When Lived Experience Becomes Leadership
How lived experience, creativity, and community transform survival into healing and leadership.
Why This Recognition Means More Than an Award
Sometimes recognition arrives and causes us to stop long enough to see our own work differently.
Recently, I learned that I have been shortlisted for the Women's Leadership Impact Award in Education at the LET Global Leadership Awards, taking place alongside the Leadership Experience Tour Global in Hong Kong in March 2027.
When I read the reasons my work was selected, I found myself sitting quietly with the words.
The research team recognized my work for turning lived experience and education into meaningful community work; for bringing together art, nature, food, and education; and for using my voice to create greater visibility for women and survivors.
Those words meant something to me beyond the possibility of receiving an award because they described something I have spent years trying to articulate:
Our lived experiences can become knowledge. Our knowledge can become purpose. And our purpose can become something that serves other people.
I Didn't Begin With a Leadership Model
I began with questions.
- What helps people feel safe enough to learn?
- Why do we separate education from emotional well-being?
- Why do we treat creativity as an extra instead of recognizing it as one of the ways human beings understand themselves and their world?
- What happens when people reconnect with nature?
- What happens around a table when food becomes more than nourishment?
- What happens when someone who has spent years feeling invisible is finally seen?
And perhaps the most important question:
What becomes possible when we stop asking people merely to survive and begin creating environments in which they can flourish?
Those questions eventually became part of the foundation for Mama Star's Healing Circle and the larger educational and community work I continue developing. But they didn't originate solely in textbooks.
Some came from classrooms. Some came from years of professional experience. Some came from kitchens. Some came from art studios. Some came from gardens. And some came from surviving things I wish I had never needed to understand.
Lived Experience Is Not the Opposite of Education
There is sometimes an artificial divide between academic knowledge and lived experience. One is considered scholarship. The other is considered personal. I no longer believe they need to compete.
Education gives us language, research, theory, frameworks, and opportunities to examine what we think we know. Lived experience gives us another kind of information. It tells us what systems feel like from inside them. It reveals where policies meet actual human lives. It exposes questions researchers and leaders may never think to ask.
Neither should exist without the other.
Research without humanity can become detached. Experience without reflection can remain only experience. But when we bring the two together, something powerful can happen.
We can transform experience into understanding and understanding into action.
What Trauma Taught Me About Leadership
I would never romanticize trauma. I don't believe terrible things happen because we were somehow destined to learn a lesson from them. Some things simply should not happen.
But once they have happened, we get to decide what we do with what remains.
Long-term trauma taught me things I would rather have learned another way. It taught me what it feels like not to be heard. It taught me what happens when someone loses autonomy. It taught me how deeply environment matters. It taught me that people can appear functional while carrying enormous pain. It taught me that survival and healing are not the same thing.
Eventually, those experiences influenced how I began thinking about education and leadership.
If having your voice taken away can wound, perhaps being heard can become part of healing.
If isolation can deepen suffering, perhaps community can help restore connection.
If environments can harm people, perhaps we should become much more intentional about creating environments that support them.
If trauma disconnects people from themselves, perhaps creativity, nature, meaningful work, food, education, and relationships can become pieces of a larger pathway toward reconnection.
Those ideas now sit beneath much of my work.
Why Art, Nature, Food, and Education Belong Together
On paper, these things may look unrelated.
- Art
- Nature
- Food
- Education
- Community
- Healing
But human beings don't experience life in departments.
We experience ourselves as whole people. We learn through our minds, certainly, but we also learn through our bodies.
- Our senses
- Relationships
- Creativity
- Culture
- Environment
- Memory
- Experience
Put someone's hands into soil, and something different happens than when we hand them a worksheet.
Invite someone to paint what they cannot yet explain, and another form of communication becomes available.
Gathering people around a table with food can become an experience of culture, memory, conversation, and belonging.
Walk beside someone outdoors, and sometimes words emerge that couldn't emerge inside four walls.
None of these things need to replace professional mental health or medical care when those services are needed. They can, however, belong to a broader ecosystem of human well-being and education.
That is the space I am interested in exploring.
Moving Beyond Survival
One phrase from the nomination particularly stayed with me:
Moving beyond survival toward healing, resilience, and leadership.
Because survival deserves enormous respect.
Sometimes getting through the day is an achievement. Sometimes leaving is an achievement. Sometimes staying alive is an achievement.
But I don't want survival to be the final destination. I want to ask what comes afterward.
Who are you when you are no longer merely surviving?
What do you enjoy?
What do you want to learn?
What do you want to create?
What does your body need?
What makes you curious?
Where do you belong?
What do you want the next chapter of your life to contain?
Those questions are part of why I have recently begun inviting others into Rainbow Weaver: Walking the Wheel of the Seasons, an educational and reflective experience built around reconnecting with ourselves, nature, creativity, and the cycles of our lives.
The intention isn't to tell another person how to heal. It is almost the opposite. It is to create space for people to listen deeply enough to begin discovering their own answers.
Leadership Does Not Always Look Like Standing in Front
My understanding of leadership has changed over the years.
Leadership isn't always the person holding the microphone. Sometimes leadership is creating the table. Then pulling out another chair.
Sometimes it means saying:
Tell me what you see.
Sometimes it means knowing when to teach. Sometimes it means knowing when to listen. Sometimes it means recognizing that the person standing in front of us possesses knowledge we don't.
And sometimes leadership means using whatever visibility we have to make room for voices that have historically struggled to be heard.
That is particularly important to me when it comes to women and survivors.
There are extraordinary women rebuilding their lives later in life:
- Women returning to school
- Starting businesses
- Leaving abusive relationships
- Raising families
- Beginning careers
- Writing books
- Creating art
- Building communities
- Discovering their voices
Their timelines may not resemble the timelines society told them they should have. That does not diminish their leadership.
Sometimes the person who has walked through darkness develops an extraordinary ability to recognize where light is needed.
Recognition Creates Responsibility
Being shortlisted for this award is deeply meaningful. But recognition also creates responsibility.
If someone places a light on your work, what are you going to illuminate with it?
For me, the answer isn't simply myself.
I want that light to illuminate conversations we don't have often enough:
About trauma.
About women starting again.
About the financial cost of survival.
About children who need environments where they can safely develop.
About creativity.
About community.
About nature.
About education that recognizes the whole human being.
About healing that preserves autonomy.
About leadership rooted in caring rather than power.
And about the possibility that our most difficult chapters do not have to become the final definition of our lives.
Perhaps This Is What Impact Looks Like
The Leadership Experience Tour Global will bring together more than 150 leaders from over 50 countries in Hong Kong. Just thinking about that room excites me.
Not simply because of recognition, but because of possibility.
- Different cultures
- Different disciplines
- Different experiences
- Different approaches to education and leadership
- Different questions
Imagine what becomes possible when people enter those conversations not merely asking:
"How can I improve what I'm doing?"
but:
"What do you know that I don't know yet?"
That is the kind of leadership community I want to participate in.
One built around curiosity rather than certainty. Cooperation rather than competition. And the understanding that none of us builds meaningful change alone.
From Being Seen to Helping Others Be Seen
There is something deeply moving about having your work recognized when much of that work grows from experiences in which you once felt unseen.
Perhaps that is what I am sitting with most.
There were chapters of my life when having a voice felt impossible. Today, that voice is being recognized because I chose to use it.
Not only for myself.
For conversations larger than myself.
For women.
For survivors.
For children.
For communities.
For people who may still be discovering that their stories did not end where something terrible happened to them.
I don't know yet what will happen in Hong Kong. I don't know whether my name will ultimately be called for the award.
But I already understand something important about being shortlisted.
Someone looked at this unusual collection of things I have spent years weaving together—education, lived experience, art, food, nature, community, writing, and healing—and said:
This matters.
And perhaps that is the recognition I needed most.
Because leadership isn't always born from having followed the perfect path.
Sometimes leadership begins when we look at everything life has placed in our hands—the beautiful pieces and the broken ones—and ask:
What can I create from this that might make the path a little better for someone coming behind me?
That is the work.
Award or no award.
And that is the work I intend to continue.
