— The Person Behind the Work —
About Jessie
30 years of leadership. A lifetime of learning how to show up honestly. This is where the life and the work stop being two separate stories.
I'm a leadership practitioner with 30 years of experience — but that's not really where this story starts.
It starts with a gay boy growing up Baptist in Texas, learning early that parts of him didn't fit the world he was handed. It starts with running through the dark with his mother. With watching the people, he loved struggle. With building a version of himself that was acceptable to everyone around him — and calling that survival.
What I didn't understand then is what I understand now: I wasn't broken. I was adapting. And that adaptation shaped everything about how I lead, how I work, and how I show up in the world.
I was the first in my immediate family to graduate college, the first to reach a level of stability I once couldn't have imagined. I've built a career, a family — a husband, two kids, a dog, a cat, and the full beautiful chaos that comes with all of it. And I've done much of it carrying things I kept off the shelf: PTSD, chronic depression, social anxiety, imposter syndrome. I've managed them, grown through them, and they've made me who I am.
Human Work is where I stop keeping those things on the shelf. It's where I connect the life to the work — because no matter how hard we try to separate them, they were never separate to begin with.
About the Project
Human Work is a blog, vlog, and resource space built around one core idea: the life you've lived and the leader you are aren't two different things.
For decades, many of us have been handed blueprints for what success looks like, what leadership looks like, what a good life means — built by systems that weren't designed with all of us in mind. Most of us found ways to fit ourselves into those blueprints rather than question them. That's what Human Work is here to examine.
This space will explore leadership through five primary lenses:
- The inner work of leadership — what's happening beneath the surface, and why it matters
- Systems we inherited — the structures we've absorbed without always choosing them
- The human experience of work — what it actually feels like to show up every day
- Leadership for the modern world — what's needed now that older models don't account for
- Tools to evolve together — practical resources to help move from insight to action
You'll find personal stories woven throughout, because that's where the real understanding lives. You'll eventually find content in multiple formats written, video, audio because people learn differently, and I want this to reach you in whatever way works best for you.
A few honest notes: I'm a talker more than a writer, so I use dictation and AI tools to help me put words on the page without losing the voice behind them. I'm also a busy human — two kids, a working household, a full career — so this grows as life allows. There's also a book, keynote work, and development offerings in progress, because my brain doesn't really have an off switch.
What I do know is this: I spent a long time waiting until things were perfect before sharing them. I've decided that's over. This is the work. Welcome to it.
"For decades, many of us have been handed blueprints for what success looks like, what leadership looks like, what a good life means — built by systems that weren't designed with all of us in mind. "
Jessie Heath
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