I grew up second-generation Greek American with one message burned into me: work hard. Be financially independent. At any cost.  Exhaustion was a badge of honor.

So that is what I did. 

For more than four decades I held senior leadership roles at Liberty Mutual, KPMG, and ICW Group. I was the person everyone depended on. I exceeded every expectation and then set higher ones for myself. Promotions, new assignments, and bigger goals were the norm. I made it to partner in 18 months at one of the most prestigious professional services firms in the world.

We celebrated at Ellis Island — the same doors my grandparents walked through one hundred years earlier with nothing but courage.

Eighteen months later I was asked to resign, due to the downsizing after Sept 11th.

I did not just lose my job. I lost myself. And what frightened me most was realizing I had not noticed it happening. My entire identity was wrapped up in my title, my role, my results. I had been caught in the Success Trap — achieving, proving, delivering, never stopping. I was a human-doing. That is a very high price to pay.

This became my awakening, and the start of my SelfPowerment journey.

What followed was twenty years of finding my own way back — to myself, to my I am..., to my power, to the clarity that had always been within me but buried beneath decades of proving and doing.  I found my being with the doing.

I wish I had SelfPowerment then. It would have been a much faster path.

When it came time to write the book I needed to know if my story was bigger than me. So I went looking. Sixty-two narrative interviews with senior leaders — 52 women and 10 men — across industries and generations. I sat down certain I would hear something different.

I did not.

I heard my own story. Again and again. High-achieving women caught in the same Success Trap — fueled by the Invisible Advancement Cycle. Women not only in ther own success trap, but also caught in the cycle at their company.  Becoming indispensable, high-performing and exhausted. Successful and somehow still invisible where it mattered most.

It was not a personal failure. It was a system. And it had to be named.

My experience, my awakening and the research became SelfPowerment. Not a self-help platform.  Not a confidence program. A research-backed framework built from my lived experience and the honest stories of 62 senior leaders — giving high-achieving women the faster path from endurance to alignment. From proving to owning. From asking Will they choose me? to knowing I choose this.

The power I had been waiting for someone to give me — was already mine.

It has always been yours too.

The book is published. The white paper is free. The programs are running. The community is here.

I am also a keynote speaker, podcast guest, and run mastermind and masterclass programs for professional women and women organizations, corporations and universities.  

And in the best moments of my life — I am a wife of 49 years, a mother to two incredible daughters, and Yiayia to four grandchildren who remind me every day what it means to live fully, joyfully, and from the inside out.