Heather Wood

I attribute my success to two things that don't usually sit together: 23 years of operational discipline, and the willingness to start over.

For more than two decades I built a career in financial services, moving through senior and executive leadership roles and learning how to bring people through change without losing them along the way. Then, in 2023, my daughter Ava was killed by my husband, who then took his own life.

I could have stayed where it was safe. Instead I left a long-established career without a traditional safety net and built Stupendous Love — a movement that honors the spirit of Ava Wood by helping people and organizations create more connected, courageous, and joyful lives, teams, and communities.

Success, for me, is no longer a title. It's a national scholarship in Ava's name that drew more than 3,000 applicants this year. It's a room full of leaders deciding to trade armor for heart. It's watching someone realize they don't have to wait for permission to start living.

So: resilience, yes. But mostly the refusal to let the worst thing that ever happened to me be the last thing that defines me.

Put people first, and mean it.

It sounds obvious. Most leaders get it backwards anyway. They optimize for performance, perception, and outcomes, then try to fit people in around the edges. That approach can produce results. It rarely produces anything that lasts.

There is no separation between work and life. There is just life, and people carry all of it through the door with them. When you lead with humanity — when you see people, not just what they produce — trust deepens, and people do their best work because they're finally allowed to be themselves while doing it.

Success without humanity is hollow.

Put people first. Not as a strategy. As a standard. That's where real impact begins, and it's the only place I've seen it endure.

Build a career you do not need to escape from.

It's easy to chase the version of success you think you're supposed to want — the title, the metric, the next rung. Those things aren't nothing. They're just a poor substitute for a life.

Four things I wish someone had said to me earlier:

Your worth is not your title. I held three consecutive Assistant Vice President roles. I'm prouder of the people I developed than of any line on my résumé.

Say the thing in the room. Women are often rewarded for being agreeable and then overlooked for being quiet. Your judgment is the product. Let people see it.

Choose the environment as carefully as the role. A great title inside a culture that diminishes you is a bad trade, and you will feel the cost long before you can name it.

Do not postpone your life. Not until the promotion, the raise, the someday. Someday is promised to no one. I know that better than most.

Build boldly. And build now.

The biggest challenge in speaking and leadership development is saturation.

There is no shortage of available inspiration — a scroll, a podcast, a conference keynote. Audiences have gotten very good at recognizing content that sounds meaningful and changes nothing. And when budgets tighten, the first thing cut is the session that made everyone feel something on Tuesday and made no difference by Thursday.

The opportunity lives in exactly that gap.

People are lonelier and more armored at work than I have ever seen them. Leaders are managing grief, burnout, and mental health inside their teams with almost no preparation for any of it. What they need isn't a motivational hour. They need language, tools, and permission.

That's what I build for. I'm not interested in being the emotional moment on someone's agenda. I want people to leave with something usable on Monday morning: how to recognize their own baseline, how to claim joy in fragments, how to lead without armor.

Stupendous Love is being built the same way — through real conversations, meeting people exactly where they are. In a world that feels fast, filtered, and transactional, I believe that's what people are actually hungry for.

Authenticity, connection, and joy — chosen on purpose, not just on the good days.

Authenticity first, because real beats polished every time. Trust isn't built by people who have it all together. It's built by people who tell the truth.

Connection, because being genuinely seen is what people carry with them. Years later, nobody remembers the outcome or the org chart. They remember whether they felt like a person in the room.

And joy — which I've come to understand as an act of courage, not a mood. Anyone can be joyful when life is easy. Choosing it in the messy middle is a discipline.

Those three aren't just how I work. They're how I live, and they're what Stupendous Love is built on: helping people and organizations create more connected, courageous, and joyful lives, teams, and communities.

Not a strategy. A standard.

If you're building something that could use more courage in it — a conference, a leadership team, a community — I'd like to hear about it.