Go home, or
figure it out.
In my junior year of high school, my guidance counselor pointed out that I was so far ahead in my studies that I could apply to college early. "Say less," I thought. A new goal had been unlocked, and I was already figuring out how to get there. I took the SATs, applied to three universities, and accepted the one closest to home. The catch was that I had to pass every college course to graduate high school. That didn’t register as a risk. I knew I would.
Two years and three majors later, I decided to pursue the subject I'd been passionate about my entire life: art. I moved to Atlanta to attend art college, a city where I knew exactly one person. Two weeks after I arrived, I was robbed, and I was left with $86 in my bank account.
My parents hadn't supported my decision to attend art school, and they weren't supporting me financially. That left me with two options: go home, or figure it out.
I stayed. I worked, went to school, graduated, and built a life on my own terms, step by step. It was the first time I learned something I've relied on ever since: if I trusted myself to take on the hard thing, I could figure out the rest along the way.
Building a career the same way
After I graduated from art school, I kept coming back to how much I enjoyed my web development classes, so I taught myself web development. To build my portfolio, I sold websites to local businesses and landed my first professional development role at Georgia State University's Robinson College of Business. My career took off when I joined Moxie Interactive and stepped fully into the technology world.
As my career grew, I noticed that my greatest strength wasn't writing code.
It was figuring things out. Looking at a problem or complicated system, seeing how the pieces affected one another, finding what wasn't working, and designing a better way for everything to work together.
That pulled me toward architecture, and architecture led to leadership. The same skills I used to architect websites began to apply to how I led my teams. I learned to set clear boundaries, manage up, and build systems that carried some of the load. As a result, problem-solving, team dynamics, individual personalities, and conflict resolution improved as a by-product. Expectations got clearer. Teams worked better together. Clients knew what they needed to bring to the table, and development timelines became far more predictable. The teams I built worked so well together that leadership adopted my methods as their own. Eventually, that mix of systems thinking, problem-solving, and big-picture thinking became the foundation of my technical consulting company, which I ran for 14 years.
From technology to people
It wasn’t until I became a mother that I saw how I was applying the same structure and systems thinking to my personal life. That’s when I began to understand how well they applied to people: their habits, careers, routines, goals, and life transitions.
We tend to believe change comes down to discipline or motivation, but trying harder is rarely the answer. The problem isn’t that someone doesn’t want something badly enough, or that the goal is out of reach. It’s that the system around them isn’t helping them get there, and sometimes we’re too close to the problem to see another route.
What I do now
After decades of applying this way of thinking to my own life and career, I now do that work through X3 Elevate: helping people see what’s happening in their lives, understand how the pieces connect, and build the habits and choices that make the life they want easier to live.
In some ways, it feels less like I changed careers and more like I finally refined what I'd been doing all along. I've always trusted myself to figure things out. Now I help others do the same, and I still love the moment when something complicated becomes clear, and you know your next move.
