What if your weirdness isn’t a flaw—but the portal to your purpose?

What if the very things you were told to tone down—your intensity, your intuition, your way of seeing behind the veil—are the exact things that make you magnetic, visionary, and wildly effective as a leader?

In this week’s powerful episode, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the one and only Kylie Ota—a woman whose wisdom, strategy, and soul left me speechless (and furiously scribbling notes).

Kylie is a NLP-certified business strategist, former Army Behavioral Science Specialist, and a burnout recovery expert who’s walked the walk. After nearly two decades managing multi-million dollar projects in oil and gas, Kylie hit a wall—what she calls medically-diagnosed adrenal burnout. And when her doctor told her, “You can’t keep doing this if you want to heal,” she made a radical choice: to leave her high-paying, high-pressure career to preserve the health she fought so hard to reclaim.

Now she helps high-achieving female entrepreneurs do the same—not just recover, but rewire their way of leading so it’s sustainable, soulful, and strategic. Through a genius blend of DISC assessments, automation, systems thinking, and deep energetic awareness, Kylie decodes leadership patterns and helps women plug the hidden leaks—time, energy, money, and ideas—that are draining their impact and their income.

Early in our conversation, Kylie dropped this gem that stopped me in my tracks:

“I get to give these false or perceived identities back to the owner who projected them on me. This jacket belongs to you. I don’t need to wear it anymore.”

Come on. YES.

Kylie shared how, for much of her life, she felt like the outsider. The weird one. The intuitive one who saw the things no one else said out loud. But rather than dull that gift to fit into corporate boxes, Kylie started asking better questions:

What if my weirdness is my wisdom?
What if my intuition is my edge?
What if seeing people clearly is my superpower?

And instead of burying it under spreadsheets and strategy, she built an entire leadership approach around it.

Now she works with female founders and CEOs to map the unseen patterns that are holding their teams—and themselves—back. And get this: she quantifies it. She created a calculator that measures the cost of things like unclear communication, control issues, perfectionism, missed deadlines, performative behavior, and wasted meetings.

You know I had to go there. As someone who’s coaching and counseling high-performing women to heal perfectionism every damn day, I had to ask:

What’s the real cost of perfectionism in leadership?

Kylie’s answer was sobering—and liberating.

She talked about how so many of us (especially those of us with “D” energy on the DISC: direct, driven, decisive) spend countless hours trying to control everyone’s emotions, reactions, deliverables, and experiences. We edit, second-guess, spin, and hold meetings to avoid actually doing the hard thing: having an honest conversation.

And every single one of those moments is costing you time, energy, money, and creative capacity.

Kylie has a way of articulating what so many of us feel but haven’t had language for. Her brilliance is helping heart-led leaders understand that our people problems are our business problems—and it doesn’t make us bad leaders. It means we have room to grow, and tools to help us get there.

The world is shifting. The old paradigm of command-and-control leadership is cracking. And what’s emerging is a call for heart-led women who are willing to throw down the masks, let go of the false identities, and lead with wholeness.

This conversation with Kylie reminded me that we don’t need to become someone else to be great leaders. We need to become more of ourselves. And we need to get strategic about it—not just spiritual.

She bridges both.

So whether you're leading a team, a family, a movement, or just your own damn self—this episode is your permission slip to stop trying to do leadership perfectly, and start doing it powerfully.

Your weirdness is not your weakness—it’s your way through.
Embrace it. Lead with it. And watch what happens next.

Connect with Kylie!

Website: http://kylieota.com/

Podcast: The Burnt Out Entrepreneur Podcast

Instagram: @kylie.ota

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alohaunveiled

Take care of yourself and there for each other!

XO, Brooke Jean