Brenda Y Meredith, COL (Ret.), U.S. Army Reserve

My success is attributed to three things. And I have never been able to separate them, because they worked together.

The first is discipline — specifically, the discipline of staying ready before I knew what I was staying ready for. I kept my resume current. My biography. My materials. Not because I was anxious about what was coming, but because I understood that opportunity does not wait for you to pull yourself together. Every time a door opened in my career, I was already standing near it — not because I saw it coming, but because I had never stopped preparing as if something might.

The second is the people who poured into me. Some of them knew they were doing it. Some of them had no idea. A man who overheard me on the phone once told me I sounded energetic and asked what I did — and that conversation changed the entire trajectory of my military career. I did not earn that moment. I was positioned for it by the standards I had already set. But someone else had to see it and say something. I do not take that lightly.

The third is the decision — made early and held consistently — to refuse to let any system, any environment, or any set of expectations define my ceiling. I started as an enlisted soldier. I became a warrant officer. I became a commissioned officer. I served in federal agencies responsible for public safety. I founded a company. None of that followed a prescribed path. All of it required me to believe, in seasons when the evidence was thin, that I belonged in the next room.

Discipline. People. Refusal to be defined. That is the combination.

The best career advice received came in pieces — some from other people, some from my own hard-won experience — but it all pointed to the same truth:

You don't have to get ready when you stay ready.

Early in my career, I learned to maintain everything — my credentials, my documentation, my professional materials — at a level of readiness that most people reserve for urgent moments. I did not wait for the opportunity to decide to prepare. I made preparation a daily practice, long before I knew what it would unlock.

That habit changed my life more than once. The moment that proved it came when someone overheard a phone conversation I was having and heard something in my voice — energy, purpose, clarity — and said they could use someone like me. I was not pitching myself. I was not networking. I was simply already positioned because I had never stopped being ready.

The lesson I would pair with that is one I received more directly from those who mentored me over the years: know your worth before you walk into the room, because the room will not always tell you. Especially as a woman. Especially in systems not originally designed with you in mind.

Together, those two pieces of guidance — stay ready and know your worth — have governed every significant move I have made. Not perfectly. But consistently. And consistency, I have found, is where the real career is built.

I did not always know where I was going.

I want to say that out loud, because I think a lot of women — young women especially — feel like they are supposed to have it mapped out. The lane. The title. The five-year plan. And when they do not, they assume something is wrong with them.

Nothing is wrong with you. You just have not arrived yet. And arriving takes longer than anyone tells you.

What I would tell you — what I wish someone had told me — is that you do not need the full picture to make the most important decision of your career. That decision is this: what kind of leader are you going to be before anyone is watching?

Lead with excellence. Even when it costs you something.

Excellence sounds like a motivational poster. I know. But I am not talking about being the best in the room or having the right credentials or impressing the right people.

I am talking about the standard you hold yourself to when no one is grading you. The way you show up to the assignment that does not seem to matter. The care you bring to the work that nobody will notice — yet.

That version of you is being built right now. Every time you cut a corner, you are building her. Every time you do not, you are building her too. And one day, when a moment arrives that demands everything you have, the version of you that shows up will be the one you quietly assembled in all the invisible seasons before it.

I know this because I lived it.

I was running a clinic on base during a military war games exercise when I got a call that 2,000 soldiers in the field had no medical support at all. Not one medic. Nothing. Someone asked if I could help. And I said yes — without hesitation — because I had spent years making sure my team was ready for exactly this kind of moment, even though I never knew that specific moment was coming.

I delegated the clinic. I delegated the soldier readiness processing center. I went to the field and stood up a centralized battalion aid station from scratch — a trailer, with two treatment rooms, a nurse, two young medics — and they served 2,000 soldiers who had nothing.

That was not a heroic moment. That was a prepared one. And the preparation started long before anyone asked me to do anything extraordinary.

Treat people well. All the way through.

This one I have to say carefully, because it is easy to dismiss as obvious. It is not obvious. It is actually one of the hardest things to do consistently in a career — especially when you are tired, overlooked, underpaid, or watching someone less qualified move faster than you.

Treating people well is not about being nice. It is about deciding that your dignity and theirs are not negotiable, regardless of what the environment is doing around you.

Here is what I know after nearly four decades of leadership: you cannot build a real following without it. You can build a title. You can build a position. But a following — people who will show up for you, who will hold the mission when you hand it off, who will tell you the truth when the room goes quiet — that requires something deeper than authority. It requires trust. And trust is built one interaction at a time, in moments nobody is documenting.

I have watched talented women lose rooms they should have owned because they forgot that the people around them were watching how they treated everyone — not just the people who could do something for them.

Do not be that leader. You are better than that. And the women coming up behind you are counting on you to show them a different way.

One more thing — stay ready.

I learned early that you do not have to get ready when you stay ready. I kept my resume current. My bio. My materials. Not because I was anxious, but because I understood that opportunity does not wait for you to pull yourself together.

That habit changed the course of my career more than once. Not because I was exceptional in those moments — but because I was already positioned when they arrived.

You can do the same. Whatever season you are in right now, treat it like it is preparing you for the next one. Because it is.

If I could leave you with a single thought, it is this:

You do not have to know where you are going to decide right now what kind of leader you will be when you get there.

Make that decision today. Hold it through the seasons when nobody notices. And when the moment comes — and it will come — it will find you ready.

That is not a promise. It is a pattern. I have lived it. And so can you.

The biggest challenges or opportunities in my field right now are all connected — and that is exactly the problem.

The organizations I work with are navigating three simultaneous pressures: AI is being adopted faster than the governance structures exist to manage it, leaders are confusing compliance with actual readiness, and the pressure to transform is consistently outrunning the organizational capacity to execute. Separately, each of those is a challenge. Together, they create a compounding risk that most leadership teams are not equipped to name, let alone address.

Here is what I see on the ground: healthcare and regulated industry leaders are under enormous pressure to move — to implement AI, to modernize, to transform — and they are being evaluated on speed. But speed without structural readiness does not produce transformation. It produces accelerated exposure of every weakness that already existed. AI does not create organizational failure. It reveals and amplifies the clarity gaps, governance gaps, and decision authority gaps that were already there.

The opportunity — and it is a real one — is that this moment is forcing a conversation that should have happened years ago. Leaders are finally being asked to prove readiness, not just assert it. The organizations that build genuine decision readiness infrastructure now will not just survive this transformation period. They will be positioned to lead on the other side of it.

That is the work I exist to do. Not after the crisis. Before it.

There are five values most important to me in my work and personal life. And I hold them in both spaces without separation, because I have never believed that who you are at work and who you are at home are two different people. They are the same person under different kinds of pressure.

Integrity. The standard holds whether or not anyone is watching. This is the one I come back to most often, because it is the one most easily negotiated away when the environment makes it convenient to do so. I learned in uniform that integrity is not a value you invoke in difficult moments — it is a practice you maintain in ordinary ones, so that it is already present when the difficult ones arrive.

Excellence. Not perfection. I want to be clear about that distinction, because perfectionism is a trap that has held too many capable women back from doing the work they were built to do. Excellence is consistency of effort. It is showing up to the work that no one is grading with the same standard you bring to the work that everyone will see.

Accountability. Owning the outcome, not just the intention. Good intentions are not a leadership strategy. What matters is whether the mission held, whether the people were protected, whether the decision delivered what it promised. I ask that of myself, and I work with leaders who are willing to ask it of themselves too.

Service. I was shaped by institutions that treat leadership as obligation, not privilege. The military taught me that authority exists to serve the people underneath it, not the other way around. That has never left me. I lead, I advise, and I show up every day with the understanding that my role is to make someone else's path clearer, stronger, or more survivable.

Humanity. People are never just a function of the mission. This may be the value I guard most carefully in my work, because it is the one most at risk in high-stakes, high-pressure environments. Efficiency can become a reason to treat people as inputs. I have watched it happen. I refuse to participate in it. The leader who treats people well — consistently, not just when it is convenient — is the leader whose team will hold the mission when everything else is uncertain.

Those five are not aspirational for me. They are operational. They govern how I make decisions, how I build relationships, and how I show up every single day.