I spent 25 years in financial services (American Express, JPMorgan Chase), rising from a call center agent to Chief Strategy Officer. I helped scale Chase Travel from a points-redemption engine, to a strategic asset with $10 billion in sales.

 

By every metric that mattered, I was winning.

 

But I was running two pressure cookers simultaneously. At work: the relentless demands of Fortune 100 leadership. At home: a high-stress marriage where neither of us had the tools to navigate conflict. So every hard conversation triggered the same survival response as a boardroom crisis. There was nowhere in my life where my nervous system could come down.

 

First, my body sent warnings,  a mystery autoimmune condition that swelled my hands shut. Doctors offered a malaria drug whose side effects included blindness. Then came cancer.

 

Cancer doesn’t negotiate. It said: the operating system you’ve been running is done.

 

So I rebuilt. Not my career, but myself. I trained at the HeartMath Institute. I studied with Q’ero shamans and Yupik elders. I got certified in energy medicine and nervous system science. And I applied the same systems thinking that built billion-dollar businesses to the one system I’d completely neglected: the human operating system.

 

What came out the other side: a bestselling book, a proprietary methodology called Transmutation Design™, and keynotes unlike anything else on the circuit. Because I don’t just teach the science. I prove it live with my own biomarker data.

 

From the C-Suite to the cancer ward to the stage. That’s my story. And now I help other leaders write theirs.