Healing Is a Leadership Skill (Not a Personal Luxury)

I started my first business in 2013 the way most people in sales and marketing do when they leave a corporate job: I became a consultant. Which is just a socially acceptable way of saying I was a generalist with confidence and a laptop.

Early on, I was in a meeting with a potential client when they asked if I did SEO. I said yes immediately. No hesitation. No qualifiers. Just an enthusiastic, “Absolutely.”

I had never heard of SEO.

I Googled it in the parking lot after the meeting and realized—pretty quickly—that I was going to need to find someone who actually knew what they were doing. That was the entrepreneur’s way in those early years. You say yes, figure it out later, and hope your nervous system can keep up with your ambition.

By 2014, I had moved out of straight consultancy and into something more specific. I launched Good Grit with the belief that the South deserved better storytelling—more nuance, more texture, more honesty. I wanted to shine a light on the place I was from, not the caricature of it.

It was easy to say I was from Savannah, Georgia. People knew what to do with that. It sounded romantic. Historic. Safe.

Alabama was a harder sell.

This was before people understood what an ecological gold mine Alabama actually is, before the rest of the country started paying attention to its food systems, its biodiversity, its creative communities. When I traveled for work and people asked where I lived, I was always a little more tempted to say Savannah than Birmingham—not because I was ashamed, but because I was tired. There was still so much stigma wrapped up in that part of the world, and explaining yourself gets old.

Good Grit went to print with its first issue in July of 2015. By early 2016, things were moving quickly. And loudly. And imperfectly.

That year was… a lot.

It was the year my childhood trauma finally bubbled to the surface. The year I took a hard look at my life and thought, holy shit, you might be the least qualified mom to ever walk the planet. The year I was living in what we lovingly called the Harry Potter apartment—a one-bedroom where my son’s bed was in a closet because he was away at boarding school on full scholarship.

I felt perpetually one step away from either stardom or living in my BMW.

All of that was happening in the background in 2016—the year I had to fire someone for the first time.

She was a contract employee, ten years my senior, influential, and already well-known. She had a following. Momentum. Opinions. She was polarizing in a way I’ve always been drawn to. There’s something intoxicating about people who are brave enough to split a room.

Her risk didn’t change after I hired her. But my awareness of it did.

We were paying her more than anyone else on the team—including me. Not because we couldn’t afford her—she was in the budget—but because what we couldn’t afford was how destabilizing the situation had become. She had her own vision for the company. My investors weren’t comfortable with it. And I didn’t yet know how to hold my own authority without collapsing into everyone else’s expectations.

Here’s what I would never recommend to another founder: do not go to someone’s house, sit at their kitchen table, and end their contract the week before Easter, in the heart of the Bible Belt, before their kids get home from school.

That is exactly what I did.

I cried. I blamed everyone but myself. I’m fairly certain I threw my investors under the bus. I had no emotional capacity to lead the conversation, much less the company it represented.

And when you fire someone for the first time—especially when you’re the owner—everything suddenly feels enormous. You wonder what this will do to the team. Whether people will leave with her. Whether she’s actually the magic sauce holding everything together. Whether you’re about to implode the culture you’re trying so desperately to build.

I didn’t have a backup plan. I just knew that what we were doing wasn’t sustainable. It couldn’t carry us into the future I felt responsible for stewarding.

What I didn’t understand then—but see clearly now—is that leadership doesn’t break down because you lack information. It breaks down when you lack internal capacity.

And unhealed stress doesn’t stay personal. It shows up systemically.

That year—2016—was also the year I hired the number one psychoanalyst in Birmingham, Alabama. A man I could not afford. He let me pay on a sliding scale, which in hindsight was one of the kindest and most disruptive things anyone has ever done for me.

I didn’t go to therapy because I thought something was “wrong.” I went because everything was loud, and I was tired of pretending I could outwork the noise.

A few sessions in, he asked me a question that landed somewhere between absurd and offensive.

He said, “Why do you believe you’re valuable at work, but not personally?”

I laughed. Not because it was funny, but because it felt… incorrect. Like he had mixed up my chart with someone else’s. I remember thinking, that’s not how this works. I was very clear on where I added value. I had businesses. Ideas. Momentum. I was useful. Productive. Needed.

Personal worth felt like a completely different category. Separate. Irrelevant, even.

Except that question shattered the illusion that those categories were real.

Because the truth—one I was not ready to confront—was that I didn’t actually have two measures of worth. I had one. And I was just very good at overperforming in the places where validation was easiest to earn.

We like to believe we can compartmentalize our lives indefinitely. That we can be confident in one lane and deeply insecure in another without consequence. That we can be wildly capable at work and quietly collapsing everywhere else, and somehow those things won’t touch.

They always touch.

What I was calling “compartmentalization” was really just delay. A temporary structure held together by adrenaline, approval, and sheer willpower. And eventually, those compartments don’t stay sealed—they seep into each other and turn into a really weird shit soup.

That was the year I started to understand something I hadn’t yet named: you don’t lead from your highest-performing self. You lead from your most regulated one.

And mine wasn’t.

Around the same time, I was trying—very awkwardly—to build a life that didn’t feel like it might implode if one thing went wrong. I was learning how to be a friend, which meant admitting I didn’t actually know how. I was trying to create a culture at work that I wanted to be part of, not just responsible for. I wanted Good Grit to be a place where people felt proud of what they were building together, not just exhausted by it.



But here’s the part no one really tells you when you’re leading something for the first time: you cannot build a culture you don’t have the internal capacity to sustain.

I wanted a calm, thoughtful, values-driven organization. What I had was urgency, fear, and a leader who was still learning how to sit with discomfort without outsourcing it onto the people around her.

Healing didn’t show up as some dramatic breakthrough that year. It showed up as responsibility. As staying in conversations I wanted to escape. As listening more than talking. As realizing that my job wasn’t to be the smartest person in the room—it was to be the safest one.