What I Kept Seeing in the Women Around Me

It wasn’t dramatic.

That’s the thing people always expect when they hear origin stories - some moment of collapse, some personal crisis, some rock bottom that led to a transformation. But that’s not what happened for me.

What happened was quieter than that. And in some ways, more unsettling.

I was sitting across from one of the most capable women I’d ever worked with. She had just been promoted. She was killing it, by every metric that mattered to the organization. Hitting her numbers. Managing her team well. Showing up exactly the way she was supposed to.

And she looked exhausted in a way that went all the way down.

Not tired. Exhausted. The kind that lives behind your eyes and doesn’t go away after a good night’s sleep.

I asked her how she was really doing.

She paused. Looked at me for a second longer than felt comfortable. And said something I’ve thought about a thousand times since:

“I don’t know who I am outside of this job anymore.”

I started paying attention differently after that.

Not looking for the dramatic collapse. Looking for the quiet one. And once I started looking, I couldn’t stop seeing it.

Women excelling at work while quietly losing themselves at home. Women managing entire teams while no one was managing their wellbeing. Women who had slowly, imperceptibly, become unrecognizable to themselves, not because something terrible happened, but because something small happened every single day, over years, until the accumulation became its own kind of devastation.

Saying yes one more time. Working late one more night. Skipping the workout again. Canceling the thing that was just for them. Doing it all anyway because that’s what strong women do.

And I watched the women around me perform this particular kind of suffering with such grace and consistency that for a long time, I thought it was just part of the deal. That this was what ambition cost.

It’s not part of the deal. It’s a pattern. And it can be interrupted.

The longer I sat with what I was seeing, the clearer it became: this wasn’t a personal failure on the part of any individual woman. It was a systemic gap in how we develop women leaders.

We teach women to lead their teams. We don’t teach them to lead themselves.

We teach women to manage their time. We don’t teach them to manage their energy.

We teach women to set goals. We don’t teach them to protect the person who’s going to achieve them.

That’s the gap. And filling it - with real tools, real conversations, real frameworks that hold up when life gets hard - became the mission that built LYV.on from the ground up.

Not because I had it figured out. Because I knew it mattered.

I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters for the integrity of this work:

I didn’t build LYV.on because I burned out and found my way back. I built it because I kept watching women around me move toward burnout in slow motion, and I couldn’t un-see it once I’d seen it.

My origin story isn’t personal depletion. It’s personal witness. And that witness -accumulated over 15+ years of corporate leadership, hundreds of conversations, deep research into what actually works - became the L.I.V.E. Framework.

A methodology not for women who’ve fallen apart. For women who are still holding it together and deserve tools to keep going without the cost being themselves.

If you recognized someone in this post — yourself, or a woman you lead — that recognition is the beginning of something. I’d love to hear what came up for you. Reply directly to this email or drop a comment below.