About

Who am I?
I started my career as an American Literature teacher at a local high school. I loved ideas and how the humanities (literature, poetry, art) could teach us so much about ourselves. The fact that not all of the 17 year olds I taught shared my passion was a minor downside. After teaching for eight years, the parent of one of my students offered me a job at an insurance company teaching agents. Normally, they hired agents to teach agents, but they were looking for someone who could develop curriculum and write training manuals and were having trouble finding an agent with those skills. So they hired me: the first non-salesperson they’d ever hired, and the first woman. The year was 1984.  Why on earth did I take the job? Part of me had always wondered if I could make it in the business world so I thought I’d give it a try.

So that’s how this literature teacher in love with ideas ended up teaching an overwhelming male audience how to calculate rates, fill out an application, and run a very rudimentary computer (more like a calculator on steroids). Fast forward to 2009. I am currently the executive vice president of operations and strategy for the same organization. I won’t bore you with a blow by blow description of the intervening years, but it’s been an interesting ride. I recently took my emergentics assessment (www.emergenetics.com)  that categorized my thinking preferences and behavior styles. The quote that summed up my profile was “You feel as though you’re diagonally parked in a parallel universe.“ That’s me. I’ve always seen things a little differently, and only recently have realized what a gift, and not a burden, this “slanted vision” is. I invite you to follow this blog as I emulate my favorite poet, Emily Dickenson, who said, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.”