For more than twenty-five years, I built the career of my dreams.

I worked my way from faculty member into senior university leadership, ultimately becoming an Associate Vice President at the University of Utah. By many measures, I had made it.

But I had built the career I wanted. I had not built the life I wanted.

At 47, I had never been married. I did not have children. I had spent years helping institutions transform while quietly postponing parts of my own life.

Eventually, I had to tell myself the truth: the conditions that helped me build my career were no longer the conditions that would help me build the rest of my life.

So I changed them.

I left Utah. I moved to the East Coast. I launched my own company, Cultural Connections by Design, LLC. About a year and a half later, I met the man who would become my husband. Six months after we met, we were married. One week after our wedding, I turned 50.

A chapter I once wondered if I would ever have: partnership, family, and a life that made room for more than work.

And I became a mother in a way I never expected. My daughter came into my life when she was 16. I had the privilege of legally adopting her when she turned 18. Today, she is 22.

My daughter came into my life at 16. I legally adopted her at 18. Today, she is 22.

The family I once wondered if I would ever have.

Professionally, I was building, too.

What began as a leap of faith became a thriving consulting firm serving colleges, universities, corporations, and organizations across the country.

For years, the business flourished. I built it into a multi-seven-figure company.

Then the politics changed.

My company had been built around diversity, equity, and inclusion. As the national political climate shifted, I felt it almost immediately. Contracts disappeared. Opportunities dried up. The company I had spent years building was suddenly operating in a very different world.

I was frustrated. I had already built something successful. I had already proven I could do it. I did not want another pivot.

But life was asking a familiar question:

Now what?

By then, my husband and I had also moved to Belize, creating yet another chapter of life, family, work, and possibility.

Belize became part of another reinvention—one built around a different relationship to life, work, family, and what success could look like.

I will be honest: rebuilding the business was not what I wanted to be doing.

But in the middle of that disruption, something beautiful began to emerge.

The work expanded beyond one industry, one kind of client, and one version of success. Women were not only asking me for help building businesses, writing books, launching projects, or navigating careers.

They were asking deeper questions:

What now?

What do I really want?

What am I ready to leave behind?

And what could I build from here?

I would not have chosen the disruption.

But I can now see what it made possible.

How do I intentionally build the next chapter of my life?

That is the heart of Vision + Impact.

Sometimes change is chosen. Sometimes it chooses us. Either way, I believe we deserve more than encouragement while we navigate it. We need room to hear ourselves again, strategy to turn possibility into movement, and community that reminds us we do not have to figure everything out alone.

If you are standing somewhere between the life you have built and the life that is calling you forward, you are in the right place.

If my story resonates with yours, I would be honored to walk alongside you as you build what comes next.