Hi, I’m Ellen!
I help create healthier workplaces where people can do meaningful work without sacrificing themselves in the process.
I’ve led teams, bought into hustle culture, and burned out more times than I care to admit.
For nearly two decades, I worked inside the same systems I now help leaders and organizations rethink. I know what it’s like to care deeply about your work, give it everything you have, and convince yourself that exhaustion is just part of the deal.
Eventually, I realized the problem wasn’t how much I cared. It was how much our workplaces ask of the people who care the most.
Today, I’m working to change that.
Let’s rethink a few things about work.
Let’s rethink a few things about work.
What I believe.
Burnout isn’t a personal failure.
It’s often the predictable result of systems that reward overwork and ignore human limits.
Wholeheartedness is a leadership strength.
The leaders who build the healthiest cultures lead with honesty, curiosity, and humanity, not perfection.
Change starts with the leader.
Creating a healthier workplace requires leaders willing to look honestly at themselves and the systems they help shape.
Work should support your life.
Doing meaningful work shouldn’t come at the expense of your health, relationships, or life outside of it.
How I got here.
I didn’t set out to become a coach. I thought I’d be an actor.
Growing up in Hawai’i as the only child of older parents, I often felt like I didn’t quite belong. Theater gave me a place where I could connect, create, and make people think and feel.
After college, I moved to Seattle with plans to pursue acting. But life had other ideas.
I found a job at a local Boys & Girls Club, where I got my first real look at how inequitable the world could be. I discovered that I loved figuring out what people needed and finding ways to help make it possible.
One thing led to another, and I spent nearly two decades in higher education and nonprofits. I built teams, developed leaders, created conferences, dug into data, centered equity, and fought to make sure community voices were heard.
I also burned out. Badly.
For years, I kept showing up and trying to make it work. I felt overlooked and undermined at times, pushed myself past my limits, and convinced myself this was simply what work looked like when you cared as much as I did.
Then I went to see Beetlejuice the Musical.
Somewhere during the first act, I started crying uncontrollably. All the exhaustion I’d been pushing through finally caught up with me. I couldn’t keep pretending this was a sustainable way to live.
I knew something had to change.
So I finally did the thing that terrified me and quit my job.
I became a certified coach and started building the kind of support I wish I’d had when I was still trying so hard to make an unhealthy system work.
Today, I help leaders and organizations question the rules we’ve inherited about commitment, productivity, and good leadership.
And I talk about this stuff. A lot.
I write about leadership, burnout, and workplace culture for Forbes and my newsletter, Work in Progress. On my podcast, Hard at Work, I have honest conversations with people who are working to make workplaces better for all of us.
Meaningful work can ask a lot of us. It doesn’t need to break us.
I believe we can do work that matters, get great results, and build workplaces where people thrive.