Tutti Taygerly

Nobody teaches you how to run a retreat. You just do it and figure it out the hard way. If you’ve ever been responsible for a company offsite, a leadership retreat, or any kind of intentional gathering — and wondered if you were doing it right — I wrote this for you. My co-leader Irene Salter and I have been running the Heroine’s Journey, a four-day women’s leadership retreat in Mendocino, for six years. This year we showed up to find our carefully scouted workshop grove taken over by a wedding crew. I burst out laughing. Yeah… the lessons keep coming even after all this time. What I’ve learned across six years of designing and hosting this retreat is genuinely hard to find written down anywhere: how to curate a room, how to structure time so people actually absorb what you’re teaching, when to hold the agenda tight and when to let it breathe. Here’s a lesson: belonging before learning. Before anyone can absorb anything, they need to feel like they’re in the right room. We used to pack the curriculum tight from the start, because that’s how Irene and I like to learn. It was too much. Now Friday evening is always about setting that foundation first. The curriculum can wait until Saturday. Full guide with four more lessons that apply whether you’re running a four-day retreat or a half-day team offsite. /blog

I just got back from running my annual Heroine’s Journey retreat. Four days in Mendocino with twelve women leaders. As an executive coach, every leader I work with wants a better sense of their executive presence. They want to be more impactful, more persuasive, more confident. They want to get things done. Most of them arrive with a theory about how to get there: work on your body language, exhibit more gravitas, understand how you’re perceived in the room. An external checklist. Often built around an archetype of what a leader is supposed to look like. In this country, that archetype is usually a white man. At the retreat, we work through core leadership skills — the Drama Triangle, inner critics, conflict resolution. But the most important thing we do is help each woman slow down enough to find her own inner wisdom and make it visible. We do it through art: each woman builds and decorates a small wooden figure. Her heroine self. One had flames shooting from her head. One wore a purple cape. One had “Bloom” written across her back. You can’t build executive presence from the outside in. You have to go inward first. The leaders who genuinely have it aren’t performing presence. They know who they are. Presence is just what that looks like from the outside. So the real question isn’t “how do I show up better?” It’s “how well do I actually know myself?” That’s where coaching actually begins. #healthyhustle #makespacetolead #executivepresence #womenleadership #heroinesjourney executivecoaching leadership

My daughter just turned 18. She returned the classic Tiffany pendant I gave her and asked for money towards her senior trip to Barcelona instead. I was hurt for a moment. And then I remembered my dad. When I was her age, we went to Switzerland where he wanted to buy me a Rolex. I said no and asked for a Macintosh Power PC instead. He bought me the computer, no questions asked. Generosity was a value my dad lived by. It’s one I am still learning to fully embody. It feels fitting that his legacy is living on in how I’m showing up for his granddaughter. He’s with me as I focus on Generosity as my intention word for 2026.

Last night I ran a Lunar New Year divination ritual for a group of people at @thecommons_sf , and this is what the throw looked like. Divination isn’t prophecy. The shamanic tradition I was taught involves taking objects from nature, each one a representation of a concept. You ask a question you’ve been struggling with, for example, “how might I better prioritize what I do each day?” and then you look at the layout to see if the objects and the relationships between them give you any insight. You can think of it as a message from the universe. As a designer, I think of it as simply another tool to help answer the questions you’re most stuck on. What I love about it is that it doesn’t tell you what to do. Instead it uses metaphor and nature to prompt your intuition. Look at the image. Which word is calling to you right now?

My colleagues used to call me Attitudy, which is probably not surprising if you know that I’m a Fire Dragon and have been described as passionate and challenging for most of my life. This week I co-led a New Moon ceremony marking the transition from the Year of the Wood Snake into the Year of the Fire Horse. One of the gifts of a Snake year is the opportunity to shed old patterns that have kept us stagnant. And after a year that has felt chaotic and exhausting for so many people, especially here in the US, that shedding feels important and overdue. What comes next is Fire Horse energy — electric, bold, adventurous. It’s the kind of year that can carry you somewhere incredible if you’re intentional about it. And a warning if you’re not. This photo is from an equine therapy session at Miraval in Arizona, taken years ago. I didn’t fully appreciate the lesson at the time, but there I am, quite literally learning to lead the horse. As a recovering workaholic who has used her passion to drive herself straight into the ground more than once, I know what it feels like to be dragged. To let the intensity and ambition take over until there’s nothing left. I’ve been doing this work for a long time, and I’m still learning. So the question I’m sitting with as we head into this new year is how do you make sure you’re the one leading the horse, rather than getting dragged by it? Because that distinction, between channeling your intensity and being consumed by it, is everything. That’s the healthy hustle I’m committing to this year. What are you shedding? And what are you charging toward?

I’m a zealot for learning. I often work with two to three coaches at once, in addition to therapy and various learning cohorts. Recently, I’ve been diving deeper into team coaching and learning skills to enhance group relationships. What fascinates me most? How these dynamics show up in our most intimate relationship—with our romantic partner. To build my skills in this area, I’m accepting a limited number of couples for couples coaching. It’s completely free. All I ask is that both partners willingly consent, are genuinely excited to participate, and commit to strengthening their relationship. Message or DM me if you’re interested. Happy to answer questions.

My word for 2025 was “ease and flow.” Of all my year-in-review summaries, the most surprising one came from ChatGPT. I’ve been using it as a second brain for the past few years. It serves as an editor (never a first-draft writer), a brainstorm partner, a research assistant and a place where information lives so my mind doesn’t have to. Surprisingly, ChatGPT has also served as a decent coach & intentional thinking partner. These three year-in-review images beautifully capture my annual themes (hurray for ease and flow!) plus poetry and a still life (with brand colors!). It reminded me how deeply the ocean and redwoods of Mendocino anchor both my personal life and my work. The annual women’s leadership retreat I lead there has become an anchor point. A pause in the year to step out of grind culture and practice a healthier relationship with ambition. One rooted in energy, clarity, and sustainability. If you’re a woman looking for a way to practice healthy hustle without burning yourself out, the Heroine’s Journey returns to Mendocino May 1–4, 2026. Early bird pricing ends January 31. #Leadership #HealthyHustle #WomenInLeadership #2026Intentions #AI P.S. My word for 2026 is Generosity. More to come!

I spent a lovely morning planning Thursday’s free workshop to “Set Your 2026 Intention” with Irene Salter. I made a major career transition in 2019 when I left my job at Facebook and entered my second career as an executive coach, writer, and speaker. My goal was to build more alignment between my professional and personal lives. December 2019 was the first year I chose an intention word for the upcoming year. For 2020, it was Grow. That word shaped countless decisions and had me say yes to unfamiliar opportunities, even when they felt scary. It reminded me that the biggest growth often comes from facing challenge head on. As a high achiever in tech, I was trained to operate through measurable goals and OKRs. Goals create structure. Intentions create the energy and identity that guide how I want to show up. I have found that I need both. If you want a breather from the December hustle, join us for an uplifting, connected hour at noon PST on Thursday December 11. You’ll walk away with some inspiration and hope to ground your 2026. /e/create-your-intention-for-2026-tickets-1976498253482 #LeadershipDevelopment #IntentionSetting #CareerTransitions #ExecutiveCoaching #GoalSetting #ProfessionalGrowth #Health

Trick or treat! This is the first year that neither of my kids will participate in the candy gathering ritual. I guess I have to get my own peanut m&ms and Twix. 🤣🎃🦄

I just watched a stunning documentary called Mistress Dispeller with an insightful Q&A with the director Elizabeth Lo. The film explores modern love and infidelity through a Chinese lens, where couples can hire a “mistress dispeller” to help repair a marriage rather than directly working through a couples therapist. Every person in the story is treated with dignity, even when their choices are messy. It’s a reminder that empathy doesn’t mean agreement or a happy ending for everyone. Instead, it’s seeing the beauty of everyone’s full humanity. Lo does a fantastic job balancing truth-telling and maintaining an ethical lens to protect all parties involved. SF Bay Area folks: @mistressdispellerfilm is playing at the Roxie 10/31 through 11/6. Go watch it now! #empathy #leadership #storytelling #AAPI #perspectiveshift

Knowing When to Quit on a Goal I’ve always said that once I have a goal in mind, once I can imagine and truly feel the thing I want, I’ll get there. I’ve got the hustle and drive to make it happen, no matter what. That’s a mode I see in almost every founder I coach: the relentlessness, the quiet conviction that if you just keep going, you’ll eventually figure it out. But here’s the thing. That isn’t always the healthiest way to lead or live. The beauty of having a goal is that you also get to change your mind when new information comes in. One founder I worked with for three years decided this year to wrap up his company. They still had a year and a half of runway, but the problem space wasn’t as interesting. The world had shifted, and they realized their energy might be better spent elsewhere. They did something almost no one in startup land ever does. They shut it down and returned the money to their investors. That took a huge amount of courage. For me, the lesson came through my body. In October, I started a creative challenge to sketch one metaphor a day. Two weeks in, my right forearm started screaming at me. In classic overachiever mode, I had gone all-in on boxing and overexerted. The pain got so sharp I couldn’t even pick up a cup, let alone a pen. And still I kept pushing for another four or five days. Until the pain got so terrible I had to see the doctor. So yes, I stopped. I quit my October daily sketch. It felt awful. I’m not someone who gives up on a goal. But this was my version of healthy hustle: listening, resting, and protecting the part of me that creates. Quitting the goal can be an equally powerful move as completing it. 📸 The first 17 sketches from my October challenge—a reminder that stopping can be part of the journey too. #HealthyHustle #Leadership #FounderLife #Creativity #Resilience #Executivecoaching #makespacetolead

#metaphoricalviztober #viztober2025