About Josee
Josee has been a high achiever since the moment life gave her the first “no.”
At twelve, when told her family couldn’t afford a bike, Josee got a paper route and started a babysitting service. It grew so quickly she had to hire her friends to keep up with demand.
Even then, she was doing what would become a pattern throughout her life: taking charge, solving problems, and figuring out how to make things happen.
That drive eventually took her to Canada’s Federal Court of Appeal, where at twenty-two she became one of only ten Executive Officers in the country.
But Josee wasn’t finished taking risks.
While studying business management, she left the security of the courts for the unpredictability of the music industry. She eventually moved from Canada to Nashville, managing artists and overseeing national and international tours.
Different worlds. Different kinds of pressure.
And a front-row seat to what happens to people when the stakes are high, expectations rise, and there’s little room for error.
Then pressure became personal.
For years, the very qualities that helped Josee succeed, including drive, independence, determination, and the ability to push through, also made it difficult to recognize when pushing through was no longer working.
At forty-one, while struggling with alcohol addiction and facing a neurological condition, Josee reached a turning point.
It forced her to become curious about a question that would eventually shape her life’s work:
Why do intelligent, capable people sometimes behave in ways that don’t reflect what they know, value, or intend?
That question led to more than 17 years of independent study, specialized training, and professional certification in neuroscience-informed approaches, hypnotherapy, nervous-system regulation, human behavior, emotional intelligence, and self-awareness.
While living in the Netherlands with her military husband, Josee continued that exploration, becoming a certified yoga instructor and spending time among monks. Those experiences expanded her understanding of awareness, behavior, and the relationship between our internal state and how we show up in the world.
In 2019, Josee put those lessons to the test in another high-pressure environment: entrepreneurship.
Just four months before the pandemic, she opened an award-winning wellness center in Columbia, South Carolina and built and led a 13-person team through one of the most uncertain periods small businesses had faced.
While building the business, Josee was also growing her work as a speaker, bringing her message of self-awareness to audiences beyond the walls of the center. In early 2025, she sold the business to focus fully on speaking, writing, and expanding that work to leaders and organizations.
The experience reinforced something she had seen in courtrooms, backstage, in business, and in her own life:
Pressure doesn’t always bring out our best. It often brings out what we’ve learned to protect.
Unless we can recognize that protective response, it can quietly influence how we communicate, lead, and make decisions.
Wired to Wise
The Science of Self-Awareness, Connection, and Better Decisions
Through her signature keynote, Wired to Wise™, Josee helps leaders understand what pressure does to really smart people.
Her signature concept, WAM™ (Wired Armor Mode), gives leaders a simple language for recognizing the protective state that can take over before their best thinking gets a vote.
Blending practical neuroscience, human behavior, real-world experience, storytelling, and humor, Josee makes complex ideas accessible and gives audiences something they can actually use when the pressure is on.
After a career that has taken her from judges to pop stars, entrepreneurship to monks, Josee has learned something remarkably simple: