My career has been dedicated to the study and practice of change. Here’s what I’ve learned (and believe me, I’ve learned it the hard way):

Change doesn’t happen the way we think it should.

It’s not linear or top-down. It’s complex and co-created.

The change we want to see emerges naturally from the development and alignment of three dimensions of an organization—leader, team and culture.

When we work with change in this way, it’s less of a struggle, more of a dance.

And it feels like magic.

Most recently, I served as Chief Culture Officer for BCW, a global integrated communications agency, stewarding the cultural integration of the largest merger in PR history and establishing a dynamic organizational ecosystem rooted in a growth mindset. In that role, I created the industry’s first mindfulness-based leadership development program, an intensive three-month course that trained 200 executive and emerging leaders and 40 internal coaches on every continent.

I’ve held talent and communications leadership roles at organizations like Citizen Relations and Plus Company, where I launched the company’s first diversity and inclusion initiative and trained managers to see themselves as “growth coaches.”

I’ve also coached leaders, trained teams and cultivated community in the service of social change—reducing the stigma around mental illness, supporting early childhood development, fighting obesity and chronic disease in under-resourced communities and registering voters across the U.S. with Rock the Vote.

It all started with my first-ever job as an AmeriCorps volunteer, which sparked my fascination with change and shaped the principles and practices that guide my work today.

I’ve been called a Jedi, a loving warrior and a magician. But more accurately I’m a teacher, a coach, an eternal student, a lover of trees, a mom and a stage-3 breast cancer survivor.

All of my professional and personal experiences inform how I help leaders and teams “surf the curve”—meeting complexity, volatility and resistance with openness, ease and joy.