My passion for this work is motivated by my own experience. Like many of my clients, I have been driven for as long as I can remember. When I was eight, I decided I wanted to go to Stanford Law School, and I didn’t stop working hard at that until I graduated twenty years later, prestigious federal clerkship in hand. After clerking, I joined an AMLAW-100 firm as a litigation associate, and I litigated on behalf of technology companies for six years before joining Amazon.com as in-house counsel.

While I have always performed well in high-pressure environments, at times this came at a significant cost to my well-being. Early in my career, I struggled with anxiety — although I consistently exceeded external expectations, internally I was plagued by self-doubt and extreme perfectionism. I often felt that if I made any small mistake, the life I had worked so hard for would come crashing down.

Fortunately, as a young lawyer I found the right therapist who could empathize with the demands of high-pressure environments and helped me develop the tools to overcome my anxiety. I cultivated strategies for challenging negative beliefs which led to self-doubt, taking care of myself even when work was at its busiest, and recognizing my value separate from my performance at work.

Much to my surprise, taking care of myself improved my performance at work by giving me more confidence, greater clarity of thought, and helping me spend less time spinning my wheels. By the time I was promoted to senior corporate counsel at Amazon, I was working and living with a level of self-assurance that would not have been recognizable to me as a young associate. 

As I became more outspoken about my own early challenges with anxiety, I was struck by the number of my peers who looked like they had it all but also reported struggling to hold it all together or find meaning and joy in life. After years of informally coaching and mentoring colleagues, I decided to leave Amazon and obtain my master’s degree in therapy to make helping people my full-time profession.

I find this work incredibly meaningful because I have seen the difference it can make in people’s lives, and I am humbled each time a client trusts me to be part of their journey.