60 Seconds: Pack Up the Babies & Grab the Old Ladies

Remember the first time you rode a bike and took your hands off the handlebars? And then because it felt fun and daring you did it again - and again - riding down a hill with the wind in your face, arms up over your head screaming, “Look, ma! No hands!” You showed up. You did it. The arc of my professional career stretches from serving as a US Navy officer and nurse, corporate businesswoman, lawyer, platform storyteller, and professor before shifting into a solopreneur as a litigation consultant, wordsmith-er/editor, noted podcaster, and story consultant who was lucky enough to scuba dive the Continental Shelf, become a pilot, hike the Rocky Mountains with Outward Bound, kayak off the coast of Mexico, parachute out of a perfectly good plane, walk the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, and so much more. Over my lifetime I've been letting go of the handlebars but - just as often - having my fingers pried off when I’ve been most afraid. At some of the darkest moments in my life where the true way was wholly lost to me, a person or opportunity beckoned and I said "Yes!" That’s the place where the story changed. This is my life purpose: Helping women identify, sort out and transform unclear messages into confident, connection-making stories, and those stories into powerful sequels. How? 30 years of story work in courtrooms, boardrooms, universities, retreat settings and more has taught me that story principles are key to conscious connection. Together we distill hazy ideas into easily understood metaphors and direct emotional language using words with power, passion, and precision so your message, your story rings true and achieves desired outcomes. My media company has three interlocking components: Quarter Moon Story Arts: "Shaping stories into sequels." Stories From Women Who Walk (podcast): "Like magic, the sorcery of stories is this: they help each of us to be seen and heard, to understand and be understood." My Life As Compost (blog): "What matters in our life is not what happens to us but how we respond, transform the difficulty into advantage, and tell *that* story."