About Em
Freedom, purpose, and presence
in leadership, in love, in life.
Hi, I'm Em.
An Early Awakening to Courage and Resilience
I snapped my femur in half when I was just one year old. My older sister and I had been playing on my mother's bed when I decided to jump. The doctors recommended to slide the bone back in place, so I was strapped into a slanted bed, feet above my head, unable to move. I pulled my hair out and ground down my baby teeth. My parents cheered me up by doing flashcard games. My mom has often recalled the car ride home from the hospital. “Red light!” “Blue car!” “Dog!” I shouted out the window with an exuberance she'd never seen before.
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I eventually recovered fully, to the point that I can’t even remember now which leg I broke. But something in me remembered the experience itself. It was my first initiation into resilience, an early knowing that pain and possibility can coexist, and that even when life turns us upside down, we can still learn, adapt, and grow stronger.
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Learning Beyond the Classroom
I grew up in Toronto, Canada, drawn to learning and teaching from an early age. I pursued a degree in Concurrent Education at Queen’s University, a prestigious program for aspiring teachers, but I quickly realized how confining I found rigid curriculums to be.
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So I began searching for a different kind of classroom. I started tutoring in federal prisons, where I saw what happens when learning meets relevance. Instead of following a textbook, I built lessons around what each person cared about, boxing, running a business, current events, etc. Many of my students had been failed by systems meant to serve them. Those experiences made me question not just what we teach, but how and why, and they deepened my interest in social and systemic dynamics.
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Later, I pursued a master’s degree in policy studies. At graduation, I stood on stage holding two of the four awards presented that year, including the Graduate Director’s Award of Merit for highest academic achievement. I expected to feel full — full of recognition and hope — but instead, I felt boxed in. I could feel the restrictions of a narrow definition of success, and my underlying motivation to prove my own worth felt suffocating. I realized that external recognition no longer held meaning for me, it was time to stop chasing approval and start following my soul.
Leaping into the Unknown
Leaving behind the safety of achievement, I followed a pull I couldn’t quite explain and moved to China. There was a logical reason, or at least I constructed one: increasing numbers of Mainland Chinese were immigrating to Canada, and I wanted to understand diversity “with Chinese characteristics.” But beneath the rationale was something simpler and truer. I was ready for adventure and ready to open myself to life.
China was alive with energy and transformation. I loved its pace of change, the hunger for growth, and the belief that learning never stops. The spirit of possibility felt familiar because it mirrored my own.
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I began working with global organizations, helping bridge East and West, translating not just across languages but across values and ways of thinking. I wanted to help leaders create environments where people from different cultures could thrive together.
Eventually, I founded my own company focused on workplace inclusion, at a time when there wasn’t even a shared word in Mandarin for “inclusion.” Those early years taught me how growth is born from tension, how systems adapt through learning, and how real change happens when we dare to experiment at the edges.
Career Momentum and Systemic Change
During those years, I partnered with multinational organizations across Asia Pacific to deepen intercultural collaboration, build leadership capabilities, and create learning cultures. One focus area centered on women in leadership. I ran programming and coaching programs for women, but also understood that for women to truly thrive, the surrounding systems also had to evolve. So I also partnered with their managers and executives to reshape culture — creating the trust, openness, and shared responsibility that allowed everyone to contribute their best. I came to see thriving and the environment we operate in as inseparable: when individuals are supported to grow, systems strengthen; when systems are healthy, individuals thrive.
Alignment as a Way of Life
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When I first tried Stanford’s “lifeline” exercise, mapping fulfillment across personal and professional dimensions, I drew only one line. It wasn’t intentional; it just reflected how I saw things. For me, work and life were never separate. I had spent years shaping both to align with my strengths, values, curiosity, and sense of purpose.
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Alignment, I learned, isn’t static. It requires continual recalibration as life unfolds and as what matters most evolves. I built my life and career around that principle, staying true to what felt alive, meaningful, and needed.
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At home, I was building a modern, blended, intercultural family. I bring the same spirit to motherhood that I do to my work — openness, curiosity, and being fully myself. Stepping more fully into the feminine, holding love as both guide and grounding, has been beautiful. My kids have joined me in jungle runs, sat in on facilitated workshops, and learned that love is an energy that has a place wherever you go.
I came to Bali for what was meant to be another creative sabbatical, and then the world paused. Covid. Suddenly, I was “stuck,” family separated (I was with my little one who was four at the time). No certainty, no clear way forward.
What began as disruption became one of the most grounding experiences of my life. I discovered, in a deeply spiritual way, that home isn’t a place. It’s being at ease in my own skin. It’s the stillness that remains when everything else falls away.
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From that groundedness, life began to expand.
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I started to work more globally. My ability to hold space for transformation was highly valued, and some weeks I would “visit” every continent, facilitating virtual sessions for leaders and teams navigating complexity and change. That time deepened what I already knew — that love and awareness aren’t concepts to teach, but ways of being to live. I found a quieter, steadier rhythm that continues to guide my work and my life.
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Creative Sabbaticals and the Call to Thrive
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After more than a decade in Beijing and regular visits to Singapore for women-in-leadership work, I began taking creative sabbaticals in Indonesia — spacious periods for reflection, writing, and experimentation. Stepping away from the usual pace of work turned these moments into living laboratories for exploring new ways of being.
During those seasons, I created the Thrive as Yourself assessment and laid the foundations for my speculative fiction series, The Hummingbird Threshold. I also reconnected deeply with nature, the natural rhythms of life, and the power of unstructured time — all key ingredients that awaken creativity and insight.
Those sabbaticals taught me that growth often happens in stillness, that imagination needs space, and that real breakthroughs come when we allow ourselves to live, listen, and create without a script.
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The Pandemic: Finding Home​
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We laughed. We ate the smashed lemon tart. And we had so much fun, we decided to make it a tradition — birthday tart for breakfast, with a good annual smash. He didn’t try to fix it or force it. But his choice, how he responded, with love, humor, and presence, that’s the kind of leadership I believe in.
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Life has a way of teaching us the same lesson in new forms: that what breaks can also open.
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This is what I help leaders discover, that the mess, the uncertainty, the thing you think went wrong might actually be the opening. My work is about seeing those possibilities and having the courage to pursue them.​​
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Ready to explore what's possible?
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On my birthday this year, we decided to have lemon tart for breakfast — because, why not? My nine-year-old daughter went to the fridge to get it.
And dropped it.
Smashed it. Tears.
Crumbs flying.
A whole thing.
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Then my husband, Rich, did something simple but quietly powerful. He flipped the tart back onto the plate, tossed the part that hit the floor, and pulled up a video of Massimo Bottura — the Michelin-starred chef famous for his dessert Oops! I Dropped the Lemon Tart. His response shifted the energy.
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Flourishing ​
​I keep learning. My deep curiosity about what helps people and systems thrive has evolved into a scholarly, transdisciplinary exploration. ​I’m pursuing a PhD in Transformative Studies at the California Institute of Integral Studies, researching how leaders can bridge thriving and flourishing in complex, changing times. I’m also a Fellow with the International Humanistic Management Association and co-lead programs with the Humanistic Leadership Academy, helping educators and business leaders reimagine work as a space for human and ecological flourishing. Here, my love of practice meets my love of inquiry.
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I continue to be guided by intuition — to engage with people, projects, and organizations that ignite me. I’m drawn to collaborations that are purpose-driven, creative, and alive; projects that stretch what’s possible; and partnerships rooted in curiosity, care, and courage.
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This past year alone, our family has traveled to more than fifteen countries, blending work and life in a beautiful rhythm that feels whole and alive. Flourishing, for me, isn’t an abstract ideal — it’s enacted. And I'm doing my best to live it, not only in service to this moment, now, but for what it contributes to for a creative future.
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My partner, the father of our three children, likes to describe me as “a tropical bird that can’t be caged.” I'll take it. Because freedom, for me, isn't about doing whatever I want — it's about following the pull even when I can't see the destination, trusting that being caged in certainty is far more dangerous than flying toward the unknown.
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