would my life look like now? What came next?

But eventually I realized that rebuilding the circumstances of my life wasn’t enough.

I wanted to understand my experience of it, but equally, I wanted to better understand the larger human experience.

Why did certain things affect me so deeply? Why did I react the way I did? How much of what I believed about myself, relationships, success, happiness, and life itself had actually been consciously chosen, and how much had simply been absorbed along the way?

And beyond my own experience, I wanted to understand the larger questions. Why do we behave as we do? What shapes us? What limits us? Why do we repeat patterns even when we know they aren’t serving us? What allows us to respond differently?

Those questions opened an entirely different kind of exploration.

So, I read. I studied. I attended programs. I explored psychology, neuroscience, coaching, emotional intelligence, belief systems, spirituality, energy work, and other approaches to understanding human behavior and change.

The two inquiries developed together.

Understanding the human condition helped me understand myself. And understanding myself gave me new questions to ask about the human condition.

Some of what I studied resonated deeply. Some gave me pieces of an answer. Some raised entirely new questions. And true to form, I didn’t accept any one school of thought as the answer.

I wanted to understand what was useful, what actually held up in real life, and how the pieces connected.

I didn’t know it then, but those questions were taking me somewhere.

I WENT LOOKING FOR GREATER UNDERSTANDING.

I NEVER EXPECTED IT TO LEAD ME HERE.

The Ideas That Wouldn’t Leave

I can’t tell you exactly where the first ideas for Modern Consciousness® came from.

They simply began appearing in my thoughts.

Not in dreams. Not during meditation. I would be going about my life and suddenly there they were: ideas, connections, concepts, sometimes fairly substantial pieces of thinking that seemed to arrive already somewhat formed.

At first, my reaction was mostly:

What the hell is this?

But they kept coming.

Eventually, they became persistent enough that I started writing them down. I didn’t know where they were leading, but they seemed important enough to capture.

I remembered something I’d read years earlier in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic: the idea that when something keeps presenting itself, perhaps we have some responsibility to engage with it.

Okay. Maybe this is mine to do something with.

The problem was, I had absolutely no idea what that something was. So, true to form, I started investigating.

The personal-development and coaching world was completely new to me. I explored the industry, studied how programs were structured, and worked with people who understood that world far better than I did.

I am, after all, a fairly practical person.

I wasn’t going to start a religion or a commune. 😂

For years, I tried to understand what I was developing through categories that already existed. Coaching? Personal development? Mindset? None of them were wrong. They simply didn’t fully describe what was taking shape.

Meanwhile, the ideas kept coming.

And I kept asking: What am I supposed to do with this?

Eventually, during one meditation, I’d had enough. My intention was essentially:

All right, listen. Obviously, you’re not going to leave me alone about this. I keep telling you I’m not your girl. You apparently disagree. So, if you insist that I am, tell me what you want me to do.

And the answer came as one word: WRITE.

Not an audible voice. Not an image. Just a word that arrived with a certainty that felt different from an ordinary thought.

My response was basically: Fine. I surrender. Whatever this is, I’ll do it. I don’t know what you want me to do, but I’m assuming you’re going to let me know.

Within a couple of hours, a friend texted me. She had a friend in Canada who was a book publisher. There was an opening for a chapter in a collaborative book project with Les Brown, and she wanted to know whether I’d like an introduction.

I remember looking upward. And saying yes.

I don’t know what caused any of that. And I’m not going to tell you what it meant, because I don’t know. I only know what happened.

And I kept going.

The book opportunity didn’t suddenly produce Modern Consciousness®. What followed were years of writing, questioning, learning, testing, organizing, and refining.

Ideas became principles. Principles became distinctions. Distinctions became frameworks. Frameworks became methodologies.

And somewhere along the way, I finally understood why Modern Consciousness® had been so difficult to explain.

I had spent years trying to fit it into familiar categories before fully understanding it on its own terms.

Today, Modern Consciousness® has become a defined philosophy and human capability development system.

And I’m still developing it.

Because the work was never really about finding the right box.

It was about understanding what had been taking shape all along.

Why This Work Matters to Me

My life isn’t a blueprint for anyone else’s.

That’s actually the point.

I don’t believe another person can tell you what your life should look like, what should matter most to you, or which choices will create the life you want.

But I do believe we can become increasingly capable of understanding ourselves and our lives more clearly. We can learn to question what we’ve accepted without examination, recognize the patterns and influences shaping our experience, develop greater discernment, and make more intentional choices based on what we discover.

Those capabilities can be developed.

I’ve experienced their value throughout my own life, first without having words for what I was doing and later through years of intentionally examining, developing, and refining the thinking behind them.

That’s why this work matters so deeply to me.

Modern Consciousness® isn’t about giving people my answers. It isn’t about asking anyone to adopt my conclusions, make the choices I’ve made, or follow the path I’ve followed.

My story is evidence of what the philosophy says is possible. It isn’t a prescription for someone else’s life.

The work is about helping people strengthen their own capacity to understand, discern, choose, and intentionally engage with life.

It’s not about following my path. It’s about becoming increasingly capable of creating your own.

THE WORK MAY HAVE BEGUN WITH MY QUESTIONS.

WHAT MATTERS NOW ARE THE QUESTIONS IT HELPS OTHERS ASK FOR THEMSELVES.

A Personal Note

If you’ve made it this far, thank you.

I realize this isn’t exactly the typical founder biography. I could have given you the polished version: a few career highlights, some credentials, a professional photograph, and a paragraph about why I do what I do.

But that wouldn’t really explain how I got here.

Modern Consciousness® didn’t emerge from a single experience, a certification, or an idea I decided to turn into a business. It developed over a lifetime of questioning, learning, experimenting, changing direction, getting things wrong, discovering things I never expected, and continuing to ask better questions.

So, if you’re going to understand the work, I think you deserve to understand something about the person and the thinking behind it.

Thank you for taking the time to do that.

And if you’re thinking, good grief, this woman thinks a lot…

You would be correct. 😂

CURIOUS WHERE ALL THIS THINKING ULTIMATELY LED?

Explore Modern Consciousness® and discover the philosophy, human capabilities, and practical approach that grew from these questions.