Meet The Founder
Meet Your Mentor
Sarah’s Story
Hi, I’m Sarah! I am obsessed with Resilience & Innovation change through the lenses of new Product & Service Development, Employee & Customer Experience, and Culture, Community & Learning. Throughout my career, I’ve taken on white space projects and built successful and motivated teams to bring innovative ideas to life through extensive research, design thinking and agile processes followed by engaging social, digital and live learning experiences to encourage adoption and change.
I’m also a recovering perfectionist and a serial burnout-overachiever, which is why I created Dreamgarten. In my 20-plus years as an innovation evangelist, I’ve consistently seen how burnout and chronic stress affect the way I’m able to engage in meaningful work and how they inhibited my ability to allow new and exciting ideas to come to life.
I see myself in so many people who are showing up in their lives restricted by a stuck nervous system operating in fight, flight, or freeze due to long-term exposure to stress and trauma. As a result, they are constantly navigating the overwork – burnout cycle, often without even knowing what’s happening!
For decades, I was stuck in the burnout cycle, and my body and mind suffered because of it. Throughout school and into my professional life, I would work myself to sickness (mental or physical), take a vacation or a leave of absence and then go right back to it. Over time and to cope, I began to study methods to manage my own severe PTSD-induced anxiety and panic attacks through breathwork, yoga, dance, and somatic movement.
Through these practices, I started to unravel my perfectionist, overachiever tendencies and help foster a deeper connection to my mind and body. Focused on my own wellbeing, I started to make space for a life that was less a pursuit of perfection and achievement and more a pursuit of intention, of creativity, of curiosity, of spaciousness, of meaning and of impact so that I could decide what was the next right innovative action for me.
At the same time, in my professional life, I began to create new resilient ways of working because of the personal work I was doing myself. I saw how resilience-based practices were a catalyst for innovative change over and over again. The more I practiced these methods, the more they worked their magic, and it’s evidence-based magic at that!
That’s where Dreamgarten was born, at the intersection of my own experiments to recover from burnout and my realization that I was not alone in struggling to find ways to change behavior and take innovative action. I believe that when you guide people to build resilient practices and focus on their own wellbeing first, you create space for change that allows for greater innovative action and impact!
Sarah
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