Twenty years exposing the gaps between how Fortune 100 systems were supposed to work and how they actually did. Then I turned the same lens on the one system I'd been ignoring the whole time. What I found became The Inner Audit™.
Former CPA turned Founder, Author, and Tedx Speaker
Not the polished version. Not the one that begins with credentials and ends with a methodology. The real one — the one with a job loss and a mentor dying on a video call and a community I built in my living room during a pandemic because something in me knew that what I was carrying, other people were carrying too. That's the story of The Inner Audit™. Not built from theory. Built from what happened to me.
My mother said: go get your accounting degree first. It's a great foundation. She was right. She just didn't know what I'd end up building on top of it.
I went to Hampton University, majored in accounting, and graduated magna cum laude. Then straight to PricewaterhouseCoopers — the training ground for people who want to understand how systems actually work, not just how they're supposed to. I spent years learning to find the gap between what an organization said it was doing and what it was actually doing. Find the gap. Name it. Fix it. That was the job. I was good at it.
And I was a complete skeptic about anything that couldn't be measured. Meditation? Mindfulness? I was an accountant. I didn't do woo woo. I did data. If you couldn't put a number on it, I wasn't convinced.
That was about to change.
The Career Arc
External audit. Learning where systems break from the inside.
Passed CPA Exam. Team built. Reputation built.
Promoted into one of the most demanding roles of my career — automating hundreds of governance controls across a massive organization. The pressure was relentless. The environment was hard. And for the first time, I started to notice that my usual strategies for managing stress were no longer working. A colleague suggested meditation. I dismissed it immediately. Then I tried it anyway — because I was out of other options. Within months, the data was undeniable. I brought the idea to our CHRO. The company started to listen.
Five people. A video call. No curriculum — just presence. The community grew to five hundred leaders in eighteen months, funded by the largest ERG at the company, built entirely on word of mouth. When functional leaders started calling — asking for leadership development experiences to help their teams navigate pressure and find clarity — that was the start of the speaking career.
The methodology became the mission. The Inner Audit™ was born.
In 2019, I started meditating — not because I had it figured out, but because the pressure had exceeded every strategy I had. I gave it twenty minutes a day. Within months, something measurable had shifted. I started telling people. Quietly, in the margins of existing conversations. When the pandemic hit in 2020, I opened a small group. Five people, a video call, an hour of breath work and honest conversation about what we were carrying. No script. No pitch. Just presence.
Word spread the way things spread when they're actually working. Within eighteen months, the Stillness Loop had grown to over five hundred leaders — professionals, executives, and people who had found their way in through a friend who said you need to be in this room. The company's largest ERG took notice and provided funding. Facilitators joined. And then functional leaders started calling, asking if I could bring this work to their teams. That phone call — not a stage, not a conference — was where the speaking career began.
Around this same time, I hit the manager jackpot.
After years of difficult environments and hard rooms, I landed a role under a leader who was everything I'd been waiting for. Supportive without being soft. Honest without being cruel. The kind of manager who saw your potential clearly and told you the truth about it — even when the truth was hard. He was a forty-year veteran of the company, a mentor to senior leaders across the organization, and the first person in my professional life who made me feel like I was exactly where I was supposed to be.
We were on a video call. He was mid-sentence — giving me feedback I needed to hear, about showing up in the details, about the effortful half of effortless effort — when he stopped. And just like that, he was gone.
I watched it happen on screen. I was the last person he spoke to.
What I saw in that moment — and in the years of watching brilliant leaders hit walls they couldn't name — was that nobody had ever taught us how to lead ourselves. Not under real pressure. Not when everything was on the line. I had spent twenty years auditing systems. I realized the most important system in any organization had never been examined. The one running the person at the top.
I didn't push through. For the first time in my career, I stopped. I took a leave. Then a full sabbatical. I went to a vineyard in Georgia and filled a journal. I went to Peru. I sat with what I'd seen, what I'd been carrying, and what I'd been avoiding for years.
A gap between who I was showing up as and what was actually running underneath. Capable and composed on the outside. Exhausted, overextended, and operating on fumes on the inside. The same kind of gap I'd spent twenty years finding in other people's organizations.
The Inner Audit™. The same approach I'd used to examine broken systems for two decades — applied to the one system nobody was looking at. The person making all the decisions.
I left the corporate world, sold my house, downsized everything, and gave myself one job: build this for real. I enrolled in an entrepreneur accelerator, went through a speaker bootcamp, and worked harder building Mindful Culture Creators™ than I had worked at any point in my corporate career - because this time it was mine.
What followed was the validation I hadn't let myself expect. Organizations started calling. Conferences. Fortune 500 leadership development programs. Industry associations. Leaders who had felt what I was describing and wanted their teams to feel it too. The Inner Audit™ went from a methodology I had built in my living room to a framework being used on stages and in rooms across the country.
Today the work reaches leaders globally — through keynotes, Pressure Proof Leadership™ experiences, and the Inner Audit System. And soon, published author of The Inner Audit: A Practical Guide to Better Decisions in a Noisy World and TEDx speaker.
In one of my very first workshops — the Mindful Visionary — I asked the room to see their future clearly and hold it without apology. I did the same exercise myself. What I saw was this: one day I would serve the biggest organizations in the world by helping their leaders close the gap between the performance they're capable of and the clarity required to sustain it. That vision has never changed. We're just closer to it now.
Motherhood, mindfulness, and Detroit roots.
The same discipline that carried me through Fortune 100 leadership rooms shows up at home — in the mom who shows up for her son, the woman who pauses before she reacts, and the Detroiter who never forgot where she came from.
My work is built on rigor. My life is built on presence — family dinners, mindful mornings, workouts that have nothing to do with how I look and everything to do with how I think, and the quiet conviction that the most important decisions I make happen nowhere near a boardroom.
HR Brew
“The hidden performance cost of pressure on high-capacity leaders”
Read article
GSAE Connections — Spring 2025
“The Future of Conference Well-Being: Rethinking Engagement in the Age of Burnout”
Read article
Rolling Out
“Leadership performance and the Inner Audit™ methodology”
TEDxBuckheadAve Mainstage · October 2026
“Leading Off the Wall: What Michael Jackson Knew About Leading Under Pressure”
The same rigor used to audit Fortune 100 systems — applied to the decision-maker running them. Mind, movement, and music as tools to unlock presence. Presence as the gateway to performance.
I bring that same diagnostic rigor to stages across the country — keynotes, workshops, and Clarity Lab™ experiences for Fortune 500 LDP programs, association conferences, and leadership teams navigating sustained pressure.
“I built The Inner Audit™ because leadership development has never taught leaders how to lead themselves under pressure. That changes now.”Book Shawntà To Speak
Step 01
Pattern Intelligence Assessment™ surfaces whether leaders Speed Up, stay Steady, or Shut Down under pressure.
Step 02
5 Whys drawn from risk management, process improvement, and Six Sigma moves leaders from symptoms to the pattern driving their pressure response.
Step 03
Three personalized Clarity Protocols™ mapped to the specific pattern. Immediately applicable before the next high-stakes moment. Extended by the Decision Clarity GPT™.
Schedule a 30-minute Clarity Call to discuss your event, your audience, and the right experience for the moment you're in.
Join the waitlist to receive book launch updates, invitations to live readings and listening events, exclusive resources, and early access to everything related to The Inner Audit™.
Every Monday, Shawntà applies The Inner Audit™ to a real leadership problem — one pattern, one pressure point, one thing leaders are navigating right now.
