Introducing This Blog: From Reflection to Connection
Exploring how we learn, lead, and live—as people, parents, and professionals—across business, education, and the impact sector.
Who this is for:
Readers curious about how personal reflection shapes leadership, learning, and organizational growth
Those who appreciate the intersection of the inner world and the systems we live and work in
Drawing from over 400 essays written across 13 years of transitions, learning, and cross-sector work, this new English series explores how reflection deepens learning—and how inner growth connects to outer change.
A Thirteen-Year Journey of Writing and Becoming
Since 2012, I’ve written more than 400 pieces—mostly in Japanese—capturing moments of transition, learning, and discovery. I began writing while studying at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, originally as a way to document my workdays and share what I was learning in class with friends and colleagues back home in Japan. Those reflections—part academic synthesis, part personal observation—soon grew into something larger.
As I moved to New York and began working in the nonprofit sector, they evolved into a living conversation about how people learn, how systems shift, and what it means to grow through change. What began as student notes became a 13-year archive of lived experience—tracing how curiosity, humility, and experimentation shape the way we see the world.
This Substack is a continuation of that thread—an attempt to connect past reflections with the ongoing questions I hold today through the lens of my work today.
How I Arrived at This Perspective
When you visit the Founder page on my website, you’ll find a short biography. But behind those lines are a series of transitions that have shaped how I understand learning, leadership, and transformation.
From Business to Education
Before graduate school, I worked in talent-development consulting in the private sector. What drew me to education wasn’t a plan to “enter the field,” but a question that had been quietly growing in me:
How do adults learn—and what helps that learning transform into lasting change?
That question led me to grad school.
As someone with no formal background in education, I approached the experience with curiosity—and a sense of wonder about the mechanics of how people grow and make meaning.
From Private Sector to Social Impact
After graduate school, I transitioned into the nonprofit world, joining an organization at the intersection of impact investing and social entrepreneurship—a field that, at the time, was still nascent. It felt like a living laboratory for new ways of driving change.
Back then, the phrase impact sector didn’t yet exist in common language. To be part of something so experimental and values-driven felt deeply fulfilling, and in many ways, privileged—an opportunity that hardly existed when I first entered the workforce in the 2000s.
Nearly a decade later, I began seeing similar conversations take root in Japan. A small but growing group of peers from my generation started embracing entrepreneurship and portfolio careers, exploring ways of working that better aligned with personal values.
It’s still far from the norm—but witnessing these divergent value choices emerge within what is often seen as a homogeneous society has given me real hope.
At the same time, I’ve seen the nonprofit and for-profit sectors converge—CSR initiatives, mission-driven startups, and hybrid social ventures blending approaches once thought incompatible. The pandemic years accelerated that merging, as people re-examined what work means, how much of themselves to give, and how to find purpose amid uncertainty.
The macro environment was unstable, yet the inner search for meaning only deepened.
That paradox—the instability of systems and the clarity of self—has become a recurring theme in my work and writing.
Lessons from Everyday Leadership, Systems, and Community
Professionally and personally, the past decade has felt like a continuous leadership laboratory—work, life, and relationships inviting me to grow in unexpected ways. Moving across countries, I’ve shifted organization types and roles across sectors, worked in-office, hybrid, and fully remote, became a partner and a parent, and now I’m building my own journey as a founder. Each turn has asked me to meet myself differently.
Through these transitions, I’ve learned:
What it means to reach out for help instead of over-functioning
How to notice my own triggers, desires, and fears
That coaching—whether practiced formally or informally—is one of the most effective tools for navigating human complexity
And perhaps most profoundly, I’ve learned that we are all part of systems.
Whether it’s understanding how my own body responds to stress and allergy through patterns that mirror my environment, recognizing the family systems we and our partners carry, or observing organizational dynamics at play in teams—seeing through a systems lens changes everything.
When I step back and view challenges as systemic rather than purely individual, I gain clarity and compassion. Patterns become visible. What once felt personal begins to reveal its interdependence. This shift—from Who’s at fault? to What’s the system doing?—has been one of the most powerful tools in my growth.
But these insights haven’t come in isolation.
Over the years, I’ve found strength and learning through many forms of community—from the long-standing network of Japanese professional women in New York that I help co-organize, to smaller, distributed circles of three or four people that have accompanied me through different seasons of life.
Each of these communities—large or intimate—has offered something essential:
the courage to live authentically,
the safety to be vulnerable,
and the freedom to let go of inherited assumptions and narratives about who we are supposed to be.
In a world defined by uncertainty, instability, and what we often call VUCA, these relationships have grounded me in optimism. They remind me that learning and leadership are never solitary acts—they are relational and systemic by nature.
Working across lines of difference while holding a shared identity has shown me that transformation rarely happens alone. It happens in dialogue, in reflection, and in the collective courage to grow together.
A New Chapter: From Employee to Entrepreneur
Now, as I navigate the shift from employee to business owner, I find myself back in the learning seat—designing systems that align with my values, pace, and purpose.
It’s humbling, creative, and often messy, but deeply fulfilling. This blog is part of that evolution. It’s where I continue to reflect on how we live, learn, and lead with greater self-awareness and intentionality.
What You’ll Find Here
Over the coming months, I’ll share essays—some newly written, others drawn from my 400-piece archive—that explore:
Transformation: what change really looks and feels like
Leadership: the subtle dynamics of power, presence, and influence
Learning: how adults grow through experience, not instruction
Coaching & Accompaniment: what it means to walk with others through change
Culture & Systems: how Japanese and global perspectives meet, blend, and evolve
My hope is that these reflections offer pause points—moments to step back, reconnect, and reorient toward what truly matters.
This blog isn’t about expertise. It’s about working things out in public. If you’re in transition, I hope it’s useful.