I Skipped the Croisette This Year. I Chose Sedona Instead and Came Home Transformed.

What we experience does not define us. What we become through it does.

In June, the annual Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity took place. For those who don't know, it's a global gathering of the industry's most brilliant leaders, executives, and creatives across marketing and advertising — and it's one I've looked forward to every year. Over the years, Cannes has given me great connections, expanded my personal brand, and sparked some of the most inspiring conversations of my career.

This year, many of my friends and colleagues showed up to Cannes like never before. I am genuinely proud and inspired by everything I saw. And still, my priorities were different this year.

Salon Culture Conversations Cannes 2005

For most of my adult life, I gave everything to two things: my family and my career. And for a long time, I thought that was enough. In the pursuit of both, exceeding goals, managing it all, loving on the people I love, I got lost somewhere in the middle. Somewhere along the way, I got deprioritized. 

Like many women leaders and high performers in corporate America, I have experienced severe burnout, extreme stress, and the kind of toxic work environment that quietly dismantles you from the inside out. And for many of us, the work doesn't stop at work. It follows us home into what researchers call the "second shift" — motherhood, family, the invisible labor that never makes it onto a performance review.

The data backs this up. According to McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org's Women in the Workplace 2025 report, 60% of women in senior-level positions are experiencing burnout. For Black women, that number climbs to 80% of senior-level Black women living with chronic burnout.

These statistics reflect my experience, but they don't fully capture what that burnout actually cost me. Because while I was navigating workplace stress and pushing through, I was also grieving the loss of a child, entering middle age, and living in high-functioning postpartum depression. A layered cake of suffering that nobody could see from the outside.

When I took my career pause, which I wrote about in an earlier post, I made a vow to myself. I would take care of myself: mind, body, and spirit. I came back to a truth I had abandoned: you cannot pour from an empty cup. I made a conscious decision that I would no longer just survive. I would thrive. I would build a life that didn't require me to constantly go, constantly hustle, and constantly sacrifice my own well-being in the process.

I began filling my own cup. Repairing what was broken. And creating something new, a different narrative of what success looks like. One that doesn't require me to suffer for it.

One of the most grounding practices in this journey has been learning to listen to my body, and to actually give it what it needs. Not overthinking it. Not analyzing it to death. Just trusting it, and meeting it where it is.

So when the time came to decide about Cannes, my soul was clear. It didn't need the Croisette this year.

It needed calm.

So I made a decision. I would plan my own solo wellness retreat,  and I chose Sedona.

I set two rules for myself before I left, and I kept them the entire trip:

Rule one: Do not overschedule. Do not commit yourself to things out of obligation or habit.

Rule two: Listen to your body and give it what it needs.

That's it. Simple and harder than it sounds for a woman who has spent years optimizing every hour of her day. If I felt tired, I slept. If the Arizona heat was too much, I stayed inside. No itinerary to stick to. No performance to manage. Just me, listening to myself for the first time in a long time.

My days were filled with early morning walks, sitting by the water, journaling, and a little spa time that I didn't have to earn or justify. But the most beautiful part, the thing I didn't fully expect, was the gift of simply sitting with myself. The quiet. The stillness. The space to hear my own thoughts without the noise of everyone else's needs filling them up first.

For every busy woman, leader, executive, and mom reading this: I highly recommend taking time away from the responsibilities, the noise, and the chaos, to come back to yourself. It doesn't have to be Sedona. It doesn't have to be a week. Even a weekend or a single night away in a hotel can do more for your nervous system than months of pushing through.

Here is what my solo trip gave me:

Clarity

When you have been through what I have been through, grief, burnout, the physical and emotional shifts of midlife — there comes a moment where you stop and realize you no longer recognize yourself. Not because you broke. Because life reshaped you. And nobody warned you it was happening. The peace and quiet of Sedona gave me space to connect with myself at my core to identify what still fits, and what no longer has a place, both within myself and in my life.

Creativity

Nature and silence gave my brain room to breathe. When your mind is so full of to-do lists and obligations, it creates a blockage where creativity cannot flow through a congested mind. In that open space, ideas started to surface. Good ones. Big ones. I came home with the beginnings of a master plan I'm still working through.

Gratitude

Not everyone has the opportunity to board a plane and sit in the breathtaking beauty that is Sedona. I was overcome with gratitude just to be there, to sit in that landscape and be in awe of what God created. Working in corporate, especially in marketing where everything is tied to sales goals and quarterly pressure, can create a pressure cooker that makes it easy to lose sight of how much there is to be thankful for. Sedona reminded me.

Perspective

Challenges and suffering are not punishments. They are signals. They are invitations to grow. Somewhere on those red rock trails, my internal question shifted from why is this happening to me, to this is happening for me. What we experience does not define us. What we become through it does. So much of our pain lives not in our circumstances but in our relationship to them.

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I am genuinely grateful for everything that trip gave me. But I want to be honest about something: I don't think I would have received any of it if I hadn't already been doing the work. The wellness habits, the self-care practices, the small daily choices to prioritize myself, those started well before I ever boarded that plane to Arizona. Sedona was the harvest. The seeds had already been planted.

So if you take nothing else from this post, take this: start somewhere.

Carve out quiet time in your daily life, even five minutes. Block time on your work calendar for thinking and innovation the same way you block time for meetings. Wake up before your family and sit with your coffee or your tea and simply be. You don't have to go to Sedona. You just have to choose yourself a little, every single day.

It is remarkable what starts to grow in that space.

#packlight

Candii