The Word That Found Me

One of the hardest parts of starting your own business is figuring out what to call it.

I toiled over this for longer than I care to admit. I wanted something short. Sweet. Maybe irreverent. Possibly alliterative. I made lists. I tested names out loud in the car. I ran them by my husband and girlfriends. I slept on them, ignored them, came back to them. Nothing stuck.

And then, sitting at my desk one morning, I looked down at an old journal. Deep turquoise knicked-up soft leather, a little Moleskine I’d picked up at Anthropologie years ago because it was cute, the way you do. It’s been with me for at least fifteen years; I know this because the first page still holds passwords from a job long gone. Never a diary. Just essentials, the dates and details that needed a home.

There in the center of the cover, embossed in gold in the sweetest little font: quaintrelle. A word I had looked at thousands of times without ever really seeing it.

Kwayn-TRELL. French in origin, though you won’t find it in every dictionary. It refers to a woman who follows her passions, who makes her life a work of art, who doesn’t apologize for the fact that her work and her life are not two separate things. Someone who moves through the world with intention and beauty and a certain refusal to compartmentalize.

Looking back, maybe it was never a coincidence. French has been part of my life since eighth grade. Not just the language, the culture, the sensibility, the way certain ideas only seem to exist in French. A trip to Paris years ago with one of my dearest friends, Mallory, lit something in me: a hunger for cross-cultural experience, for the beauty of lives lived differently, for spaces where I am the one still learning. The language is how I keep it alive. I find myself reaching for French words in the middle of English sentences because sometimes they're simply the only ones that fit.

So when I saw quaintrelle staring back at me that morning, I felt it before I could explain it.

I tell that story not because it was a clever branding exercise, but because it wasn’t. It was recognition. And I think that’s how it goes with the things that matter most. You don’t manufacture them. You pay attention until they surface.

The journal cover that named this business, now framed where I can see it every day.

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I've been thinking about this a lot lately. About voice. About what it takes to find it, trust it, and use it.

Some of that thinking has been professional. After nearly two decades helping leaders and organizations find the right words for the right moments, I've seen what happens when people speak from a place of genuine conviction, and what happens when they don't. The difference isn't style. It's not polish. It's whether someone actually believes what they're saying.

But some of my thinking has been more personal. And it started, as so much of my thinking does these days, with my kids.

I have both a son and a daughter now, and something shifts when you have both. You start noticing the different messages the world sends them about their voices. Who is encouraged to take up space. Who learns, early and often, to make themselves smaller. I find myself paying attention in a way I didn't before, a kind of constant, low-grade auditing of what they're absorbing.

Lately, one of the things they've been absorbing is the film K-Pop Demon Hunters. I won't pretend I've counted how many times we've watched it. But I will say this: I love it. Not just the music, but what it's actually about. Three women who figure out that they aren't just performers, they are the authors of their own power. They use their voices not to entertain, but to push back the darkness.

There's a line from Celine, the mother in the film, that stopped me cold the first time I heard it.

Strength lives in the heart that writes the song.

I posted it on Instagram for International Women's Day and meant every word. But I keep coming back to it, because it isn't just a line about women or girls or even K-pop. It's a line about anyone who has something real to say and hasn't said it yet.

Writing the song is the act of claiming your voice. It's the choice to be an author rather than a subject. It's what I watched my daughter watching on the screen, and what I hope she's quietly filing away somewhere she can find it later.

It's also, honestly, what I'm doing here.

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Starting Quaintrelle meant trusting a voice I had mostly used on behalf of other people. That's not a complaint. I loved that work. I'm extremely proud of it. But there's something clarifying about stepping out from behind the curtain and saying: here's how I actually think. Here's what I believe about the work of communication and leadership. Here's what I've seen, what it means, and why it matters.

So, what does that mean for this blog?

Le Journal is a place for honest thinking. I'll write about strategic communications, leadership, and the mechanics of saying the thing that actually needs to be said. I'll get practical. I'll share frameworks and observations from the field, including the field as I'm navigating it right now, in real time, in the early days of building something new.

I'll also bring in other voices. I have the good fortune of a network full of people who know their stuff, executives and coaches and communicators and thinkers, and I plan to put them to work here. Expect conversations that feel less like interviews and more like the kind of exchange you have with someone at the end of a long conference day when the good stuff finally comes out.

And yes, occasionally, something personal will find its way in. That's in the nature of a quaintrelle. The work and the life are not separate. They inform each other. And sometimes the most useful thing I can offer is the unfiltered version of what I actually think.

This first post was the heartfelt one. You've been warned.

Welcome to Le Journal. Let's get into it.