My goal with this readme is to provide you insight into my work philosophies. If you have a readme, I'd love to read it as well.

You can learn more about me here.

My beliefs on how we can best work together:

Everyone deserves to be treated with dignity and mutual respect.

We embrace our differences. We celebrate individuality. Everyone is significant. We strive to truly listen and be heard with sincerity and curiosity. We seek to understand and elevate each other. We exercise kindness, empathy, compassion, and accountability for ourselves and each other.

The way we treat each other as people deeply affects who we are as people. While it sounds painfully obvious, it’s not often fully appreciated and realized in our day-to-day behavior. This in turn affects how we perform in the workplace and in the home. We have to do better than "not consciously hurting or diminishing each other" — we must consciously work to elevate each other in our every action.

The antonym to "paranoia" is "pronoia," which Adam Grant describes in this Ted talk as "the unreasonable belief that people are going behind your back to help you." Creating a "pronia culture" in a company will pay massive dividends at any scale.

We work best together when we are aligned on the purpose.

Alignment, (not to be confused with consensus), requires full commitment to open dialogue, transparency, and psych safety. This is no easy feat.

Alignment has to be multidirectional - top down, bottom up, and lateral. Once aligned, we commit to the destination together with hard work, optimism, and collaboration on our side. We won’t always agree on every point, but through productive alignment we can stand united in our efforts to achieve our greater goal without negating our own unique path.

Default to empathy, then to action.

We feel pressured to act, especially in the San Francisco tech culture. In acting on that pressure we often forget to seek understanding of the situation and of each other. Defaulting to empathy creates a path to mindful action. Mindful action results in faster execution with greater success.

Everyone is a self-directed and responsible individual:

We are each empowered to make decisions, take action, and have ownership of decisions. We are responsible for our own feelings and reactions. We do not override others’ decisions without consent. We are responsible for our own "happy".

Ownership does not mean martyrdom.

Martyrdom is not the same as ownership. If we are truly a team/unit, there can be no “falling on the sword” as an individual. We succeed and walk the path of trials and tribulations as a unit.

We have a responsibility to provide feedback to each other.

Feedback. It’s always easier said than done. It’s a word that is very haphazardly tossed around in casual and formal discussions. The word itself doesn’t have the social weight and impact that it should, so we have an expectation that it should be easy, (think about all the points of tension and conflict - it’s often around how feedback was given or received). But in practice, it’s one of the most difficult things that we do as people.

In spite of all this, we owe it to ourselves and each other to provide feedback (as objectively as possible). With feedback, we can iteratively grow and modify ourselves, team, product, and company. It facilitates alignment and connection between everyone and everything; without feedback, our actions lose purposefulness.

We enable each other to do our best work.

We, as a human species, strive to stretch ourselves to achieve more than who and what we are today. While varying degrees of success can be achieved in multitude of environments, only in a positive, honest, respectful, and collaborative work environment can we each do our respective best work.

We do not “test” people.

Hidden agenda is toxic. There’s no way to go around it. It breaks down trust. It doesn’t provide a fair environment for people to execute against. It pits people against each other instead of working together from the same side.

About Me:

I am passionate about organizational behavior and people.

At the end of the day, everything revolves around people. How we behave as individuals affect how we perform as a company. Whether it’s product, finance, sales or HR, the root cause of success and opportunities for improvement is always people. The work to understand people and the underlying reasons behind our actions energizes me.

I enjoy creating order out of chaos.

I thrive in the chaotic, ever-changing environment of high-growth startups because I am highly adaptable. I learned in my early 20’s that I have adult attention deficit disorder (ADD). It was unbelievably liberating to finally put a diagnosis to the curious behaviors that were very frustrating to me.

Since then, I have been on a mission to tap into the gift that is ADD. One gift is that chaotic environments aren't disorienting for me, therefore I can embrace change straight on, no matter how hard or how fast. Second gift of ADD is that I can switch context very efficiently. The third major gift is my ability to hyper focus. It's a lesser known aspect of ADD but many with ADD have to ability to deeply focus when they are drawn to it - thankfully I am very drawn to my work.

I have deep appreciation and need for efficiency and sense of urgency.

Efficiency is not just about speed; it’s about optimal effectiveness. I’m a firm believer that 80% of life is showing up and while the early bird doesn’t get all the worms, it does indeed get first pick.

I believe that people have an innate desire to be kind.

Everyone comes with their own bucket of trauma, history, triggers, and perceived threats - but I believe that people have an innate desire to be kind.

I am a partner in surfacing your potential and helping you achieve them.

No matter where we are in the org chart, we must all be partners in being the best versions of ourselves. As your partner I will set context, provide feedback, and navigational support whenever appropriate.

I believe vulnerability is the true sign of strength.

I am what I call a "1/2 generation American". My family and I came to the states when I was just shy of my 8th birthday, with only hope in our pockets and not much else. I grew up straddling the two, often very polarizing, cultures which has given me a complex perspective on people. It’s been a gift and a burden that has shaped my view on the world.

I grew up in a household where crying was seen as a sign of weakness. It has taken me years to shed that notion and come to understand the amount of bravery and strength it takes to embrace the truth of who we are. Accepting the truth of who I am is vulnerability. And through that acceptance can I find courage, be authentic, seek to understand others, ask for collaboration, receive/give feedback productively, and be truly present.

I prefer to dive right into Level 2 and Level 3 conversations.

I find Level 2 and 3 conversations (The Three Levels of Conversation) to be most meaningful and effective in building relationships.

I gravitate towards the vulnerable, difficult, or emotive conversations. In fact, I’m often uncomfortable and do a poor job of engaging in level 1 conversations altogether.

I often work during "off hours".

I am very willing and able to conform to the set-working hours of any business but the general notion of boxing in creativity and productivity around set hours doesn’t resonate with me. So, I end up working odd hours.

Personal

  • I’m a mom, a daughter, and a sister.
  • I have three children--one girl and two boys.
  • I'm learning to navigate co-parenting with love and grace.
  • I’m passionate about food, reading, gardening, nutrition, parenting, and travel.
  • I speak/write conversational Korean fluently and I dabble in preschool Spanish.
  • I am an INTJ. Enneagram type 8.
  • I love animals, but I don't have any pets.
  • I’ve lived in the San Francisco, California, USA Bay area since 2010. Washington DC, USA area prior to that.