Maya hired me as her executive coach to help her navigate this kind of corporate nonsense without losing her edge. In our coaching, we addressed a hard truth: while subjective feedback is often a product of unconscious bias, simply dismissing it as "BS" doesn't help you win.

Here’s the nuanced truth: To maximize her leverage, Maya needed a strategy to bridge the gap between how she organizes reality and how the "harmony-seekers" around her do.

Yes, progress feels fragile right now. But fragile doesn’t mean doomed. Fragility can be strengthened with intention — and even transformed into what Nassim Taleb calls antifragility.

Leaders who are willing to choose courage, who can combine accountability with compassion, will be remembered as the ones who helped their organizations become more resilient, more human, and more sustainable in uncertain times.

You don’t need to play a zero-sum game in your career journey. 

You don’t need to hustle for external validation or tie your self-worth to a job title.

But you can choose to grow — to negotiate for better pay, to rise into leadership — not because you’re trying to prove your worth…

You grow your career one conversation at a time — not by being some superhuman “Business Barbie” who never messes up and wears a tight plastic grin that doesn’t scare the bros.

You’re allowed to feel both proud and petrified. Brave and unsure.

You don’t have to resolve that tension. You get to be real inside it. That’s one of the most honest, human things you can do.

Feeling like a "fraud" is super normal, even for me. The more I coach subject matter experts and executive women, the more I see that imposter syndrome is never an indicator of actual competency but a hypnotic spell induced by a society steeped in bias against women and minorities. We can break the spell of this terribly boring hypnosis by co-opting its language. So there, I'm a "fraud." 

She reached out for coaching because, in her words, she didn't want to make the mistake of being "too blunt, too forward, too much" in her negotiation-- a critique she's heard more often than she'd care to count over her decades-long career. So here are four things we worked on in coaching.

Explore new 2025 sliding scale coaching rates designed to make executive coaching more accessible, inclusive, and aligned with real-life finances.

My client, Kasvi, came into our session feeling frustrated, angry, and rejected.

Her boss had shut down a well-intentioned suggestion for improving team output—something Kasvi offered in good faith to support the team’s performance.

But instead of openness, she hit a wall: “That’s my problem to fix,” said the boss tersely. (Translation: “Stay off my turf.”)

I teach a concept called Itty Bitty Sh*tty Committee (not a new idea 💡 — I first heard it from Kara Snyder when she coached me about a decade ago, and I’ve run with it ever since).

Itty Bitty Sh*tty Committee, or IBSC, for short, is the voice of our inner critic.

What if you don’t have to figure out office politics the hard way?

What if handling frustrating work situations didn’t require Machiavellian maneuvers—or pretending everything’s fine?

Here’s a simple guide to walk you through your options.

🦄 Behind the myth of a unicorn startup is burnout.

👉 But burning out doesn’t have to be your destiny when you are wizened to a few truths.

Here’s what went down in coaching today…

I'm a transplant from South Korea and a naturalized New Yorker for 19 years and counting.
A career and executive coach for women.
Someone learning to navigate the perimenopause journey.

Can we please talk about perimenopause? 
Perimenopause is NOT a disease, not just hot flashes, and not something most doctors -- nor most workplaces -- understand. 
EVEN THOUGH NEARLY ALL WOMEN GO THROUGH IT -- at the peak of our careers. 

In this space, we alchemize workplace anxiety, stuckness, and frustration into pragmatic groundedness, forward momentum, and therefore, gratifying self-actualization. 

A few things attendees of my past negotiation webinars have said. The next webinar “The Art of Negotiating Salary, Resources, and More” is on Friday, April 19th, 2024. Register HERE today. Or get the free resources (scripts and replay) HERE.

It’s easy to forget what an incredible privilege, astonishing gift it is to be a woman — anyway you define womanhood.

In this photo, I’m graced by two gorgeous genderqueer girlfriends for whom embracing their femininity is a brave step in bucking the “rules.”