About Dr. Kimberly McLeod
I spent years helping people become more effective. Then I had to learn how to stop abandoning myself.
I am a professor, counselor, executive coach, organizational leader, and author. My work explores what happens when the qualities that helped us survive become identities we no longer know how to remove.
I knew how to become what the room required.
I knew how to lead, teach, counsel, solve problems, care for others, and keep moving. I knew how to appear capable even when I was tired. I knew how to perform strength.
What I did not always know was how to hear myself beneath all of that competence.
Choosing Me grew from the realization that the qualities that help us survive can eventually follow us into rooms where they are no longer needed. Strength becomes armor. Responsibility becomes identity. The performing self becomes so effective that we forget it was ever a performance.
The performing self was a survival strategy, not your identity.
It protected you. It helped you survive. But it was never meant to become the only life you know how to live.
When my body interrupted the performance.
My understanding of this work deepened when cancer and treatment required me to stop.
Illness confronted me with questions productivity could not answer. Who was I when I could not perform at full capacity? What remained when strength was no longer something I could display? Could I receive the same care I had spent years giving to everyone else?
Cancer did not create the ideas in Choosing Me, but it made them impossible for me to ignore.
It taught me that surviving and living are not the same thing.
The work behind the words
Dr. Kimberly McLeod is also the founder of Creative Energy, LLC and the creator of the PIPES Effectiveness Map.
I created this work for the competent and exhausted.
- For the person praised for holding everything together who has rarely been asked what holding it together has cost.
- For the person who can function in every room but no longer knows where they feel most like themselves.
- For the person who has confused being needed with being known.
The performing self is not the villain. It protected you. The question is whether it still belongs in every room.
My work honors the strategies that helped people survive while helping them recognize when those same strategies begin to cost them peace, intimacy, health, or authenticity.
What shapes my work
Choosing Me
You do not have to earn the right to choose you.
Explore the book, or take six minutes to see your own pattern.