Creator of Narrative Identity Leadership™ · Founder of AVS Business Consulting · Host of The Strategy Table
And you're wondering — who is this woman, and has she actually been where I am?
Before I list a single accomplishment, I need you to know something. The narrative you see now is decades in the making. Changing your narrative doesn't always come quickly. But change is worth every transformation. Every hard one.
I was incarcerated four times before I was seventeen years old. Showing up and embracing every part of myself — every day — was taxing. It was an internal narrative war. But it was worth it.
In 2021, I burned out. Not the kind of burnout a vacation fixes. The kind that sits you down and asks you a question you have been avoiding for years: are you leading from purpose, or from obligation? I did not have a good answer. So I went looking for one.
By forty-one, I held a bachelor's degree in Criminal Justice and two master's degrees — Talent Development and Christian Ministry. I had built and run a successful food and hospitality business. I had served at the peak of military leadership. I had survived the kind of professional and personal crises most people only read about.
The path from there to here was not a straight line. It went through graduate research, spiritual disruption, business closure, institutional betrayal, single motherhood, and the slow rebuilding of a self that had been performing for so long she'd forgotten which version was real.
That rebuild is what produced the framework. What I found became Narrative Identity Leadership — NIL. The framework I wish someone had handed me ten years earlier.
I am a Black woman. A mother. A veteran. A former cop. A business owner. A researcher. And the founder of a body of work that is reshaping how leadership development actually reaches the layer it's been failing to reach. I do not say that lightly. I say it because the leaders who have sat at this table have stopped looping.
And that is the whole point. Pull up a chair.
It is how you carry yourself under pressure. It is how you mother. How you grieve. How you decide. How you stand at the threshold of who you were and who you're becoming.
The very thing you've been hiding may be the thing that qualifies you to lead. The version of you the world rewarded for surviving is not always the version meant to lead what comes next.
Take the NIL Narrative Profile™ and start with The Strategy Table — the podcast, the magazine, and the framework that names what's actually breaking.
Request the white paper and book a discovery conversation. NIL deploys inside healthcare systems, federal agencies, and enterprise leadership pipelines.
Warrior RIZE programming is available for transition-age youth and juvenile justice partners. Reach out to discuss licensing and partnership.