On ambition, vitality, and leading on your own terms
I built my entire career by saying yes before I knew how.
Security agent in Kyiv. Then a retail entrepreneur selling Victoria’s Secret stock out of a warehouse. Then a representative for Malaysian timber — a job I took partly because I was terrified not to. Then Shanghai on a tourist visa, one month to find a job, twenty-something years old, no plan. I found the job. I always found the job.
Twenty years later, I am a Director at Cisco in Singapore, where I have lived for twelve years and call home. I have run sales teams across Asia Pacific, led cloud transformation at Microsoft, VMware, Broadcom, and sat in rooms where the decisions are made.
And I am tired of the version of “high performance” that those rooms sell.
The Graceful Edge is a weekly publication for ambitious leaders in their 30s and 40s, especially women, who are still building, but on different terms than they were in their 20s.
Not slower. Not softer. Different.
Smarter about energy. Clearer about identity. Less interested in performing competence and more interested in actually having it.
I started writing this in May 2025 after being made redundant from my previous role in Broadcom. I was walking in Bukit Timah in Singapore with a friend who practices BaZi, an ancient Chinese metaphysical system that provides a personalised, energetic blueprint based on your date and time of birth. She told me the activity that would bring me the most joy, money, and connection for the next twenty years was writing.
I told her she was wrong.
Writing had been a source of anxiety since childhood. I grew up in Soviet-era Ukraine where essays had to be perfect, and mine never were. I wrote five drafts of one assignment while my mother tore each one out. She eventually wrote it for me. I got a good grade. I decided writing was not for me.
Until that one day in May, when I sat down at my desk at 1pm and for the rest of the day I was writing. By midnight I had a publication: the name, the logo, the template, the first manifesto. I didn’t get up because I knew if I waited until the next day the energy would be gone.
Clarity never comes before you start. It comes in the process.
What I Write About
The biology of sustained performance — not wellness trends, but what actually happens in your body when you’ve been leading at high intensity for a decade. The cortisol, the depletion, the recovery. I came to this through necessity, not aspiration.
The psychology of ambition — identity, reinvention, the quiet cost of being the person who holds it together. What happens to you when the title disappears. Who you are outside the org chart.
Leadership from the inside — what it actually feels like, not what it looks like on a slide. Lessons from eighteen years across China, Singapore, Japan, India, and the rest of Asia Pacific that no business school taught me.
And the question I keep returning to: in an era when AI can do more of your job than you might realise, what remains irreplaceably human? I don’t have a tidy answer. I’m working it out in public, every week.
Who reads this
Ambitious professionals who are still building but asking harder questions about what they’re building toward.
Women in leadership who are navigating the intersection of career and biology in a way that no one around them talks about openly.
And, it turns out, a lot of men, who send private messages saying they’ve never read anything that made them feel seen quite like this. I didn’t expect that. I’m glad for it.
About me
I am Ukrainian, raised in Zaporizhzhya, and have lived in the USA for a year and then in Asia for eighteen years — six in Shanghai, twelve in Singapore and counting. I have a Master’s in Finance and no technology degree. I built my entire tech career by learning faster than the job required.
Outside work I am a Latin dancer (one and a half years in, still not great, completely committed), a Chinese tea ceremony practitioner, and a person who asks my GPT assistants questions she probably should be asking herself.
My son is six. He doesn’t know what AI is yet. I’m not in a hurry to tell him.
