A Mental Ironman + A $5M Question
My mental Ironman
At the end of last year, I mentioned I’d learned about the WIN Challenge (Workplace Innovation Now), a $60M funding initiative by Melinda French Gates in partnership with Aspen Digital. The challenge is focused on workplace innovation, specifically solutions that advance economic mobility for women.
More Than My Title has always been about shifting binary, conventional narratives and revealing the true value of who people are in their work—beyond job titles, resumes, and outdated definitions of success.
One of the three WIN Challenge tracks focused on workplace narratives, so I decided to apply. What I didn't expect was that it quickly became my version of an MBA capstone project, compressed into 8-weeks (over the holidays)!
The application was intense:
30 pages of narrative sections (all with tight word limits), financial models, detailed timelines, and videos—including a 90-second solution pitch that had to land the entire idea.
How This Unlocked My Soul Truth
At first, the application looked like “a very large grant.” I've done those before. They're a grind, but manageable.
What I didn’t anticipate was that taking this seriously would force me to wrestle with questions I had never truly allowed myself to ask—questions my mind had quietly filed under never, impossible, or don’t bother.
One question, in particular, became the gauntlet:
What would I do if I had $5 million to bring More Than My Title fully into the world?
The WIN Challenge requires every applicant to design their proposal as if they will receive the full $5 million award.
Sitting with that question day after day revealed two things:
I've been thinking too small about MTMT
I knew exactly what I would do (I'd just buried it away)
Since 2020, I've been shaping MTMT in the footsteps of others because I assumed that's what thought leadership looks like: ideas turned into books, courses, workshops, communities, keynotes, consulting, coaching, etc.
But, what if MTMT wasn’t just thought leadership?
What if it wasn't coaching or a service business?
What if it could reach more than thousands—but tens or hundreds of thousands of people?
Remembering what I already knew
Back in 2022, I went on a 10-day solo self-discovery retreat in the Moab desert. In my journal, I wrote down visions. One of them was:
More Than My Title is a center for professional identity development—a unifying body that helps individuals and institutions understand who people are beyond their job titles so that their value is clear and translatable.
What I know now is that professional identity development is fundamentally about sensemaking. It exists upstream of resumes, career coaching, skill building, HR systems, and workforce structures.
So, in the WIN application, I wrote:
Professional identity already shapes nearly every career decision. Employers infer it when hiring and promoting. AI systems approximate it when classifying and matching people to roles. Coaches and leadership programs work around it. Workers feel the consequences when it is unclear or misread. Yet professional identity remains implicit, fragmented, and unevenly understood.
The gift (and the curse) of this application process was the endless revisions required to explain what professional identity development actually is, how it works, why it matters, and why our application is a smart investment.
Week after week, I translated, refined, sculpted, and started over, taking an abstract idea and turning it into something a peer reviewer, evaluation panelist, or WIN Council member could understand well enough to say yes.
The unanticipated gift
This "capstone project" acted like a relentless graduate advisor who forces you to re-examine every thought, claim, philosophy, and theory of change you've ever held.
All the fancy language gets thrown out because mastery comes from distillation and simplification, not overcomplication.
I had to create a proposal worthy of $5M, which meant I had to put MTMT in terms of systems, infrastructure, scalability, and field-building.
That's where the core insight came from:
Professional identity must be treated as shared workforce infrastructure, not a self-improvement activity.
Most workforce initiatives help people tell better stories, market themselves more effectively, or become more visible. Our solution addresses the layer before, how professional identity is defined and valued in the first place.
Professional identity is the invisible layer connecting people and systems. It brings coherence to nonlinear careers, and it communicates value that can't be interpreted through one-dimensional models or performance metrics. I believe this more than ever.
What we proposed
For the $5M, three-year award, we proposed launching the More Than My Title: Center for Professional Identity Development.
The vision includes:
An AI-enabled, non-reductive identity sensemaking tool. Not another personality test or psychometric assessment, but reflective digital tools that help people see themselves in their work—using AI as a mirror, not a sorting mechanism.
Professional identity workshops and trainings. For individuals navigating career transitions or advancement, and for career coaches, managers, and HR leaders who shape how people are seen and valued in the workplace.
Employer pilots. Bringing professional identity language into hiring and advancement decisions so people aren’t evaluated only on vague impressions or narrow skill lists, but on the invisible identities that make them valuable in the first place.
Field-building and field-seeding. Convening practitioners, scholars, and leaders to help professional identity become a recognized, shared field—rather than a fragmented idea living in silos.
I know this is doable in three years. And truly, this is just the start of a decades-long project.
Oh, and did I mention the magnetism?
Before writing a single page of the application, I spent weeks networking and planting seeds to gather partners and collaborators. (Yes, I wasn't alone).
People leaned in.
First degree connections opened second and third degree doors.
I met brilliant thinkers, practitioners, and leaders who didn’t just “like the idea,” but said things like: The world needs this. How can I help?
It showed me what’s possible when a vision resonates deeply.
When I stopped being afraid to speak my truth, and shared my heart and soul desire, serendipity and kismet kept occurring. It was unreal.
During dinner one night, I turned to Brad (my husband) and said, "I don't know what to call what's happening, but there's a magical energetic force here."
I still believe that.
I don't know if this award will come through. But, I know that this process wasn't just about the money.
My worldview has shifted.
I've seen what becomes possible when professional identity is taken seriously and held collectively.
My mantra right now is: I don't know how, but I know it will.
Acknowledgements
I have to acknowledge the team who made this application possible. I had a core group of partners, accountability buddies, and feedback-givers who marched with me week by week.
I truly could not have done this without: Signe, Coree, Adriane, Nikki, and Andrew—whose generosity as a fiscal sponsor still amazes me.
Regardless of outcome, thank you all for being part of this journey.