THE FULL INTRODUCTION

How did I get here?

By “here,” I meant on the ground, nearly dead.

I’d fallen off my bike, an event that would forever change the way I chose to live my life and how I would choose to do business.

I call it “The Crash.”

The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was flat on the pavement, staring up at the sky. For the first time in years, I wasn’t moving. I wasn’t planning the next meeting, strategizing the next move to grow my business, mentally drafting the next proposal. I was completely and utterly still.

In that stillness, a question emerged. I’d been too busy to hear it in real time: How did I get here? By “here,” I didn’t mean the pavement, stunned as I was. I meant my career. I had gone into a space where I’d never intended to go.

I was always in overdrive. More, better, faster was my mantra. It fueled my success. Living in that gear all the time eventually led to a crash—literally. That near-fatal bike accident forced me to stop, reflect, and ask myself: How did I become the woman who needed a near-death experience to be able to stop?

I’d built a successful business from my living room in my 20s, driven by purpose, integrity, and an unstoppable work ethic. The “more, better, faster” addiction is so seductive because when you are in that flow, it is fun. And it works—at least initially. I grew from a young entrepreneur into the CEO of a thriving business. It earned me respect, financial success, and the satisfaction of knowing I could make things happen. Somewhere along the way, though, traits that had served me so well—the work ethic, the focus, the drive—had become my master.

I was young, unencumbered, with the luxury of being able to go all in. I never considered how unsustainable that would become. That’s what our 20s are for, charging in, taking over the world, maybe learning things the hard way.

Back then, life in overdrive felt like freedom. I could work long days and have energy to do more. I could say yes to every opportunity, chase every lead, and attend every event that felt aligned with what I was trying to do. My body was resilient, my mind sharp, my spirit fed by the pure adrenaline of creation. Underneath it all was the foundational layer of caring about people and wanting to make a difference. It was always there, sometimes quietly. The business grew. I grew it through sheer force of will and endless availability. It was fun, exciting—and costly.

When we’re in our 40s and 50s, still living on the edge of crashing and burning… well, let’s just say that sometimes it takes a literal crash to knock us to our senses.

That shift—to the edge—happens so gradually that we don’t notice it at first. The eighteen-hour days that once energized us start to drain us instead. The constant availability that once felt like “dedication” becomes a prison of our own making.

The unstoppable work ethic, a former superpower, becomes the very thing that stops us. Not through failure, necessarily, but through a kind of success that demands everything; until it returns less and less with each passing phase. At some point, we stop feeling like we are in charge of our lives and work. We begin to notice what else in life we might be missing. Wasn’t “freedom” the goal, or the reason we took all of this on in the first place?

Have you experienced this? Apparently, I am far from being the only one.

I had to (very reluctantly) come to terms with the fact that I was over-functioning, stuck in repeating cycles. No amount of planning, books, or strategy could shift it. Not fun, not the dinners, invitations, not even the promise of money could fix this.

This realization was perhaps the most humbling of my entire career: Here I was, someone who built a business helping others transform their work and lives. With that expertise, I was still trapped in patterns that I couldn’t think my way out of. And it was for the same human reasons why everyone else experiences that stuckness: fear, doubt, being uncomfortable, questioning oneself, and learning to trust oneself.

I had read every business book, attended every conference, hired consultants, crafted joint ventures, bought a dissolving business, and cleaned up the results of more than a few frustrating mistakes. I had depth of knowledge. I had a breadth of experience. I had strategies for everything and solutions on paper for problems I had never even encountered—for my business, for other people, and other businesses, firms, teams, and leaders.

But no roadmap for my own inner work. Because helping others succeed had become my way of avoiding myself.

Hence, The Crash.

I found myself in a fundamental (and common) paradox. The tools that got me to that level of success were now trapping me there, preventing me from reaching the next level. Something was preventing me from getting off the ride, even though I wanted to. It was not enough to intellectually know or understand what to do or what was going on; it was a classic case of “What got you here will not get you there.”

I could also no longer be sure about “there” in terms of where I was going. I began craving something deeper: actual alignment between who I am on the inside and the work I do on the outside. I became determined to find it. Or really, to see it again. More importantly, to live it again.

The word “again” matters here. This need wasn’t about discovering something entirely new. On the contrary, I needed to return to what I lost along the way. Somewhere in that relentless pursuit of “more, better, and faster,” I had abandoned the essence of myself and all that had made the work I had chosen feel meaningful in the first place. In the aftermath of my bike accident, I remembered part of what I had intentionally left behind.

About a decade earlier, I’d received a curious invitation to a workshop. As a continual learner and seeker, I accepted. One night, I walked into a stranger’s basement not knowing what to expect. I walked out changed by the power of family constellation work. This is all really amusing to me now: I don’t remember who invited me, whose basement it was, or who else was in the room. That night, I learned the amazing power of constellation work. I soon decided I needed to train with and create programming with the facilitator of that workshop. That is how I met P. Jamie Lee.

What I had experienced in that workshop was unlike anything I’d ever heard of. Sometimes the most profound changes, even whole transformations, come from unlikely places. Using representatives to map family systems and uncover hidden dynamics sounded esoteric, maybe even a little weird. I was actively seeking to try something that would offer me a different lens on my “problem.” The more I thrashed around trying to fix it, the worse things were getting.

I resisted a little. It was easier for me to think about the difference something like this could make for clients. Let’s keep in mind that my life was good; everything looked okay on the outside.

This was purely an internal battle for me, as I sought more meaning, purpose, and fulfillment. This is a mirror for me now, as I think of my clients over the years. They are successful on the outside. It’s human for many of us to continue seeking, or to be wholly unaware of a deeper yearning for balance and purpose.

What I experienced in that basement session challenged everything I thought I knew about how change happens. Instead of analyzing my patterns, creating new strategies, in other words, intellectualizing my way through, I was invited to simply observe what emerged when we mapped elements of my situation using representatives for people and things.

I watched as hidden loyalties, unconscious commitments, and systemic patterns revealed themselves without any effort on my part to figure them out. For the first time in years, I wasn’t trying to solve anything; I was just witnessing.

I witnessed what the embodied wisdom within me had to offer, though it could not communicate verbally, even within myself. Solutions emerged that no amount of strategic thinking had been able to produce. Believe me, I’d “thought” my way through in every direction, and stuck myself sideways in all that thinking.

That experience didn’t just solve my immediate crisis. It revealed an entirely different approach to transformation. I saw potential for its use in working with my clients, from individuals to leaders, even entire organizations.

Instead of forcing change through willpower, education, information, modeling, and strategy or policy, what if we could simply create ideal conditions for natural human intelligence to emerge? If the solutions we needed were already present, just dormant, waiting for the right process or experience to become discernible?

With the insights I’d gained, what started as a personal interest turned into a calling: integrating consciousness into business. It would begin with discovering a person’s—or organization’s— unplayed potential.

What is “unplayed potential,” exactly?

Unplayed potential refers to the capacity, talent, or possibility within a person, team, or system that hasn’t yet been expressed, activated, or realized. It’s like having notes in a song that haven’t been played yet—beautiful, powerful, but still dormant. In human or organizational development, it points to the gifts, strengths, or wisdom that are present but hidden beneath old patterns, fear, confusion, or misalignment.

In this book, I will introduce you to what I believe is a fresh new approach to the old constellation therapy model. It can be used in business, leadership, and life to drive performance by tapping into the unplayed potential in all of us.

Working with individuals, groups, or companies, I help them chart a new, healthier, functional reality to grow and move forward. The Circle Tool Process, which I will lay out for you in the next chapter, reveals the hidden patterns, dynamics, and relationships that shape a person’s current situation and then guides them toward a new alignment that supports their goals, values, and well-being.

What’s unique about this, you might ask? Well, it’s like you’re playing a game, only the stakes are tied to real life, and winning is measured by the depth of insight and alignment you walk away with.

You can’t lead consciously or build a people-centered culture using outdated tools and expect meaningful change. People are more sophisticated now—they see through jargon and empty initiatives. Today’s challenges demand fresh, tested, transformational tools that actually work to drive performance and align talent. This is true for individuals, teams, and our businesses themselves.

This book and my story aren’t a platform for criticizing traditional business tools. Many of them are excellent for what they were designed to do: strategic planning, financial analysis, performance metrics, and organizational charts; all of those elements were necessary and had their place. Most of the talent or human resource tools we use today were created in a different era, when business moved more slowly, people stayed with companies for decades, and the core challenge was talent management to drive efficiencies. Today, we strive to enable large-scale adaptations to rapid change and optimize individual talents.

Today’s reality is harsh. More than ever, people are living in their “back brains” — the primitive brainstem that reacts instead of reasons. Think about it this way: when we’re in the workplace and one person gets triggered and reacts, then another person gets triggered and reacts in return, it creates a rapid, chaotic loop. Layer that over time, and things can get pretty complex and pretty crazy, pretty fast.

It may make sense that we’re operating out of our back brain a lot these days, given what’s happening in our world. There is pressure to work faster, handle more work, and be available 24/7. We’re seeing high rates of burnout and stress; meanwhile, loneliness is the new epidemic. We must start functioning in a more integrated way.

As leaders, we need to first shift our own operations from our back brain to our front brain, the part responsible for conscious thought, empathy, decision-making, and problem-solving. The “front brain” allows us to pause, assess, and choose our responses rather than react from instinct or fear. Only then can we help our teams, other people in our lives, and our organizations move forward. We won’t be able to keep up with the pace of change if leaders in our organizations aren’t leading from the front of their brains.

You know the saying about opportunity in chaos? Under all those dire warnings, beyond the churn and burn of today’s business environment, is a vast amount of unplayed human potential that has barely been explored.

If you can’t access the unplayed potential in yourself and others, real growth—whether personal or business—will always stay just out of reach.

Every organization is filled with people who have skills, insights, ideas, and innovations that will never see the light of day. Not because they are lazy or unmotivated, but because the systems we created don’t know how to recognize or cultivate what wants to emerge. We focus on optimizing what we know exists, and seldom seek to create new possibilities from what we already have. We give direction and correction far more than we pose questions, especially the kind of questions that would produce new ideas and approaches, or reveal unplayed potential within our midst.

When people learn to access their deeper intelligence and make choices from alignment rather than fear, they become agents of positive change in every area of their lives. They parent differently, relate differently, and contribute differently to their communities.

Life feels good.

I believe so deeply in this work because, beyond making businesses more successful or leaders more effective, it restores people to themselves. When that happens, people naturally begin to restore the world around them. Restoring people to themselves can, and will, change the world.

We empower people to take conscious control of their lives, provide them with the tools to understand what is truly happening at a foundational level, and guide them through a process that makes that awareness multi-dimensional. In the moment of identifying their truth, they can quickly engage their middle and front brains, choosing their responses and next steps.

It can be astonishing to witness.

The tools I mention in this book extend beyond business and into human transformation, guiding us back to a way of working and being that honors our practical needs and our deeper purpose as humans, with a profound capacity. Instead of preserving organizations that extract value from people, we can create organizations that foster the full development of who we are.

Your “crash” need not be literal, as mine was. Your moment of reckoning does not have to include a near-death experience or dramatic life upheaval. It can be as simple as recognizing there is something in you, or your organization, that wants to emerge—and the current approaches you have tried don’t quite reach it.

The question isn’t “Are you ready for transformation?” That’s too big, too vague, and honestly, too easy to nod along to. The real starting point is much simpler, and far more revealing:

What do you want?

It almost sounds like too simple a question… until you try to answer it honestly. Most people can’t. They’ll tell you what they don’t want, what they’re tired of, or what they wish would stop happening, but naming what they actually want? That’s where things get uncomfortable. And that’s where transformation begins.

Because once you know what you want, the very next question becomes unavoidable:

Are you prepared for the tools that will actually get you there?