The Monster, the Meth House, and the Messy Middle…

How Falling Apart Taught Me to Lead Better

The Monster…Let’s rewind ten years.

I was the kind of HR leader who could write a progressive discipline policy in my sleep, fire someone before lunch, and still get complimented on my emotional intelligence by 2 PM. I was “strategic.” Polished, confident, respected. A dangerous combo. I was completely disconnected from what it meant to be human at work.

In fact, I was so good at this version of HR, that I was the person the company chose to fly around the country to our various locations for the sole purpose of making sure our leadership team didn’t screw up firing someone - someone I surely never met, mind you. No emotions. It’s just business.

Turns out, I wasn’t a leader. I was a walking policy manual with great hair.

But today, I’m here to tell you how I got my ass kicked by life – gracefully, then not-so-gracefully – and why it made me a better coach, a better mom, and an actually decent human being to work for.

Let’s dive back into the Monster first…

When I was 27, I was managing a department, making more money than I knew what to do with, and walking around with the kind of confidence only a person who hasn’t lived through anything actually hard could have.

I hadn’t struggled. I hadn’t been stretched. I hadn’t felt like my world was crashing down while still trying to show up for a morning meeting.

Empathy? I could teach it in a leadership training, but little did I know, I had none myself. I was a corporate robot. The truth I didn’t know back then was that leadership isn’t about the leader. I was trying to be the hero in the story, riding success waves like I had earned every one of them. Giving no thought to my incredible privilege, wealthy upbringing, debt-free college education, and ability to relocate on a dime wherever and whenever the next opportunity came knocking.

I could fake connection, but I never truly opened up to people – not at work anyway. I didn’t understand that you can’t connect with your people if you don’t know them, and you don’t let them know you. There’s this thing called The Empathy Gap, and so many fast-rising, hard-working, high-performing leaders don’t even know they’re in it.

The Empathy Gap

You can’t coach people through chaos if you’ve never felt it.

You can’t help someone through underperformance if you’ve never had to white-knuckle your way through a single workday just to make it to bedtime.

So, when someone on my team underperformed, I didn’t ask why. I asked for documentation. I saw low performers as weak links; not people with full lives and complex realities.

I wasn’t unkind. I just didn’t get it. I hadn’t lived through hard yet. I was 27 with a big job, a fat paycheck, and way too much power for someone who still believed productivity was the same thing as worth. If you couldn’t keep up, you didn’t belong. That was the unspoken policy in my head, and I enforced it like a champ.

Then life humbled me. Not gently, either.

The Unraveling

My marriage began to implode. I had a baby in the first few months of a global pandemic. Instead of a partner, I found abandonment. My husband left for days at a time, doing things that I now know were tied to addiction, denial, and a whole lot of brokenness. He had his own version of unraveling, and I can’t pretend to know what was going on with him at the time. All I knew was, I was alone.

He disappeared. sometimes for days, sometimes weeks. leaving me at home with my newborn, in a state far away from family or a support system, and with a brain rapidly unraveling from postpartum depression. While on maternity leave, my company was planning multiple rounds of pandemic-related layoffs.

All of a sudden, nothing was stable anymore.

The entire world shut down…and so did I.

One pretty severance package and a handshake later, I was updating my resume and applying to everything I could find in stable industries. Still bleeding from childbirth, I managed to line up a new job. This new gig paid well and gave me hope at a time when I really needed a win.

He kept disappearing, and I filed for divorce.

In the thick of it, if I’m being honest, there were times I regretted having a baby.

But looking back at it now, I see it more clearly: My daughter gave me my life back.

It took having a daughter to realize that I would never wish this marriage for her. I knew she’d be watching me her entire life and accepting this type of marriage as normal. Maybe even landing in a similar situation once she grew up. Having a daughter was what it took for me to finally say, “enough.” Having a daughter taught me that love didn’t need to be earned, conditioned, or begged for.

I named my daughter Grace. That first Sunday after I left my husband, my pastor spoke about grace. He defined it as:

Unmerited favor, forgiveness, and kindness from God.

How fitting that this would become the word I would use to address my daughter every day for the rest of my life.

Divorce comes with consequences.

I was now a single mom with sole custody. Grace’s daycare was 45 minutes from my new office, and the commute was not sustainable long term. So, after about two years, I left that company and found something closer to home, relatively quickly (it’s easier to find a job when you have a job…key learning for me that didn’t come until much later).

Now, I was Director of HR – big salary, big responsibility – my first time at that level. And again, I thought I had earned every ounce of it. I poured myself into that company, and I thought I was back on track.

I even built my dream house. It took nine months to build, but it was all mine. Ours. Me and Grace, a fresh start. We moved in January 2023.

Three months later, I was fired.

Or as my CEO put it, “re-organized.”  He didn’t give a reason, just that my position was being eliminated. But I knew the reason. I wasn’t a yes-woman. I wouldn’t rubber stamp bad decisions. I told the truth, and provided strategic counsel for a company that didn’t actually want strategic HR. They wanted someone to nod along and execute.

I was fired on a Wednesday morning during our scheduled 1-1. He had skipped the previous eight 1-1’s, and I was so eager to connect with him again. Like a child eager to see her distant, emotionally abusive father coming home from a long work trip.

He delivered the news in 20 words. I stood up, stuck my hand out to shake his, and he walked past me out the door. No handshake, no eye contact. The whole thing was over in less than 30 seconds.

This is when I learned that how you treat someone on the way out says more about you as a leader than it does about them as an employee. I thought back to all those people I had let go in my career, seeing it as just a business decision. It took getting let go myself to realize – it’s not just a business decision, it’s a human decision; one that affects real humans, who you once believed in.

Losing your job can be a traumatic experience – I know it was for me. I am now a firm believer that if a company can execute this one critical touchpoint extremely well, with compassion, and a genuine effort to help someone land on their feet, it can actually add to the bottom line. From that experience, I created a Compassionate Offboarding toolkit, which I knew could revolutionize the way we fire people. Because our employees deserve better – yes, even the underperforming ones.

Career Whiplash: The Rebuild

You could say I got baptized by fire. I guess the more layers of pride and entitlement you have, the more painful the fall has to be to turn you into the version of yourself that you were always meant to become.

I was no longer the woman who judged people for not performing at work. I was those people.

So here I was: no job. No childcare. Just me, my 3-year-old, and the crushing fear of becoming invisible.

I couldn’t find a job before my short severance ran out.

Remember how I said it’s easier to find a job when you have a job? This is when I learned that lesson.

I turned my dream house into an Airbnb and moved home to Indiana.

Back into my childhood bedroom. With my toddler. At 30-something.

Desperate to keep the lights on, I took a job teaching high school business management for a quarter of my former salary. I was humiliated. And exhausted. And mad at myself. And maybe, although I couldn’t see it yet, I was broken and cracked open just perfectly enough to allow the light to fill in.

While I was grading papers and warming up macaroni, I was also writing a new vision.

I started building the coaching business I wish I’d had to guide me 10 years earlier.

Then came the meth house.

(Also mine. Plot twist…)

The Meth House Moment

While I was licking my wounds in Indiana, teaching during the day and building my business plan at night, my ex was trashing our other home in Colorado.

And I don’t mean a little drywall damage. I mean meth contamination.
Like, condemned by the state level meth.

The loss? $270,000.

At that point, I wasn’t sure whether to cry, scream, or pitch the story to Netflix.

That was the final gut-punch.

I borrowed and begged for money from family and friends, and scraped up enough to have it professionally decontaminated and gutted. After the school year ended, I went back to Colorado to say goodbye, to grieve, and to let go of my first house.

I walked into what was once Grace’s nursery, where I had painted a mural of the sun setting over the mountains on the west-facing wall. The mural was still there but the ceiling was not. I could see straight through my baby’s ceiling into the dining room above. And I cried one last time over the life I left behind.

Turns out, nobody wanted to buy my newly decontaminated, stripped-down shell of a meth house. It took six months to sell. Which meant six more months of paying the mortgage and utilities on a 3,000-square-foot memory box in Colorado.

But then it sold. For $270k less than what it used to be worth.

And here’s the wild part: I thought I’d feel devastated. Or full of self-pity. Or maybe just numb.

Instead, I felt immense gratitude. Even joy.

It wasn’t just a sale. It was a severing. And a becoming.

Sometimes a house needs to fall apart so the woman inside can finally come together.

I had survived.

And in surviving, I’d finally learned how to be human. And I’d finally learned how to lead other humans.

We each have our own monsters to slay. And once you slay one, another will come.

But surviving one teaches you how to face the next. Because you’ve been here before. You’ve developed the muscles to endure. And with every fire you walk through, your body repairs. And you grow closer to the version of yourself you were always meant to be.

This is when I learned that rebuilding doesn’t take a linear path. It’s messy. It’s meant to be. This is how warriors are made.

Like a master carpenter chiseling an intricate piece of furniture, I believe this is how God carefully shapes and refines our character to better serve the world.

The loss was $270k. The gain? Me.

Real Talk
“All Organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get.”

-  Arthur W. Jones, an organization design expert, but has also been linked to systems-thinking experts Paul Batalden and W. Edwards Deming.

So, how does all this relate to leading at work?

You didn’t read this far just to hear about my dumpster fire of a decade and not walk away with a lesson, right?

Let’s go back to that first version of HR-Katie. The so-called “high-performing” version of me, moving up the ladder with nothing but tailwinds – no obstacles. No crises.

Here’s what I know: I didn’t grow up throwing emotion out the door. I learned that was the way to succeed in my environment. The system I was working in wasn’t designed to support humans in the messy middle.

But we can do better.

What if we could engineer kindness into our processes?

As business owners, we have the privilege and responsibility to build whatever culture we want. What if we made compassion part of our DNA? Our values? What if we broke down the touchpoints of the employee life cycle and added kindness to every SOP?

I think we would radically transform our culture.

I find great comfort in the idea that if we don’t like our results, we can change them.

Because here’s the truth: You cannot lead people well if you don’t understand what it feels like to be human at work.

You can’t coach someone through burnout if you’ve never felt what it’s like to be scared, broke, exhausted, and expected to smile anyway.

You can’t build high-performing teams if your only strategy is “find better people.”

I used to fire people who struggled.

Now I ask why they’re struggling, and we build systems to help them get back on track. And yes, sometimes I still have to let people go. But now, I do it with a level of care and compassion I wish would have been shown to me.

Your Next Bold Move

Today, I have my dream job.

I help small business owners – the ones with vision but no time, the ones who feel like therapists and referees and fire marshals all rolled into one – build the leadership systems and people strategies they never got training on.

I help them stop winging it and start leading with confidence.

Here's what it looks like:

• Hiring and onboarding systems that actually set people up to succeed

• Leadership rhythms that keep the culture healthy

• Accountability without shame

• Values-based rewards, not just goal-based

·        A team that runs without micromanagement

It’s not magic. It’s just strategy…with heart.

I used to think leadership was about control. Now I know it’s about connection.

I used to judge people from the outside. Now I sit with them in the mess and ask:
“What do you need to get back on track?”

I used to think I had to do it all. Now I know I just have to do it aligned – with my values, my family, my faith, and the kind of life I want to model for my daughter.

I built a business out of the ashes of my former life, and I did it one system, one strategy at a time. With a whole lot of growth along the way.

If any of this resonates, maybe it’s time to stop being the hero of your company’s story.

Your team doesn’t need perfection from you. They need connection, clarity, consistency, and a leader with a playbook that grows both people and profits.

If you’re building something meaningful and want a coach who’s been through the trenches – and came out not just stronger, but softer, sharper, and more faithful? I’m your girl.

And, if it’s you that’s in the messy middle right now…
If you’re feeling like the glue holding it all together while slowly unraveling yourself,

I see you. I was you.

This will be the story you will one day tell. The battle cry of a warrior tested again and again.

And…

So long as you don’t give up, it will get better. Because you will get better.

That’s how winning is done.