I’m Grace Stierwalt, author, speaker, sales executive, founder and creator of Grace in Duality.
Yes, I have the credentials you are apparently supposed to have if you are going to ask people to buy your book or pay to hear you speak: a TED Talk, congressional testimony, executive leadership, a startup, an acquisition and years of building businesses, selling complicated things and walking into rooms full of powerful people and getting them to listen.
Well, my alter ego had all of that.
Her name was Grace McCubbin.
Grace McCubbin built one hell of a life. She was ambitious, capable, polished and relentless. She became extremely good at being the woman people expected her to be.
Grace Stierwalt is what happened when I stopped being her.
After my startup, marriage and eventually corporate career unraveled, I started writing what became Two Things Can Be True, a deeply personal book about identity, contradiction, ego, grief, motherhood, love, failure, judgment and the strange process of realizing you can do everything right and still hate the life you built.
I finished the book.
The next day, I got fired from what I very much hope was my last corporate job.
Subtle.
I am not a guru.
I am not emerging from the wreckage fully formed with answers for anyone else. I am still standing in it, actively building the next version of my life while talking about what I am learning in real time.
I also deeply dislike social media, personal branding and most of the performative smarminess involved in selling yourself on the internet, which makes this particular career pivot extremely inconvenient.
But somewhere in the process of dismantling Grace McCubbin and becoming Grace Stierwalt, I was forced to confront something I had spent years minimizing.
My voice carries weight.
Grace McCubbin spent decades building credibility, access and authority. Grace Stierwalt gets to decide what to do with it.
I have decided to lend it.
My work is not about giving women answers. I believe most women already know far more than they trust themselves to act on.
My work is about shortening the distance between knowing and doing.
Sometimes that means permission.
Sometimes it means helping a woman tolerate judgment.
Sometimes it means looking someone directly in the eye and telling her to do the thing she already knows she needs to do.
I call that acceleration of acceptance.
I cannot do your work for you.
I cannot tell you what your life should look like.
But I can help you stop waiting for someone else to validate what you already know.
And if you need to borrow my authority for a while until you can hear your own, I am willing to lend it.
