- ABOUT STEPHANIE
I live in two worlds.
And I have stopped pretending that is a strange thing.
VP of Product leading AI transformation by day. Certified coach, meditation teacher, and forest therapy guide every day. The two are not separate. They inform everything I teach.
- WHO I AM
I was that manager.
Capable, committed and figuring it out alone
There was a point in my career where everything looked like success on paper. The title. The results. The team. And yet something felt off. I was performing well and leading from a place that did not feel entirely like me.
I was avoiding the hard conversations. Holding on too tight. Carrying more than I needed to. I had never been taught how to lead. I had been promoted because I delivered results and then handed a team and expected to figure out the rest.
I did figure it out. The hard way. Over ten years of leading people across insurance, operations, and technology. Through the gaps, the mistakes, the growth. And then I became a coach so other leaders would not have to do it alone the way I did.
.
- WHAT I BELIEVE
The organizations that thrive through AI will have the most human leaders.
Behind every metric, every output, every implementation is a human who needs to feel like they matter. That is not a soft idea. It is the most strategically important leadership insight of this moment.
AI is making workplaces more productive and less human at the same time. The managers who understand how to lead the humans behind the work: who can make people feel seen, develop them deliberately, hold standards with care, and guide teams through uncertainty without losing them. Those are the leaders who will define what good leadership looks like for the next decade.
That is what I help people build. Not because it is a nice idea. Because I have lived both sides of it and I know what the difference feels like from the inside.
- MY STORY
I decided that day
I would not be that leader.
Early in my career I was leading without the title.
My team saw it before anyone else did. They came to me and asked me to be their people manager officially. They wanted me in that role. That moment meant something to me.
So I went to my manager.
He told me I would not want to be responsible for people. That I would not want to be accountable for their performance. He told me what I wanted instead of asking me.
I sat with that for a long time. Not because he was unkind. But because I realized that what he did in that moment is what most managers do without realizing it. They make decisions about people without ever actually seeing them. They manage performance without ever asking what someone needs or wants or is capable of. They turn humans into transactions.
I decided that day that I would not be that leader. Not as a rule I wrote down. As something I felt. A quiet decision that shaped everything that came after.
Over the next ten years I led teams across insurance, operations, and technology. I made mistakes. I held on too tight sometimes. I avoided conversations I should have had sooner. I carried more than I needed to. But I never stopped asking. I never stopped trying to see the person in front of me rather than the role they were filling.
And the more I developed myself as a leader the more I realized how much of leadership is invisible work. The self-regulation before a hard conversation. The clarity you have to find inside yourself before you can give it to someone else. The decision to slow down and develop someone even when it would be faster to just do it yourself.
Nobody teaches managers this. They get the title and they figure it out alone.
That is why I became a coach. And that is why everything I build starts with one belief.
Behind every metric, every output, every implementation is a human who needs to feel like they matter.
You are not a number. You are not a transaction. And the people on your team are not either.
That is what I help leaders remember. And then build.
- HOW I WORK
Structured, empathetic
and deeply practical.
I meet you where you actually are
Not where you think you should be. Not where your job description says you are. Where you actually are right now as a leader and as a person. That is where the real work begins.
I work from the inside out
Most leadership programs teach frameworks and hope people will apply them. I work on the internal patterns that drive behavior first. When those shift, the external changes follow naturally rather than being forced.
I bring real world leadership experience
I am not observing leadership from the outside. I lead a team right now in a high-growth tech company navigating real AI transformation. Everything I teach is tested in the same environment my clients work in.
I make people feel seen
People tell me this is my superpower. It is not a technique. It is what happens when a coach stops managing from the surface and starts meeting people from something deeper.
- CREDENTIALS AND EXPERIENCE
The work behind
the work.
These are not titles I collect. They are tools I use. Each one informs how I show up with the leaders I work with.
Vice President of Product
Currently leading AI strategy and product development at a high-growth Canadian SaaS company. In the same pressure you are in right now.
Former Operations Director and Business Consultant
Over ten years leading teams and advising organizations across insurance, risk management, and operations. Real leadership experience from the inside and the outside.
Certified High Performance Coach
Trained in an evidence-based coaching methodology. 100+ leaders coached individually and in groups across industries.
100+ Leaders Coached
Individual coaching, group facilitation, and corporate leadership development. The methodology is proven beyond just my own experience.
- BEYOND THE CREDENTIALS
The depth
behind the work.
For a long time I led the way most leaders do. Head down, moving fast, measuring everything by output and results. I was good at it. And underneath it I was running on empty more often than I let on.
I did not have language for what was missing. I just knew that the version of me showing up at work was capable but not fully present. I was getting things done. I was not really connected to why.
The practices I eventually found were not things I sought out as leadership tools. Meditation, energy work, slowing down in nature. They came into my life when I needed them most. And what they did for me as a leader surprised me more than anything a course or framework ever had.
They taught me to pause before I react. To find stillness when everything around me is loud. To make decisions from clarity rather than anxiety. To walk into a room and actually feel the people in it rather than just managing the interaction. To trust what I know rather than just what I can justify on a slide.
Without these practices I would have kept burning through myself. Delivering results and losing myself in the process. The grind has a way of masking itself as productivity until you are too depleted to see what it has cost you.
What I have learned is that this work is not separate from leadership. It is the foundation of it. The regulation, the presence, the intuition, the capacity to hold space for someone else when your own world is full. None of that comes from a framework. It comes from practice.
What this means for you is that when you work with me you are not just getting a leadership coach. You are getting someone who brings a VP's understanding of organizational pressure, a coach's ability to see your patterns, and a practitioner's ability to help you access the stillness and clarity underneath the noise. That combination is rare. Most leadership coaches come from one world. I come from all of them.
I am a Certified Meditation Teacher, a Forest Therapy Guide, a Gendai Reiki Ryoho Level 2 practitioner, and a Spiritual Mentor. I bring these into my work not because they are interesting credentials but because they genuinely changed how I lead, how I coach, and how I show up for the people I work with.
If you are a leader who has been running on capability and willpower alone and wondering why it still does not feel like enough, this is the part of the work that might be missing.
Ready to find out
where you actually stand?
Start with the free assessment. Or explore the ways we can work together.