ABOUT BREEI didn't set out to build a media company from the ashes of a former version of myself. I truly thought I'd spend the rest of my career practicing employment law, helping people who had been harmed in the workplace.
As an attorney, I had a front-row seat to the most painful human emotions that surface after something has gone very wrong at work, from harassment and discrimination to retaliation, and to leaders trying to rebuild trust after organizations they once believed in had broken it. Time and time again, I watched a person get reduced to legal claims when what they had really lost was far harder to measure: Their confidence Their emotional health Their relationships Their sense of who they were The law was the benchmark for determining liability, and it rarely restored what work had quietly taken from them. The more people I worked with, the clearer it became that these weren't isolated incidents. They were symptoms of a much larger problem hiding in plain sight.
We've spent decades teaching people how to perform at work in exchange for a paycheck. Very few of us are asking what work is doing to us in return, or how to recover from it. That question changed the course of my life.
I left the law because I became convinced that preventing harm matters just as much as responding to it through confidential settlements, which too often end up covering up bad behavior. I couldn't unsee what I'd learned across corporate workplaces and boardrooms, first as a C-Suite legal operations exec and then as Managing Partner and COO of my own boutique law firm. At some point the question became impossible to ignore: If not me, who?
So I walked away from a known future toward an unknown one and founded Executive Unschool, a media company dedicated to work recovery. My mission is to shape a future of work that recognizes our humanity instead of asking us to sacrifice ourselves just to survive it, and to reach women before burnout becomes a badge of honor or before they talk themselves into believing that over-functioning and self-abandonment are simply the price of success.
This matters especially for women. For too long, workplaces have been built around narrow, masculine definitions of leadership and success that overlook many of women's greatest strengths: collaboration, emotional intelligence, intuition, relationship-building, community, care, empathy, and the ability to navigate complexity with both courage and compassion.
Those qualities are essential to the future we all need, and they belong at the center of leadership. Executive Unschool grew out of a question bigger than the usual ladder-climbing advice: are we even building the right workplace in the first place?
Today it publishes the best thinking on Work Recovery through writing, research, podcast conversations, immersive experiences, and a growing community committed to a more human way of working. My role as founder is to hold space for those conversations, curate the evidence of what is and isn't working, challenge assumptions, and help us imagine something better and then build it. Because work changes us. The real question is whether we'll be changed by default or by our own badass design.
WORK RECOVERY PHILOSOPHYPeople don't need to optimize themselves to survive unhealthy systems. What we actually need is to rethink the systems, and the autopilot, running our work lives. For years we've been taught that the answer to difficult work is to become more productive and more resilient. That advice keeps us solving the wrong problem. Work Recovery begins with a different premise: work shapes people more than people realize, and recovery helps us choose who we become. That philosophy informs everything we publish. You'll find research sitting alongside personal stories, leadership next to nervous system science, and business strategy in the same space as conversations about joy, identity, relationships, and meaning. And true to the disruptor in me, I don't believe any single framework explains human behavior or holds the whole map out of this mess. My work draws from many bodies of thought, including organizational psychology, mindfulness practices, leadership principles, trauma research, neuroscience, Human Design, astrology, systems thinking, and lived experience. These lenses don't hand us certainty, though they do help us ask better questions and notice patterns worth investigating, both in ourselves and in our workplaces. Executive Unschool is built around one thing: creating the conditions for better conversations.
TEDx
In my TEDxDuluth talk, "Work Recovery: Why Recovering From Work Is the Future of Leadership," I introduced an idea that has become the foundation of Executive Unschool. Recovery is the practice of reclaiming the parts of ourselves that work slowly teaches us to abandon. The talk explores how work leaves behind far more than exhaustion, and how recovery is really about changing our relationship with work rather than escaping it. If you're new here, it's one of the best places to begin.
SPEAKER KIT
For speaking engagements, interviews, podcasts, articles, and collaborations, the media kit includes:
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Whether I'm facilitating an executive retreat, joining a podcast conversation, delivering a keynote, or contributing to an editorial feature, my goal is always the same: to leave people thinking differently about work than they did before we met, and to turn chaos into calm. “
→ Founder biography
→ Executive Unschool overview
→ Speaking topics
→ Official headshots
→ Brand assets
→ Logos
→ Media inquiries
The best conversations begin with curiosity. Whether you're interested in speaking, executive experiences, editorial collaborations, media opportunities, or becoming a Founding Catalyst Sponsor, I'd love to hear what you're building and explore whether there's an opportunity to work together.