Get out of the trunk of the car.

That's what my speech teacher yelled from the back of the room in tenth grade. My parents found it hilarious and repeated it for years. He wasn't wrong, but it took me more than a decade to do anything about it.

Years later, a CEO in a feather jacket was tearing us apart.

Dark wood paneling, a mahogany table you could land a plane on, and the C-suite watching us the way a firing squad watches. Across from me sat the CEO, in a jacket covered in feathers that lifted every time she gestured. She was not happy with our work.

I was there with two consultants far more senior than me, and they said nothing. So I did. I told her I understood what was frustrating her, and offered a place to start that would actually get her what she needed. She took it, and the meeting turned.

I got out of the damn trunk.

Something shifted after that. I had been doing the job for years, and that was the moment I started owning it.

Twenty years on both sides

Willis Towers Watson first, running complex client work and presenting benefits strategy to Fortune 500 C-suites who had ten minutes and no patience for a methodology walkthrough. Then Health Care Service Corporation, where I led large teams as VP of Cost of Care. So I have built the work, sold the work, and been the one who needed to understand it in order to decide something.

Across the table.

I have been the person presenting to senior leadership, certain the work was excellent, watching the point get lost somewhere between my analysis and their decision.

At the head of it.

And I have been the senior leader on the other side, frustrated that a brilliant team couldn't answer the question I was actually asking.

What I believe.

The analysis is table stakes. The message is the deliverable.

If people can't understand what you're showing them, you may as well not have done the work. Nobody ever bothered to teach us that part.

You can learn this without becoming someone else.

I'm an introvert who worked every bit of this out deliberately, which is exactly why it's teachable. Most people who think they're bad at this are missing a framework, and a framework is something you can hand someone.

The hard part isn't the wording. It's having a point of view.

People stop short of a recommendation because it doesn't feel like theirs to make, or because they genuinely can't see what the numbers imply. That's business judgment, and you can't fix it with a better slide template.

A bit more about me

None of this came naturally. I failed the first actuarial exam three times before I worked out how to study for it, and then got a perfect score. Nothing about me had changed except how I was going about it, and that turns out to be true of most of what I teach. Watching it change for someone else is the part of this I love most.

I wanted to be a teacher before I did the math on my student loans and became an actuary instead. The teaching never really stopped. I tutored calculus out of college and for years after, which is where I learned to explain one concept ten different ways until one of them clicks, and at every job since I built training for junior colleagues on my own time. I did that for twenty years before it occurred to me that it could be the job, so in 2025 I made it the job.

My husband and I live in Haarlem, in the Netherlands. We moved about a year after I went all in on this work, for much the same reason, because we didn't want to wait until our sixties to build the life we actually wanted. This January was the first time I was genuinely excited to get up and work on the first Monday after the holidays. People tell me the enthusiasm comes through in a session, and I'll take that.

Outside of work: marathons, travel, and finding the best meal in whatever city I land in.

Fellow of the Society of Actuaries (FSA) · Member, American Academy of Actuaries (MAAA) · B.S. Mathematics and Cognitive Studies, Vanderbilt University · MPH, Johns Hopkins University · Formerly Willis Towers Watson and Health Care Service Corporation

If I were a natural at this, I'd have nothing useful to hand anyone.

Everything I teach is something I had to work out the hard way, which is precisely why I can teach it. Tell me what keeps happening with your team.

Let's talk