Long before I became an author, a coach, or the founder of The S.W.A.T. Institute, I was a little girl trying to survive.
My childhood was filled with abuse, neglect, and uncertainty. By the time I was a teenager, I had learned how to disconnect from myself just to get through the day. Like so many women, I became incredibly good at ignoring what I felt.
At 21, I opened my first fitness club. I competed in Ms. Galaxy, appeared in fitness magazines, and built what looked like a successful life.
Then I became a wife and a mother. I gained more than 100 pounds.
Why do intelligent, capable women abandon themselves?
Why do we know what to do, yet struggle to actually do it?
Why do we override our intuition, our emotions, and even our bodies?
Those questions became a thirty-year journey.
I created what would become Emotional Age and Empowerment Coaching, wrote three books with Hay House, became an Oprah.com contributor, and—with the encouragement of my mentor, Louise Hay—founded The S.W.A.T. Institute to train women to become Empowerment Coaches.
Strategy second.
Your emotions do not live only in your mind. You feel them in your body—in your energy, your exhaustion, your anxiety, your joy, your pain, and your peace.
Your body is always communicating with you.
Then life gave me another lesson.
Perimenopause arrived. I slowly gained weight again. I became busy helping everyone else while quietly ignoring my own body. I knew better, and yet I stopped listening.
Then came my diagnosis: endometrial cancer.
Today, I feel healthier, stronger, and more alive than I have in decades—not because cancer changed me, but because I finally returned to the very principles I have been teaching women for over thirty years.
That is why The S.W.A.T. Institute exists.
Not simply to teach coaching.
To teach women how to come home to themselves.
Because when a woman learns to trust her body, understand her emotions, and honour her own wisdom, she does not just transform her own life.
She changes her family.
Her relationships.
Her business.
And eventually, the world.
I am a Hay House author, an Oprah.com contributor, a mother, a cancer survivor, and the founder of The S.W.A.T. Institute—where women learn to empower themselves, transform others, and lead a movement.
