February was a full month.

I had just returned from New York City, where I accepted the PR Net’s Next Gen Award on behalf of our team — an honour I am still processing, honestly. And before I had much time to sit with it, I found myself in my car, driving to Nanaimo for the Vancouver Island Business Excellence Awards, where our agency had been nominated as a finalist in the Professional Services (Boutique) category.

Somewhere on that drive, a Grade 5 memory I hadn’t thought about in a while surfaced.

I was 10 years old and desperately wanted to go to leadership camp with my friends. My mom took it upon herself to speak to my teacher, who was responsible for selecting the few kids who got to go. She told him I was eager. That I wanted to be there.

He told her I would never be a leader. That I would always be average.

I have thought about that moment more times than I can count. Not with bitterness, but with reflectiveness at how much weight a single sentence from an authority figure can carry, and how differently my life could have been if I had let that one sentence become my story.

I didn’t.

I went on to found my agency, rooted in the belief that communications should be conscious, values-led and in service of voices that have historically been silenced. I’ve had the privilege of working alongside Indigenous communities, purpose-driven organizations and whole-person leaders who are building something real. That work has changed me — made me a better leader, yes, but also a more present partner, mother and friend.

Pulling into Nanaimo, I wasn’t thinking about the award. I was thinking about that teacher and about how wild it is that the kid he wrote off is the same person who just returned from New York City to accept a national award — our second in the last three months — for the company she built.

Leadership isn’t granted by a gatekeeper in a classroom. It is grown in the choosing, over and over again, to show up as yourself, even when someone told you that self wasn’t enough.

No one gets to define that path for you.

I am so humbled to lead this company and the incredible people in it. And I am so grateful for every moment that reminds me of exactly who I am.