I get paid to mind people’s business.

The first time I did it for real, I was thirteen. Philadelphia was in the middle of the AIDS epidemic, and the health department trained a small group of us — I was one of the first thirteen — to teach other young people about HIV. I stood in front of rooms of hundreds and talked about the thing no one wanted to discuss, with the people most likely to be left out of the conversation. I kept doing it through college.

I didn’t have language for it then. I do now: making something visible to the people who need to see it, especially when the system would rather they didn’t. That’s still the whole job.

I didn’t take a straight road into any of this. I studied politics, not business. I worked for a state senator and a congressman and was headed for a life in Washington — until I’d stood in it long enough to know it wasn’t mine, and left. My first job in finance was at the only Black-owned bank in Philadelphia. From there I moved into the investment world, and eventually into Vanguard, one of the largest investment firms in the country, where I stayed for more than two decades.

I did nearly every job there was — relationship management, operations, running a contact center, building leadership and talent strategy — and led teams of hundreds across the country. For most of it, I was a reluctant leader. People kept telling me there was more I could offer. They were usually right. I just hadn’t decided it for myself yet.

Here’s what all of that taught me — and it’s the thing I most want my clients to learn faster than I did. I didn’t control my own destiny enough. I let myself be moved from one role to the next, trusting that being good at the work would be enough on its own.

It isn’t. Whether the people above you actually want you to win shows up in how they place you, not in what they say to you. I watched it happen — to me, and to people like me — good people slotted into roles dressed up to look like opportunity and quietly built to lead nowhere.

When the chance to leave came, I took it. Thirty years in corporate life was enough. I turned down offers that would have put me back in the machine. I’d finally done the honest math on what I was worth, and I wasn’t going to be paid less than that again. Not by an organization, and not by myself.

I didn’t plan to coach. But the work kept finding me, and when it did I realized I’d been doing it since I was thirteen.

I’m not here to fix what’s wrong with you. There’s usually nothing wrong with you. My job is to help you remove what’s standing between you and the people who need to see who you actually are. I’ll tell you what I see, what I’m hearing, and what I think you’re holding onto that you haven’t said out loud. I’m a relator, not a wooer — I won’t flatter you and I won’t parent you. I’ll be straight with you, because being straight is what finally got me out of my own way, and it’s the fastest thing I know.

Most of the leaders I work with are somewhere in one of three places: they need to be seen, they need to know what comes next, or they need to recover from what the first half of their career cost them. Often all three.

I spent much of my career as the only one in the room who looked like me, carrying the second job nobody names on top of the first. That experience sits at the center of this practice. Black and brown women leading at senior levels don’t have to explain any of it to me — I lived it, and it’s a big part of why I coach. The door is open to anyone who recognizes themselves in this work; the unseen come in more than one form. But I won’t pretend the center isn’t where it is. And I’ll tell you what I tell every client: if a place can’t see you as you are, the real work is deciding what to do about that — and I’ve been on both sides of that decision.

Today I run The Transformational Leadership Guide. I coach senior leaders one to one, and I work with leadership teams and cohorts inside organizations. Leaders at SAP, Novartis, Comcast, Aflac, Quaker Houghton, KPMG, and Spark Therapeutics have brought me in. I’m an ICF-accredited executive coach and a certified Insights Discovery practitioner, and I work mostly virtually, with leaders across the country.

The credentials aren’t the reason to call me, though. The reason is that I’ve sat where you’re sitting, and I can see what’s hard to see from the inside.

If any of this sounds like you — or like someone on your team you can’t afford to lose — that’s worth a conversation.

And if you’d rather get a feel for how I think first, Follow along → is where I do that out loud.