Boys & Boardrooms

Jessica Lattif came into tech without the background everyone around her seemed to have. 

She had no engineering degree and no business degree. She started at a startup in her early 30s, surrounded by 25-year-olds, four months pregnant. She wanted to prove she belonged there, and she meant to do it through the quality of her work. She did not want to belong to the culture. Her coworkers stayed through dinner and played board games into the night. She went home to her family. 

That choice followed her for ten years, through management roles at Meta and Salesforce. When she turned down a high-profile project because her son was three, she watched it cost her. The people who got chosen were the ones who gave up everything else. Good work was not enough. In 2023 she spent months sick, ran a department offsite with bronchitis, and came home to a performance conversation she did not see coming. She took medical leave, and then her life changed for the better. 

In this episode, Jessica, tech career and burnout coach and founder of Not Working in Tech, talks about the "no" that sidelined her at Meta, the offsite she could not cancel, and why she now speaks openly against an industry that rewards people for giving up their lives. 

This is validation dependency built around belonging. Jessica held a line most people in tech do not, and the need to prove herself still ran underneath it. If you believe you came in through the wrong door, you expect each promotion to settle whether you belong. It doesn't. Your performance stays strong, so the cost shows up in your health. We look at where the need to earn your place starts, why the boundaries you hold for your team rarely get held for you, and what changes when you stop trying to control how others see you. 

If you have kept working through being sick because canceling felt like it would cost you, this one is about you. 

GUEST INFO
Jessica Lattif — Not Working in Tech founder and burnout coach; former Salesforce and Meta leader. Website: notworkingintech.com; Instagram: @notworkingintech; Podcast: Not Working in Tech 

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Cassie Crosby learned the rules by watching what happened to the people who broke them.

Take the hard job, whether you want it or not. Never let them see you cry. Nobody said either one out loud, but she watched who got promoted and who got sidelined for being emotional, and she drew the correct conclusions.

The second rule was already installed before the army got to her. She was the teenager who would not let the boys see her get flustered. The army did not teach her to go quiet; it confirmed that going quiet worked.

Cassie joined at 18, on her birthday, as an act of rebellion that did not land the way she planned. It was the first place anyone had ever called her a leader. She led at every level over the next 24 years, from Baghdad at 25 as the only woman in her unit to the highest levels of government. Every rung came with more weight and fewer people to put any of it down in front of.

She retired on the cusp of battalion command, the assignment most officers spend a career trying to reach, because her family needed her more than the army did. She and her husband retired the same day. Then she waited for the relief. What arrived instead was the same hustle, the same burnout, the same need to be producing something in order to have earned the day. The institution was gone but the rules were still running.

In this episode, Cassie — leadership consultant and founder of Iterata, and author of the Leadership Reimagined newsletter and podcast — walks through the two hours she lasted as a squad leader before a drill sergeant fired her, the platoon sergeant who told her on day one that he did not want to work with a woman, the therapist who handed her an emotion wheel in 2015 because she no longer had language for what she felt, and the five thousand dollars she sent back to a client rather than keep working with someone who did not respect her.

This is the version of validation dependency that hides instead of performs. The trade is quiet and it looks like strength: be the one who needs nothing, and you get to stay. It also works, which is the problem. The jobs get bigger and the rooms get harder and there is less company in every one of them. What Cassie found on the other side is that the suppression was never selective. Once you start putting one emotion down, it dampens all of them. We trace where that trade gets made, what it costs to be the steadiest person in the room, and why leaving the environment does not uninstall the behavior it rewarded.

If people describe you as steady and not one of them knows what you are carrying, this one is about you.

GUEST INFO Cassie Crosby — Leadership consultant; 24-year U.S. Army veteran, retired officer. Connect at LinkedIn: Cassie Crosby; Newsletter and Podcast: Leadership Reimagined

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Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Courtney Harkness was the one who held everything together.

She co-founded a wireless infrastructure company with her husband and ran it as COO, scaling it past $50 million and sitting across the table from the biggest carriers in the country. She married him at 24, straight out of college. Twenty-one years and two kids later, the marriage and the company were still the same structure — build one, and the other came with it.

Her husband was having an affair with one of their employees. She found out during the divorce. Because her personal life and her business were never separate, both collapsed in the same moment, over the same negotiating table. The private equity investors had a word for the version of her that wouldn't step aside quietly: unreasonable.

In this episode, Courtney — former COO turned divorce and life-transition coach, and author of the forthcoming book Unreasonable — walks through what it costs to build a marriage, a company, and a self all inside one channel, the specific shame of a successful woman watching her life implode where everyone could see it, and the negotiating discipline — the 24-hour rule, no sudden moves — that got her through a high-conflict divorce.

This is where validation dependency hides inside competence. When capability is the currency you trade for being chosen — in the boardroom, in the marriage, in the room — there's no part of your identity that isn't for sale. We trace where that wiring gets installed, what "it's fine, everything's fine" was actually covering, and why the moment Courtney stopped performing and got honest was the moment she started to rebuild.

If you've ever built your worth into something so consolidated that losing it would take you down too, this one is about you.

GUEST INFO Courtney Harkness — Divorce & Life Transition Coach; former COO Book: Unreasonable (forthcoming, Fall 2026) Instagram: @courtney.harkness

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Jenny Dreizen was the one who took care of everyone. 

In sixth grade that meant making dinner for her younger brother and getting him to bed while her parents split custody fifty-fifty. Later it meant officiating other people's weddings under a brand she called Cheerleader For Love, then coordinating corporate events where her actual job was making sure everyone else was fed, housed and handled. The feedback loop was clean. She was good at taking care of people so she kept doing it. Nobody was taking care of her.

She spent ten years with a man who held her engagement ring for two years before he used it. The relationship was never contentious. It just was never good. Ten months before it ended he told her he wasn't sure he loved her anymore and she told him yes, you do.

In this episode, Jenny — co-founder of Fresh Starts Registry, a resource platform for people rebuilding after divorce and other endings — walks through three Wednesdays in June 2021 and the night she drove to Target alone to buy towels, because whatever her life was going to be, she was going to need towels.

This is where validation dependency hides inside competence. When worth is built on being the capable one, being taken care of stops registering as available, and nothing that happens to you ever rises to the level of deserving help. We trace where that wiring gets installed, what it costs to stay in something that was never quite wrong enough to leave and why Jenny and her sister built a company designed to make divorce boring.

If you have always been the person everyone counts on and never the person anyone checks on, this one is about you.

GUEST INFO
Jenny Dreizen — Co-founder, Fresh Starts Registry
Website: freshstartsregistry.com
Instagram: @freshstartsregistry and @oliviaandjenny
Email: [email protected]
Podcast: Divorce Happens

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Erin Snow spent years listening to people nobody else would hear.

Domestic violence survivors, in a legal aid office in New Hampshire. Clients who told her the same thing over and over: I'm telling my story, and nobody is listening. She recognized it. She had carried her own story since she was nine, surrounded by people who wanted her to be okay but didn't know how to help her get there. Later, a divorce she told almost no one about — more afraid of the reactions than the silence.

In this episode, Erin — founder of The Unmuted Room, a professional listening space that is not therapy and not coaching — names what she watches high performers do mid-sentence. The censoring, masking and careful management of every word, even in a room built for the opposite.

This is where validation dependency meets containment. When identity runs on being the capable one, you never get to release what you're holding. And what you can't put down backs up. We trace what that costs, what shifts in the body when someone finally says the thing, and why Erin believes spaces like hers should be as common as gyms.

GUEST INFO
Erin Snow — Founder, The Unmuted Room
Website: theunmutedroom.com
Instagram: @the.unmutedroom
Free 10-minute consultation available through her website.

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Stefanie O'Connell is an award-winning journalist, researcher and author of The Ambition Penalty. She spent years documenting what happens when women do everything right — follow the advice, ask for more, negotiate, perform — and still face punishment for it. What she found wasn't a broken system. It was a functioning one, designed to reproduce the same structure of power even as the rules appear to change.

What this conversation builds is the connective tissue between that external architecture and the internal one. Andi names it explicitly: the ambition penalty is most damaging to the people trained to need the reward in the first place. The system rewards and then withdraws. Validation dependency is what makes that withdrawal land so hard.

They cover the ambition penalty's mechanics — what it looks like when it happens in real time, why self-blame is a feature of the system and not a byproduct of it, and what it means that women are negotiating at the same rate as their male peers and still less likely to get what they ask for. Stefanie also shares what it was like to lose 90% of her revenue during pregnancy and postpartum — having written the book on exactly why this was going to happen, having prepared for it financially and intellectually — and still being inside it.

This is an episode about a designed system and the internal wiring that makes it even more effective.  

Guest Links
Instagram: @stefanieoconnell
Newsletter: Too Ambitious (Substack)
Book: The Ambition Penalty: How Corporate Culture Tells Women to Step Up and Then Pushes Them Down — wherever you get your books 

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

 Melissa Pavone watched her mother hold a family together — and then watched it come apart with no one in her corner.

Stay-at-home mother, then part-time work, present for everything. The glue. When the divorce came, it came as a shock to everyone, including the daughter living in the house. Her mother relied on one attorney. No one guided her financially. No one guided her emotionally.

In this episode, Melissa — Certified Financial Planner, Certified Divorce Financial Analyst, and founder of Mindful Divorce Partners — names the pattern underneath that story. Women who organize their worth around being the good wife and the good mother. Women for whom asking a financial question feels like a betrayal of the role. The thing that freezes them is not fear of divorce. It is fear of the unknown, and the shame of not already knowing.

This is validation dependency at the household level. We trace where it starts, what it costs, and what shifts when a woman stops asking to be reassured and starts asking to be informed.

If you recognized yourself, Andi's Validation Pattern Quiz shows you where this pattern lives in your own life.

GUEST
Melissa Murphy Pavone, CFP®, CDFA® — Founder, Mindful Divorce Partners
Book: Divorce by Design — available on Amazon
Website: mindfuldivorcepartners.com
Instagram & TikTok: @mindfuldivorcepartners 

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

Welcome to Boys & Boardrooms. This is where it begins.

For most of my life I was running on a pattern I couldn't see. Being chosen — by the right partner, for the right role, in the right room — was the metric I kept reaching for. I called it ambition. I called it taste. I called it knowing what I wanted. None of those names were accurate. 

In this opening episode of Boys & Boardrooms, I name the pattern — validation dependency — and walk through how it installed itself in me.

I share:

— What validation dependency actually is, and why it is invisible to the people running on it

 — The first relationship at 16 that taught my nervous system what being chosen felt like 

— The last relationship that showed me the ceiling of the pattern, and the question underneath it: who am I if I'm not being chosen? 

— How the same operating system that ran my romantic life ran my career, and why my nervous system never knew the difference between a relationship and a job title

 — What it costs to build a life that looks like confidence and runs on approval

This episode is the foundation of the show. The frame I'll hold against every story that follows — my own and my guests'.

Follow me on Instagram at @advance_with_andi to catch when new episodes drop.

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.

If Episode 1 was about being chosen, this one is about being needed. Same engine. Different costume.

For years I was the person people came to — the colleague who could carry, the friend who could hold space, the partner who absorbed everyone else's emotional weather. I called it leadership, loyalty, or just being a good person. None of those names were accurate.

In this episode of Boys & Boardrooms, I introduce a specific shape validation dependency takes — emotional containment — and walk through how it shows up at work, in the people we love, and in the work I am still doing in my own life.

I share:

— What containment actually is, and the one-word tell that gives it away every time 

— The colleague who burned out trying to hold her direct report up, and what her story tells you about yours 

— The three questions I use to figure out whether you are supporting someone or quietly carrying them

Episode 1 named the pattern. This episode shows you one of the shapes it takes in capable, generous, high-functioning people. There will be more.

Follow me on @advance_with_andi to catch when new episodes drop, and check out the Validation Pattern Quiz referenced on the show here.

CONNECT
Host: Andi Johnson — Instagram @andijohnsonleadership
Take the Validation Pattern Quiz — link in bio.