I didn't learn
leadership
from a book.

The Story

It started when I was six years old.

My mother was having a paranoid schizophrenic episode. She was wearing aluminum foil in her hair and putting signs in the yard that said "stop the mind control" and throwing our belongings into the river that was our backyard. I was standing there watching her come apart and I understood somewhere in my small body that no one was coming. There were no adults on the way. There was no cavalry. There was just me and my mother and whatever I could find inside myself to make it stop.

So I opened a Bible. I found Corinthians 13 and I started reading out loud. She calmed down.

I kept doing it. Every time. Because it worked and I was not going to do something new when I had found something that worked. That was my first lesson in leadership and I was six years old and I didn't even know that's what it was. I just knew that if I could find something solid to hold onto I could change the room.

I grew up south of Baton Rouge, Louisiana in a TAG program that told me my IQ was 141 and sent me to Space Camp and Washington DC — while I was going home to something that felt like anything but exceptional. I had Dylan when I was eighteen years old, Destin five years later, and a year after that I left a marriage that had felt familiar for all the wrong reasons. I took my boys and I kept moving.

For years I was an anchor to everyone who needed one. To my children, my family, my community, my clients. I gave more than I had. I gave past the point of having anything left. Then in 2016 our home flooded — and for the first time in my life circumstance gave me permission to move. We relocated and something cracked open in me. I started asking a question I had never let myself ask before.

That question changed everything. I built Paradise Mortgage — 25 employees across 13 states, a million dollars a year, a national presence built from nothing. I was on CNBC, Fox Business, and Bloomberg. I spoke to audiences of 6,000 people. And I knew the whole time the mortgage business was never the whole story — it was just the chapter I was in.

Then 2023 happened. I published my first book on May 31st — I Am Not My Mother. Two days later, my son Dylan died in a car accident. June 2nd.

I am not going to try to describe what that is. What I will tell you is that it changed the architecture of everything. It closed the company. It moved me to Michigan with Destin. It cracked me open in ways I am still discovering. And it did not take my anchor. If anything, it deepened it.

I started The Dylan Foundation because grief needed somewhere to go and love needed somewhere to live. I kept coaching and speaking because the leaders and the grieving mothers and the business owners who texted me every morning saying "you are my anchor" needed me to stay in the room. And I kept building because building is what I do — and stopping was never in my nature.