Now

Updated January 9, 2026

People don’t care about what you’re going to do; they care about what you are doing now and what they can learn from you.

What Happened Before Now? How did we get here?

For decades I was the consultant for kick-ass professionals. Plenty of go-getters thrived with my guidance, and seeing them achieve their stretch goals and “financial safety” landing was my jam.

Want to know why I stopped? Because the majority wanted someone else to do the work for them. I’m the guide who knows the path and has the questions to bring out the gifts and the story you want others to understand. I didn’t get paid to build someone else’s dream.

After hundreds of consultation engagements and strategy sessions, I faced a harsh truth: Most adults would rather daydream about change than roll up their sleeves and make it happen.

The hard choices and paths to change were clearly defined and visualized in the strategy work we did. Their day of reckoning and points of no return were known and committed to writing. They just didn’t want to do the work to get down the field and across the goal line.

That’s when I changed my mind, changed my life, and put all of my attention and resources on the only winning combination for making sure I spent the rest of my life in the right place with the right people.

The winning combination:

• Professionals: Individuals committed to a life of learning and service.
• Communicators: Individuals who love words, truth, storytelling, and understanding among humans.
• Gifted adults: Individuals who may accept or deny they are gifted, even though they have dozens of traits of giftedness evident in their every thought and action.
• People past 45: Individuals with lived experience and wisdom that comes from many achievements and mistakes. Women have experienced renewal after menopause, and men are done with their midlife crisis identity.
• Real and ready individuals. Individuals who have been through one or more fires of major transformation, grief and renewal, or reality checks with their health, career, finances, relationships, or all of that at once. They are done thinking that someday is another day in the week. They don’t need another course, another download, or a map. They need to make their next move today, without any more of those delays and detours that only drained their energy and cash.

What you can expect depends on where you connect with me.

I am a journalist, writer, editor, and creator of the Wishes to Action consulting experience.

The natural extension and amplification of 40 years of success in consulting opened many doors to become the founder and builder of a global online community with gifted professionals and communicators who have advanced past career ladders and are living out their calling and writing the third chapter of their lives.

Let’s look at each of those closer so you can decide where to connect with me.

Wishes to Actions

My greatest joy is when someone takes what I’ve done with them, completes their own journey, and then writes it up better than I ever could. Straight from Kate Van Name’s lived experience to you, here is what can happen to you in Wishes to Actions.

From Wishes to Work

An exploration of how honest commitment—not aspiration or possibility—is what turns ideas into outcomes and plans into lived reality.

It often begins quietly.

A kitchen table. A back porch. A slow morning where the conversation drifts toward plans that haven’t quite decided whether they’re real yet. Someone says they should get to something this year. Someone else nods. No one interrupts. There’s an understanding, almost instinctive, that not every sentence is meant to become action. Some words are just trying themselves on.

That distinction — between what’s said and what’s done — has always mattered where I come from. Not because people are harsh about it, but because time, weather, money, and energy have a way of clarifying what’s real. You learn early that intentions don’t move boats, finish harvests, or keep commitments. Action does.

Years ago, I was introduced to a deceptively simple framework that named this truth with precision: three words that look ordinary until you realize how thoroughly they sort reality from fantasy — should, could, would. I encountered it through one of my mentors, Georgia Patrick, the owner of The Communicators, through a consulting program she developed and used called Wishes to Action. It was not presented as a lesson or a training module. It was a working discipline — a method the consultants at The Communicators applied in real engagements, with real clients, to move ideas out of abstraction and into action.

The elegance of the framework is that it mirrors how life actually works.

Should is almost always the starting point. It sounds responsible. Earnest. Well-intended. We should grow the business by twenty-five percent. We should clean out the garage. We should finally get serious about that idea we’ve been talking about for years. Should carries the tone of obligation, but it rarely carries commitment. It’s aspiration wearing the costume of necessity.

In organizations, should is where wish lists masquerade as strategy. In families, it’s where unresolved chores linger. In individuals, it’s where guilt quietly accumulates. None of this is malicious. Should isn’t lying. It’s just not deciding.

Then comes could, which is where things finally get interesting.

Could asks a different question altogether: if this actually mattered, if we were willing to engage with it honestly, what are the real ways it might be done? This is the creative middle — the space where imagination has permission to stretch. Here, options multiply. Pathways appear. Constraints are explored rather than denied. You can make the could list as long as you want, and that’s exactly the point. This is where innovation lives. This is where strategy begins to take shape — not as declarations, but as possibilities.

But possibility is not truth.

That arrives with would.

Would — or will — is where the conversation changes temperature. It’s where ego steps back and reality speaks plainly. Would asks what you are actually going to do, given your time, your resources, your energy, your temperament, your competing obligations, and your willingness to stay with the work after the novelty wears off.

That list is always shorter. And that’s not a problem — it’s the breakthrough.

This is the moment where fantasy, optimism, and performance give way to honesty. Where you stop negotiating with who you wish you were and start accounting for who you actually are. Would is not about potential; it’s about intent. And intent is what turns plans into outcomes.

This is where strategy either becomes credible or collapses.

A strategy is not a three-to-five-year wish list. It’s not a document full of admirable goals that no one has the resources, authority, or appetite to execute. Real strategy is built only from what an organization will do. Anything else is theater. And theater doesn’t survive weather, budget cuts, leadership changes, or fatigue.

The same principle applies to process work. A process built around what people should do or could do is already broken. Processes only function when they describe what will actually happen — not what looks good on paper, not what someone hopes will occur, but what people will reliably do when the day gets busy and priorities collide. Anything else creates friction, disappointment, and quiet erosion of trust.

What makes the Wishes to Action framework so enduring is that it removes moral judgment from the equation. There is no virtue in over-promising. There is no failure in naming limits. Some things are true have-tos — legal, regulatory, fiduciary obligations — and those are straightforward. You do them because you must. Everything else deserves honesty.

And honesty produces relief.

When people finally move off endless wish lists and unbounded possibility and name what they will do, something shifts. Expectations reset. Trust strengthens. Energy returns. Teams stop carrying invisible disappointment. Individuals stop negotiating with guilt. Resources get allocated to work that will actually be finished.

Momentum becomes possible — not because ambition has grown, but because alignment has.

This is true in organizations, in partnerships, and in lives. It’s the same logic that quietly governs how responsibilities divide themselves over time in families. People gravitate toward what they will actually do — not what they think they should enjoy, not what looks fair in theory, but what fits who they are. When that truth is acknowledged instead of resisted, systems work better. Resentment fades. Reliability increases.

The outcome of this exercise is not smaller vision. It’s truer vision. It’s the confidence that comes from knowing your commitments match your capacity. It’s the freedom of choosing integrity over optics. It’s the power of doing fewer things well instead of many things halfway.

Reality, it turns out, isn’t limiting. It’s grounding. And grounded things endure storms.

That’s something the Shore has always known — not because it says so out loud, but because life here requires it. Promises are personal. Follow-through matters. Truth travels fast. And over time, people learn that credibility isn’t built on what you wish you could do, but on what you will actually carry.

That understanding — quiet, practical, and deeply human — is what turns wishes into actions, and plans into lives that hold.

Community Belonging and Participation

The online experience with me is through Substack, and that ranges from free subscriber to a paid option that gives you four, one-hour phone calls with me, in four weeks, to move from one wish to one action you cannot screw up or miss.

Here’s why GPC members care about what I’m doing now and what they can learn from me—plus gain from the collective wisdom of others like them in the community.

• They care about connection with other people and their communication experience tells them that happens only with truth, understanding, meaning, and context.
• They are moving fast, living large, and going through transitions in work situations, relationships, and everyday decisions. At the same time their customers, subscribers, and all who want to know them are going through changes and shifting needs. That means our main character in this story—you or the gifted professional and communicator like you, is constantly in an updating and rewriting mode. Your website, your LinkedIn profile, your next article, and your last article never seem finished, clear enough, or good enough to get you to your goals
• They have goals in seven areas, all at once and interconnected. They struggle to keep the story short, clear, and accurate while covering the main points in the seven areas, which are 1) health/physical 2) financial 3) family/emotional 4) professional/intellectual development 5) spiritual/personal development 6) social, and 7) environment/relationships.
• What they learn from me is who they really are and how to rewrite their story. As a lifelong writer, then journalist, editor, producer, and story investigator, I serve as the Storytelling Detective for individuals.

I work with individuals because decades of working with boards of directors, committees, and task forces taught me that everything starts and ends with the individual. That one person, that one life journey, and that one story is the only thing that is real. Everything else is ephemeral. Everything else is a connection and collection of individuals. Everything else is conceptual, somewhere in someone’s brain.

What is the Magic and the Future of the Community for Gifted Professionals & Communicators?

What happens now and in the next three months depends on who comes forward to help me find answers to these questions:

• What are the thoughts and challenges of the gifted professional and communicator? Do they want the wisdom, experience, and networks of relationships I built over the past 40 years?
• Who wants a safe place kind of container to explore the world as it appears to the super smart, highly sensitive, empathetic professionals and communicators?
• Who is ready to write the third chapter of their story and needs a “right now” editor and story detective to help them with the rewrite or finish what they started? Who is ready to write with me, now—no more online courses, workbooks, or YouTube videos?
• Beyond me, who else is obsessing about brain science? Who wants to learn more about what’s inside the mind of the professional and communicator?
• What happens to the authentic you, in your brain and soul when the world keeps pressing with external expectations and egos?
• Is there value in harvesting stories and secrets from decades of work with high-performing executives and innovative entrepreneurs when I was the driver of game-changing professional development and certifications for American-created organizations?
• What is the best way to help the individual advance from the status of a name on the mailing list into introductions into our networks of trusted relationships we’ve cultivated for decades?
• What stories shall I write for subscribers who want to learn from my quests for frameworks and secrets for growing a profession, a communication business, a future workforce, and a happier life?

Texas 2026