Carolyn came to embodied leadership coaching the way most people come to it: by needing it herself.

She spent over twelve years working with National Geographic — first on staff, then as a contracted producer — where she produced its first digital series to feature scientists and researchers. The scientists she worked with gave her a reference point she's never lost: people who were genuinely leading with curiosity and alive in the discomfort of the unknown in ways that most professional culture trains out.

She also noticed the gap. The same leaders who were fearless in the field often went quiet in the moments that mattered most; sitting across from her in the TV studio with cameras rolling, at a podium, in a funding conversation. Their knowledge was vast. The gap was in the body.

She came to understand that gap from the inside. Her background was in science storytelling — she studied Human Ecology at Middlebury College, trained in documentary production at the Salt Institute, and built her career at the intersection of science and narrative. She produced humanitarian and conservation films for clients around the world including The Global Fund, The World Bank, the Biden Cancer Initiative and high-impact philanthropists. As her career required more visibility, travel, and risk, she ran into the same wall her clients know well: the performance pressure and self-doubt that arrives precisely when the stakes are highest.

Carolyn found her way through body-based practices grounded in the neurophysiology of the stress response. They worked. That became her evidence, and eventually her methodology.

Carolyn trained as a leadership coach through Accomplishment Coaching and over the last decade has worked with leaders from organizations including Adobe, NASA, LinkedIn, TED, and Dartmouth Health.

The work she does now is built on one organizing idea: internal clarity for external capacity. She works with scientific founders, executives, and senior leaders through her Inner Strength Training methodology — building the internal foundation that high-stakes visibility actually requires.

What she brings to Etalia is the internal side of the practice. You can have the right message, the right platform, and the right relationships — and still leave something essential unrealized if the leader carrying them hasn't yet done the inside work that makes the outside work possible. Carolyn's work builds that foundation. The leaders she works with describe what happens as stepping onto solid ground. A distinct shift in which doubt and distraction recede, words come more easily and sincerely, and the internal groundedness that lets them hold a room rather than perform for it.

Carolyn has spent her career in proximity to scientists, and she has never stopped seeing them as the heroes they are — people who choose curiosity over certainty, who live at the edge of what's known. They deserve something that has never quite existed: a holistic leadership framework purpose-built for how they think and who they are. That's the gap Etalia was founded to close. And this is the work Carolyn was made for.