The Career I Swore I’d Never Have
I sometimes laugh when I think about how my career started because I grew up surrounded by educators. I was absolutely certain I would never become one! Education was everywhere in my family. I grew up around the lesson planning, the grading, the meetings, and, of course, the educator stories that somehow always found their way to the dinner table. And I thought, “Absolutely not. That will not be my life.” I was going to do something completely different.
Well…apparently I should have been a little less confident about that decision. What I didn’t understand then was that sometimes the very thing you spend years saying you’ll never do turns out to be exactly where you discover your calling and purpose. Education didn’t just become my career; it became the place where I found the work I believe I was meant to do.
I eventually found my way into special education and started my career teaching students who were deaf and hard of hearing. My first classroom was full of boys, and when I say they brought energy into that room, they brought ENERGY! They kept me laughing, thinking, adjusting, and, on particularly lively days, probably questioning whether I knew what I was doing. But I loved that classroom! I loved their personalities, their humor, and the challenge of figuring out what each student needed in order to be successful.
That experience changed me.
I discovered that I had a particular passion for working with students who didn’t always fit neatly into traditional ways of teaching and learning—the students whom others sometimes struggled to reach, but who often had so much to offer when given the right opportunities to show it. I loved figuring out what made them light up, what helped them connect, and, just as importantly, what might be getting in the way of their success. I stopped asking, “Why isn’t this student succeeding?” and started asking, “What can we, as the adults around this student, do differently to create a better opportunity for them to succeed?”
That shift in perspective became one of the earliest lessons that shaped the way I lead today: before we assume something needs to change within the person, we should be willing to examine what may need to change around them.
I didn’t realize it then, but that question would follow me throughout my entire career.
Over the years, my career took me from the classroom to serving as a principal, a director of special education, a district consultant, a state-level coordinator at the department of education, and eventually a university professor and program director preparing aspiring educational leaders. With each new role, my view became a little wider. I went from thinking about what one student needed, to what a classroom needed, to what teachers needed, to what leaders and entire organizations needed in order to be successful.
And I kept seeing a similar pattern: people often don’t need someone to come in and “fix” them. They need the right support, opportunities, expectations, relationships, and environment to grow.
That realization eventually became a major part of the inspiration behind EmpowerEd Educational Consulting Group, LLC™.
Today, I have the privilege of serving as the Founder and CEO of EmpowerEd, an educational consulting firm in Michigan that allows me to bring together so many pieces of my professional journey. Becoming an entrepreneur was another unexpected turn in my story. I didn’t begin my career imagining that one day I would own a consulting firm, but over time, I realized I wanted to take what I had learned across classrooms, schools, districts, higher education, and state-level work and use those experiences to help leaders and organizations in a broader way.
For me, being a Founder and CEO isn’t simply about owning a business. It’s about having the opportunity to build something that reflects what I believe about people, leadership, and change.
Through EmpowerEd, I partner with leaders and organizations to help them become stronger from the inside out. Rather than simply coming in, delivering training, and leaving, I want our work to help people build the skills, confidence, systems, and ways of working together that continue long after our partnership ends. There is something incredibly rewarding about watching a leader or team realize, “We can do this. We have what we need. We just needed a different way to think about it.”
At the heart of EmpowerEd is a pretty simple belief: when we create better conditions for people, we create better possibilities for results.
When I look back now, I can see how much of what I do today started in that very first classroom. I just didn’t have the language for it yet.
Those energetic boys taught a brand-new teacher that people will often surprise you when you take the time to understand what they need, recognize what they bring to the table, and create an environment where they have a real opportunity to succeed.
That lesson followed me from teacher to principal, from district leadership to state-level work, from professor to now to Founder and CEO. The roles have changed, and the rooms have certainly gotten bigger, but the heart of the work has remained remarkably similar.
So there is definitely some irony in my story. The girl who grew up surrounded by educators and vowed she would never go into education ended up building an entire career, and eventually a business, around helping students, educators, leaders, and organizations grow.
Apparently, education had the last word after all.
