I didn’t set out to make work more playful. I set out to have serious impact.

So I did what high-achievers do. I climbed. I optimized. I led teams, launched programs, earned the credentials, survived the meetings that absolutely could have been emails — and spent a decade doing it at Google, one of the most demanding and intellectually stimulating environments on the planet.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, something became impossible to ignore.

The most impressive people I encountered were the ones where people felt genuinely safe — safe enough to say the uncomfortable thing, try the half-baked idea, laugh at the failure, and show up as actual humans rather than highly caffeinated performance machines.

For the past 20+ years — across startups, nonprofits, small businesses, and multinationals — I’ve been designing and facilitating experiences that help people reconnect with the human skills that actually drive performance: trust, curiosity, creativity, psychological safety, and the kind of genuine connection that no algorithm has figured out how to replicate yet.

My background spans neuroscience-informed learning design, facilitation, leadership development, executive coaching, analytics and marketing. I hold a B.S. from the University of Denver, a Master’s from Northwestern, an Executive Certificate in Neuroscience from MIT, and I’m a Certified Executive Coach and LEGO® Serious Play® Facilitator.

Basically, there’s science behind the silliness.

When not shouting about playfulness from the mountain tops, you’ll find me somewhere between rescuing animals, worrying about the planet, and raising two small boys with my gorgeous husband in a seaside town in South Dublin. It’s chaotic, beautiful, and almost entirely unlike a back-to-back meeting schedule.

It’s exactly the kind of life that keeps reminding me why the human stuff matters most.