How Do We Do It?
I asked myself that question on an ordinary afternoon, leaving work to start a second shift as a mom, likely followed by a night up with an anxious child who rarely slept. All I knew about mental toughness was the phrase itself, something I'd heard used around sports. But I thought about how relentlessly I pressed on for my kids, despite the details, the challenges, the surprises, the sheer exhaustion, and I wondered if that was the same thing.
No one had studied it that way. Mental toughness had been researched for decades in athletes, executives, and soldiers, never in the people carrying some of the most sustained, least visible pressure there is: mothers. That question became my doctoral research, the first study of its kind on mental toughness in mothers, built on in-depth interviews with mothers across diverse backgrounds. What I found wasn't a trait some people have and others don't. It was steady regulation held together amid chaos. Endurance shaped by responsibility. Strength drawn quietly from faith, prior hardship, and relationships that held people up when they needed it most.
That research became the foundation for the Centered Authority Framework™, an applied approach to making decisions on purpose instead of reacting to whatever's loudest, whether that's a boss, a room, a crowd, or the pressure underneath your own skin. I've spent years building teams and leading people through change, long before I ever stood on a stage to talk about it. Today I bring that framework to leaders, teams, organizations, and communities working through their own version of sustained pressure.
I hold a PhD in Developmental Psychology, along with graduate degrees in Organizational Leadership and Human Services Counseling. I'm the author of five children's books, and I host MOMents of Strength, a platform built around the same questions that started this work.
Movement
Growing up in an Air Force family, I moved constantly, new schools, new towns, another chance to start over before I'd even settled into the last one. I didn't have language for it then, but I was already learning something I'd spend years trying to explain... circumstances change. What actually shapes us is what we do next.
Capacity
While raising children, I was employed, earned four degrees, wrote books, built a business, and completed the research that became my life's work. Not because things got easier. They didn't. I built capacity within the demands, instead of waiting for them to lighten first. And capacity doesn't stop with the person who builds it. It moves through everyone around them.
Contribution
Every part of this work points to the same purpose. Research asks better questions. Speaking brings them into a room. Writing keeps them there after the room empties. I don't just want an audience to leave encouraged. I want them to leave with clearer judgment, and a little more confidence in what they're capable of becoming.