Start where you are. Build what matters.The Stress-Free CEO is a weekly newsletter created for women who are building businesses on their own terms. You'll find clear strategies, supportive advice, and practical tools to help you move forward with confidence. No pressure. No hype. Just the guidance you need to grow a business that feels right for you. Let’s build something meaningful together.
The Missing Data: How Science Forgot Half the Population
Why it took me 55 years to get a diagnosis that should have come decades earlierHi Reader, For most of my life, I thought something was wrong with me. I was smart, capable, and driven, but always fighting my own brain. I would start projects with fire and finish them in chaos. I’d forget appointments, lose track of time, and work twice as hard just to keep up. I was told I was disorganized, emotional, or just not trying hard enough. It wasn’t until I was 55 years old that I learned the truth: I have ADHD. And only because my son was diagnosed with it and they said it was hereditary. The diagnosis was both a relief and a revelation. For the first time, my entire life made sense. But what stunned me most was how invisible women like me still are in the world of science and medicine. For decades, researchers studied ADHD almost exclusively in young boys. They built the criteria around how it showed up in them, hyperactive, impulsive, disruptive. Girls and women, who often mask symptoms through perfectionism, overachievement, or emotional regulation, didn’t fit the mold. So, we were overlooked, mislabeled, and left to internalize the struggle. That missing data didn’t just distort the science. It distorted our lives. Women were excluded from most major medical trials until the 1990s, deemed too hormonally unpredictable to study. The result was a health system built on male data, male baselines, and male assumptions. Even today, women’s pain is often dismissed or misdiagnosed. Heart attacks in women present differently, yet we are sent home. Women’s neurological and hormonal patterns are under-researched. And conditions that affect women disproportionately, like ADHD, autoimmune disorders, and chronic fatigue, still lag behind in funding and understanding. I sometimes wonder how my life might have unfolded if someone had recognized the signs earlier. If a teacher had said, “You’re not lazy, you just think differently.” If a doctor had looked beyond anxiety or exhaustion. If medicine had been built with women’s brains and bodies in mind. But what gives me hope is this: women are no longer waiting to be studied. We are studying ourselves. We are gathering our own data, tracking our own cycles, understanding our own patterns, and speaking up about what we know to be true. The same is happening in business. Women are creating systems that work with their energy, not against it. They are redefining productivity, success, and self-worth in ways that reflect the complexity and brilliance of who we really are. We were never too complicated. We were simply never counted. It’s time we count ourselves by speaking up, sharing our truths, and owning our stories.
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The Stress-free CEO
Start where you are. Build what matters.The Stress-Free CEO is a weekly newsletter created for women who are building businesses on their own terms. You'll find clear strategies, supportive advice, and practical tools to help you move forward with confidence. No pressure. No hype. Just the guidance you need to grow a business that feels right for you. Let’s build something meaningful together.
What to Do When You Need a Confidence Boost Hi Reader, Author’s Note:There are moments when even the most capable women forget who they are. This is a story about losing confidence, rediscovering it, and remembering my own worth. There was a period of time when I felt lost. My confidence was at an all-time low. Everything around me seemed to reinforce the idea that I wasn’t being valued. Opportunities weren’t panning out the way I hoped. The world felt loud, critical, and quick to remind me...
Good morning Reader, It’s Okay Not to Know What You Want We live in a culture obsessed with certainty. From the time we’re young, people ask: What do you want to be when you grow up? As adults, the question doesn’t stop. It simply shifts to: Where do you see yourself in five years? The expectation is that we should always know, always be aiming at a clear target. But the truth is, sometimes we don’t know what we want. And that’s okay. Not knowing what you want is not a flaw. It is a natural...
Three approaches that shift the tone and give your words greater impact. Hi Reader, Some of the hardest moments are the conversations we don’t want to have but know we can’t avoid. They might involve telling someone news they won’t want to hear, pushing back on an idea that doesn’t hold up, or addressing behavior that needs to change. These conversations feel heavy before they even begin, and once we’re in them, the pressure to defend ourselves or escape the discomfort can be overwhelming. In...