From Disneyland to Davos
Not many career paths include Disneyland, the Grateful Dead, a Hollywood film set, and the World Economic Forum. Mine does, which still catches me off guard when I say it out loud.
I started as a performer — training and entertaining at Disneyland, learning early that an audience’s attention is a fragile and precious thing. From there, the stage got bigger and stranger: performing alongside the Grateful Dead, then working in front of a film camera, which teaches you an entirely different kind of presence. Fewer places to hide.
The venues change. The work is the same.”
Somewhere along the way, the skills I’d been developing as a performer turned out to be exactly what executives needed. The same tools that help an actor hold a scene — listening, adaptability, the ability to make something feel spontaneous even when it isn’t — are the tools that make a leader compelling in a boardroom, or on a stage in Singapore.
Which is how I found myself training the C-suite at the Singapore Stock Exchange. And eventually, speaking at Davos.
The throughline, I’ve come to realize, isn’t performance. It’s communication under pressure — and the deep human need to connect, whether you’re keeping a child’s wonder alive in Anaheim or making a point that actually lands in a room full of the world’s most powerful people.
The venues change. The work is the same.