Helping you remember who you were before work made you forget
You don't even recognize yourself anymore. You were told if you just followed the rules, you'd be successful in your career and have a happy life.
And yet... you feel miserable
You've inherited an identity that's not even yours, shaped by family, community, work, friends, and your last five performance reviews. All telling you who you should be.
I built Innervates as a guided way to help you rediscover who you truly are, before everything else made you forget.
Four things I hear the most
- 01"I feel so lost in my career... I have no idea where I'm going"
- 02"There's never any time to breathe, let alone do anything else in my life"
- 03"I hate my boss... I hate my job... I hate the work... I don't know how to handle it"
- 04"Nothing makes me special or unique in my career... I'm not special"
If any of these sound familiar to you at all... this is exactly why I built this place. These pains come from forgetting who you really are.
Four areas of focus supported by rediscovering yourself
Innervates is a platform for people who are good at their work and quietly lost inside it. Most people arrive on one of these four planes.
Stabilize
Stop the emergency. Make the room you're in survivable. Get your footing back.
Craft
Overlap who you are with what you do. Turn the job into a craft you own.
Advance
Move up on purpose instead of by default, towards a life that's actually meaningful.
Change
Choose the next step from a grounded place instead of panic, and know why.
Rediscover who you are.
Stabilizing, crafting, advancing, and changing all rest on this one. Know who you are and the ground you're standing on. From there? The four stop being guesswork. You'll find yourself pulled towards a better career and life, instead of always running away.
Help, how you need it
These are what you can expect to find inside the platform, depending on what you need.
Learn how the corporate world actually works, the things nobody tells you about
Courses that guide you through 1 of the 4 focus areas, taken at your own pace as you're ready.
A collection of exercises to help you based on what you're currently struggling with
Asynchronous reviews for anything you need. It's like having a coach right in your pocket
In platform tools to help where single worksheets aren't enough, like values sorting.
Get the first look at new videos, blogs, research, and content before anyone else
My philosophy
My platform and style will not be for everyone. If you're looking for a quick win on a resume rewrite to "guarantee" a new job, you're not going to find that here. I will show you how to do those types of things for sure, but my goal is to show you something a lot deeper about yourself.
Read the rest if you want to know whether this resonates... before you commit to anything.
Distress in your career comes from working so far away from who you really are
The corporate system is set up in a way that makes you forget who you are and to fuse your identity to your work. This is why performance reviews end up being about you and not your work. Promotions are about you and not your work. Getting a new job is about you and not your work. This is also why when our work gets attacked, we take it personally.
Most people spend much of their career chasing something, because we believe it will finally bring relief to this pain. If we can just get through this week, this month, this quarter, or this year... if I can just get promoted... if I can just get that new job... then suddenly everything will be okay.
For most people with an honest reflection, relief never arrives
It's why "just get through today" turns into "just get to the end of this year" so quickly. Or why we feel the dopamine rush of that bonus or pay raise, but we're still so miserable across the rest of our lives. All you end up doing is putting the rest of your life on hold, continuing to chase something that's never actually going to arrive.
The answer? Know thyself.
You are a full, complete, unique, amazing, and wonderful human being that exists completely independent of any job, title, or career. You have your own passions, excitements, thoughts, visions, and meaning for how you want to operate your life. You just might have forgotten them along the way.
So the work becomes about peeling back all of those layers of corporate performance and political nonsense in the workforce, and remembering what really gives your life meaning and purpose.
One central piece is rediscovering your values, understanding how far away your career is keeping you from them, and learning how to reorient yourself back towards them. When you can start here from a more grounded place, knowing how to lean into what makes you unique and applying it to your career can give you a significant advantage.
Not all values are the same size.
Core
Violate one and your whole body knows before your mind does. These are the closest things to us that often shape many parts of our lives.
Proximity
Depending on the situation, we often will reach for additional values behind our core. This allows us to be flexible in various situations.
Perimeter
These values are still important to us but we reach for them less often. We may explore these values and play with them. "Wanted" values can sit here.
Discovering and living a values oriented life is not a new thing and while it's central to my philosophy, it's only one part of a broader picture. We are not designed to fit into rigid boxes either, so the values we explore take on a much more fluid presence.
We are flexible creatures that change over time. So do and can our values.
Values can take on three major states. Whether these are values we inherited from others passed on to us when we were young, values we decided to adopt as we got older, or sometimes values we really admire in others that we wish we exemplified more.
Born into
Installed by others like family before you had any say. Neither good nor bad, just not necessarily chosen.
Adopted
Taken on deliberately. You can tell the story of when this value became true for you. These carry authorship.
Wish I had
Often values we admire in others. The gap between the stated value and the practiced one is the whole point.
We have a lot more control in our lives than society will even give us credit for. We get to keep the things we love and change the things we don't.
Four situations shaped by a better understanding of who we are.
When we have a better sense of who we are, we get to have a lot more fun making decisions about where to focus our time and energy next.
Career as expression
We can take our values and everything that makes us unique and apply it as a differentiated lens in our career.
We can develop a craft and point of view that's unique to each of us
Better decision making
We face decision points in our career all the time. Now you can evaluate whether it brings you closer to who you truly are.
A way to help you assess whether that next step is right for you
Awareness of why
We often are the most upset at work when a core value gets stepped on. Sometimes just being aware of this can give us back agency.
Truly knowing why we're upset in a moment can give us back control
Protective barrier
When we genuinely know who we are, the results of working in a toxic environment can become far less painful.
We can more easily separate the work we do from who we are
The possibilities become endless because there are already so many things in this world outside of our control. Knowing who we are can help give us more agency.
We can't stop a company from doing a layoff. We can't force someone to promote us. We can't make a new job opening magically appear. So our goal is to better discern the difference of what we can or can't control, and lean into the things we can.
Start with the card sort.
If you're not quite ready for the platform and have never done a card sort before, give this light version of the card sort a try! ~50 values sorted into what feels true and what doesn't. A fun exercise of self-exploration!
- Cards
- 54, drawn from the full values set
- Time
- About fifteen minutes, once
- Output
- Your top 5 values
- Cost
- Free
Career is the door. Values are the house.
I spent 15 years honing my marketing career, navigating the reorgs, the politics, the broken systems, and the leaders who were never given the tools to lead. I climbed to a director-level role, served as an active interim VP co-running a global product marketing department... and burned out in the process.
Along the way I went back to school for my Masters in Social Work, not to leave tech, but to understand what the corporate world refuses to look at: how systems, power dynamics, and organizational design actually affect the people inside them.
The training gave me the tools most coaches and managers have never been exposed to: how to see the whole system, how to sit with someone in real complexity without flinching, how to help people find clarity inside chaos. This is coaching built on a foundation most coaching doesn't have.
Career is where I focus today because it's one of the single biggest things any of us will do in a given week. It has so much influence over the rest of our lives: whether we can pay our bills, whether we have mental capacity for our family, whether we have any energy for our own hobbies, or whether we just can turn work off and relax a bit.
I built Innervates because the people I kept meeting, smart, driven, successful on paper, deserved better than a resume refresh and a pep talk. They deserved someone who understood the system they were stuck in and could help them find themselves inside it.
Innervates is a coaching practice, not a clinical or therapeutic service.
You get one life.
There's no second run to spend on someone else's idea of who you should have been.
