I moved to Okinawa at twenty-two to teach English in Japanese public schools. I had no idea what I was walking into.

The culture shock hit at a level I wasn't prepared for — not the fun kind of disorientation you read about in travel memoirs, but a sustained, bone-deep stress I didn't have language for. I couldn't see what was happening to me from the inside. Looking back, it was the first time I understood — viscerally, not theoretically — what it feels like to be stuck in something you can't name. An outside observer would have spotted it immediately. I didn't have one.

Meanwhile, my students had zero interest in learning English. If I wanted to connect with them, I had to stop trying to make English relevant and start seeing what was actually going on in their lives — the constant, messy growth of being a teenager.

That meant learning to read past what was being said into what wasn't. This is where I learned to see people. Not what they say they need. What they actually need. It's the foundation of everything I do now.

Working alongside Marines also taught me something about stress that I carry into the work I do today. Watching the reality of combat service sit next to the everyday stress of tech work recalibrated my understanding of what's actually worth the emotional weight we give it.

Most of the stress we deal with is manufactured in our minds. It feels real — and the feeling matters — but the thing itself is rarely as big as our experience of it. The real work is learning to see it differently. It's something I keep front of mind in how I lead and how I work.

I went from biggest fish in a small pond to small fish in one of the biggest ponds in the industry. It was a stretch in every direction.

There was a moment where I thought I might lose my job. That fear did something useful: it forced me to disconnect from what everyone around me was telling me I should be doing and connect directly to what actually mattered — impact on the business.

It was also the first time I had a manager who didn't see me. Not just missed what I was doing, but genuinely didn't care about my growth or career progression. I asked about promotion. He said no. End of conversation.

Most people need someone in their corner who sees more in them than they currently see in themselves. It's hard to grow when the person above you has already decided your limits. That's a big part of why I care about how managers show up for the people in front of them.

AWS is where I became a leader. I transitioned from IC to manager and was fortunate to have two exceptional mentors through that shift. They taught me — not by lecture, but by example — what it actually looks like to lead a team well.

The biggest lesson: people-first leadership isn't a line on your resume. It's the mechanism. Making your people successful and helping them grow is how the team succeeds for the business. It's not idealism. It's engineering.

I also learned that people's personal problems don't evaporate because they showed up at the office. Flexibility isn't softness — it's how you keep the whole person performing over the long haul.

And I learned that humans mirror each other. If I show up to my team as a stressed-out mess, the team becomes a stressed-out mess. My state isn't just mine. It's contagious.

What Google did give me was space to grow. I got early internal exposure to what AI could do — well before ChatGPT broke the scene, I'd already been through the mind-blowing realization of what large language models were capable of.

But the real story at Google is simpler than that. A reorg gave me a new team in a new domain. After about six months, I realized I was spending most of my time on administrative managerial work that I wasn't enjoying. I was stretched thin. I couldn't access the work I loved.

That's when I got my own coach.

Through that work, I learned to distinguish between the parts of my job that gave me energy and the parts I was merely good at. Once I went through that exercise, the answer was obvious: what lit me up was working with my team and helping them grow.

That work also gave me a clean look at what I wanted to do next. Two things stuck. One: coaching the people I see growth in — I do that one-on-one through No Small Lives. Two: helping operators and creators use AI without losing themselves to it.

This site is where the second one lives.