Breaking Rank

What does leadership look like when it doesn't announce itself?

In this episode of Breaking Rank, I sit down with my dear friend TeAnna Strickland, a healthcare regulatory compliance consultant who helps providers navigate Medicare and Medicaid, and one of the most quietly powerful people I know. TeAnna doesn't self-promote. She rarely tells anyone about her accomplishments, and yet she has built a career and a reputation that speak for themselves. She's the kind of leader whose actions carry the room, even when she isn't saying much at all.

We start where she started: growing up multiracial in Omaha, the granddaughter of a Black airman from Washington, DC and a German woman who met on his first base assignment overseas. TeAnna talks about being born in DC, spending her earliest years in Germany speaking both German and English, and then finding her footing as one of very few minority students in predominantly white classrooms. That experience shaped a woman who learned early how to belong to herself first.

From there we get into the heart of it. TeAnna has always marched to the beat of her own drum. She is nearly impossible to peer pressure (and trust me, I have tried), and she credits that unshakeable core to her single mom, her stubborn German grandmother, and a lifetime of deciding for herself who she wants to be.

We also go somewhere a lot of people avoid: pretty privilege, and what it actually costs in the workplace. TeAnna is honest about how being a plus-size, curvier, Black woman changes how you are seen in leadership spaces, how easy it is to become invisible in a room, and how much harder you have to work to prove you belong. She shares how she navigates it, from taking fashion risks in a hot pink suit to setting boundaries that protect her energy and her health.

And she speaks candidly about resilience: leading with rheumatoid arthritis, knowing her limits, and refusing to let a chronic illness or anyone's assumptions define what she is capable of.

This one is for the quiet ones. The people who lead without the noise, who don't fit the mold, and who are still learning that they were always meant to be in the room.

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Connect with TeAnna on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teannaleigh/

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Rachel Clar has a law degree and chose to walk away from it early. Not because she failed, but because she was paying attention. She saw the billable hours, felt the misogyny, received no mentorship, and made a decision that would take 15 years to fully make sense. She went into real estate, affordable housing, urban infill, and renewable energy, and built a career entirely outside the walls of law.

Then the pandemic hit and she couldn't look away from what was happening to the women she'd been quietly inserting herself into conversations with for years. Smart women. Women lawyers who were exhausted, underpaid, invisible to leadership, and had no roadmap for building a book of business no one had ever actually taught them to build. So she built Interconnected Us.

In this episode, Rachel and I talk about what it cost her to leave law when everyone expected her to stay, what 15 years in business development taught her that no law school could have, and how the "good girl" archetype plays out as a very real career barrier for women in Big Law. We dig into non-binary thinking, her study of non-violent communication, and why she calls herself a compassionate disruptor.

We also get into AI, specifically why Rachel believes the timeline is shrinking for women to take the reins of their careers, and why knowing the tools is not enough.

This is a conversation about trusting the long way around, and why for some of us, that's the only path that was ever going to work.

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Leading from the margins looks like this: curriculum and human development strategist Ly'chel Carmichael joins Breaking Rank to talk about dyslexia, ADHD, and why emotional intelligence beats any system.

Ly'chel Carmichael was a non-reader until almost the 9th grade. Undiagnosed dyslexia and dysgraphia, three years of failing the same grade, and a brain injury that finally led to the right diagnosis and the right support. She graduated on time, went on to earn five degrees, and became a special education teacher, curriculum strategist, and multi-hyphenate entrepreneur running ventures in beauty, food, media, and business consulting.

In this episode, host Diana Lauritson talks with Ly'chel about what it actually takes to lead people, not just manage systems, in a world where AI is automating more of the technical work every day. Ly'chel explains why she believes emotional intelligence is the leadership currency that will not be replaced, how assuming positive intent changes outcomes in hard conversations, and why she thinks reading and math scores are a flawed measure of a child's intelligence.

In this episode, you'll hear about Ly'chel's path from undiagnosed learning disabilities to five degrees and a doctoral study in progress. Why she manages people's emotional wellbeing before she manages any program, and how that turned a struggling daycare into a million-dollar facility. The year she took over one of the most challenging classrooms in her school, more than 85 percent of the students with IEPs, and spent two weeks on emotional repair before teaching a single academic lesson (that class ranked third in the state). Why she believes AI is a tool for leaders willing to question it, not a threat to replace them. What culturally responsive curriculum actually requires, and why representation in literature changes outcomes for Black boys in particular. Building four businesses at once: Goddess Lux Beauty, Food by a Goddess, Love Jones Media, and Dream Chasers Business Solutions.

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Breaking Rank is the podcast about leading without permission, hosted by Diana Lauritson. New episodes explore leadership, reinvention, and what it takes to build a life and a career on your own terms. If this episode resonated with you, leave a rating and review, and share it with someone who needs permission to lead differently.

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Megan Senese gave everything to Big Law. When the review that called her work the best they had ever seen came with the smallest raise they could offer, she decided to build something that belonged to her.

In this episode of Breaking Rank, Diana talks with Megan Senese, co-founder of stage and co-host of So Much to Say: A Legal Podcast for People, about leaving the firm and going to market as her full self. Megan started building her visibility before anyone knew she was leaving Big Law, launched a company with $2,000 and a one-year runway, and grew a LinkedIn following of 23,000 by trying every strategy she was told would never work.

They talk personal branding, business development, and why the simplest outreach beats the polished campaigns. They get into abundance over scarcity, being the person who builds the room instead of guarding it, bad bosses, and how Megan turned a childhood label into the name of her show.

For legal marketers, business developers, and anyone considering the leap out of a role that no longer fits.

Find Megan on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/megansenese/ and at stage.guide, and listen to So Much to Say: A Legal Podcast for People wherever you get your podcasts.

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Black. Queer. Reverend.

In this episode of Breaking Rank, Rev. Don Abram refuses to choose between the parts of himself the world keeps asking him to separate. Don grew up in a hand-clapping, toe-tapping Baptist church on the South Side of Chicago, raised by a Jamaican Patois-speaking grandmother who dragged him to service every Sunday. He shares the story of a recurring dream that called him to the pulpit, and the moment his grandmother told him she couldn't interpret it for him, because only he knew what God was telling him. That moment became his first real introduction to queer theology.

Don makes the case that the church has been naming the wrong sin all along, and it has nothing to do with who anyone loves. He also talks about the manufactured care crisis he sees playing out across institutions, the belief that care is a limited resource that only belongs to some, and what it would take to build systems from a place of abundance instead.

This conversation covers his founding of Toward Pride, formerly Pride in the Pews, and what's next for the organization, including a new initiative supporting people living with HIV and a research partnership with Northwestern University exploring faith as a determinant of health.

This is a conversation about theology, identity, and refusing to shrink any part of yourself to be accepted by a room.

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What if we looked for the remarkability in people instead of the disability?

July is Disability Pride Month, which marks the anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so there is no better time to share this conversation.

In this episode of Breaking Rank, the podcast where we lead without permission, I sit down with Roxy B. Rocker, a disability advocate, consultant, and broadcaster, and the founder of Embracing Disability. Roxy has lived with disability her whole life, and she has spent decades turning that lived experience into advocacy, education, and community for others.

We talk about what it means to carry multiple visible and invisible disabilities, and why so much of what people navigate every day is something the rest of the world never sees. Roxy is honest about the discrimination and bullying she has faced, about being told she could not be a leader, and about being doubted even now by people who question whether her disabilities are real.

She shares the turning point that led her to found Embracing Disability: a stretch of hospital stays in 2021 that ended with a serious accident and eleven days in a hospital bed, where she found herself asking for something as basic as dignity. That experience became a mission. Embracing Disability is now a media and education platform built around disability stories, representation, and inclusion, with a magazine, an adaptive clothing line called Roxease, a television project, and a growing community. Roxy is also working to turn it into a nonprofit that teaches broadcasting and hosting skills to people with disabilities.

We get into the psychology of the word "disability" itself, why it can trigger pity instead of connection, and how Roxy reframes her work around inclusion, relationships, and community. We also talk about advocacy and leadership: the history of the disability rights movement, the fight for accessibility and independent living, and her belief that we all have a seat at the table, even when someone would rather we were not in the room.

This is a conversation about dignity, visibility, and the kind of leadership that refuses to disappear. As Roxy puts it, learn, listen, ask questions, and look for the remarkability instead of the disability.

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Learn more about Roxy's work at embracing-disability.com.

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What does it take to stop proving your worth to everyone else and finally live on your own terms?

In this episode of Breaking Rank, I sit down with my longtime friend Nicole Steiner, someone I've watched grow over 20 years of friendship into one of the most driven and authentic leaders I know. Nicole grew up as a brown girl in a white family in Oregon, then spent her early adulthood chasing every external marker of success: the master's degree at 23, the six-figure income, the house, the titles. From the outside she looked like she had it all figured out. On the inside, none of it was filling the cup that actually mattered.

We get into the moment everything cracked open about five years ago. Walking away from a lucrative marketing career. Getting sober. Spending six weeks in Africa. Rebuilding her whole life around boundaries, self-worth, and a simple line she once read on a therapist's wall: you matter.

Nicole also shares how she found real purpose in energy-based medical technology, where she became a top global sales rep by leading with kindness instead of a script. That work is also what allowed her to give her own son a laser treatment that helped him breathe and sleep through the night, which she describes as one of the most meaningful moments of her career. We talk about why she refuses to hide anything, from her plastic surgery to her mental health, and what she's learning about being neurodivergent in a world that expects everyone to be the same. As she puts it, if you expect a fish to climb a tree, it will always look like a failure.

This one is about identity, reinvention, and choosing yourself first. If you've ever felt like the outsider, or like you had to earn your place by becoming whoever everyone else wanted you to be, this conversation is for you.

In this episode:

Connect with Nicole on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-steiner-44298833/

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In this episode of Breaking Rank, we sit down with Nadira Ford-Robbins for a conversation about courage, adversity, and the kind of leadership that gets built in the middle of a crisis instead of before one.

Nadira takes us back to her childhood in Staten Island, growing up in a family of eight with a mother who put herself through nursing school while raising her kids largely on her own. That early exposure to grit and grind followed her into adulthood, through marriage, motherhood, a divorce that reshaped her entire world, and ultimately into a leadership role she wasn't sure she was ready for.

We talk about what it means to lead while you're still rebuilding, how she became chapter president of her organization in the middle of her divorce, and the leadership lessons that carried her through it, including failing forward, eating the frog first, and learning to let criticism roll off without letting it stop her. Nadira also opens up about raising a Black gay son and helping him navigate identity and rejection in a world that isn't always built for him.

This is a conversation about resilience, reinvention, and refusing to let one devastating season define the rest of the story. Nadira reminds us that leadership doesn't always look like the version we were sold, and that showing up in your own way still counts.

Reinvention isn't a one-time event. Just ask David Ackert.

David Ackert is the co-founder and CEO of PipelinePlus, bestselling author of The Short List, Gold Award winner for nonfiction book of the year, and one of the most respected voices in legal industry business development. But before all of that, he was an immigrant kid navigating the hostage crisis, a bullying victim who found refuge in theater, and a trained actor who landed roles on The West Wing, CSI: Miami, and JAG before walking away from Hollywood entirely to build something of his own.

In this episode of Breaking Rank, David opens up about what it really means to reinvent yourself, not once, but multiple times, and what leadership looks like when your path doesn't follow any conventional playbook. We talk about growing up between two cultures, the typecasting he faced in Hollywood, the moment he decided to leave it all behind, and how he built PipelinePlus into a firm that now serves some of the most elite law firms in the country.

We also get into the mindset behind it all, including why David swears by Theodore Roosevelt's "comparison is the thief of joy," and why he believes the legal marketing community is more capable of reinvention than it gives itself credit for.

This is one of those conversations that goes way beyond business development. It's about identity, resilience, and what becomes possible when you stop letting the world decide who you are.

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What does it really mean to lead — and who gets to do it?

In this episode of Breaking Rank, host Diana Lauritson sits down with her best friend and HR veteran Angela Jones for a no-holds-barred conversation about leadership: where it comes from, who it's designed for, and what it costs to show up in spaces that weren't built with you in mind.

From the earliest leadership examples they witnessed growing up (a single mom grinding through it all, a dad whose influence wasn't always healthy, and a corporate mentor who led with empathy instead of ego) Diana and Angela get real about the moments that shaped how they understand power, authority, and what it actually looks like to lead well.

They go there on the tough stuff too: the exhausting reality of walking into rooms where your race arrives before you do, the double standards Black and mixed-race professionals navigate every single day, and why "being professional" often just means being someone you're not.

But this episode isn't just about what's broken. It's about what's possible. Diana and Angela dig into what it means to lead without permission, to stop waiting for a stamp of approval and start showing up with intention, integrity, and a little less need for the crowd's validation.

Whether you're deep in your leadership journey or still wondering if there's even a seat at the table for you, this one's for you.

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