Beyond Uncertainty: On Showing Up Anyway

Yesterday in Waco I was on a fireside panel called Beyond Uncertainty at the Financial Women In Texas 2026 Leadership Forum. The Forum’s theme this year was Fear Less, Achieve More. The questions on the panel went places most business conversations don’t: what tested me as a leader, how I move through self-doubt, what anchors me when the pressure grows, what I’d tell a woman who feels capable of more but isn’t being seen yet.

Driving out of Waco toward Dallas last night, I kept thinking about how closely my answers tracked to the conversations I have every week with community bank CEOs and CFOs. Different details, same underlying shape. There’s a lot of weight on bank leaders right now: AI anxiety, core-provider roadmap fatigue, margin compression, talent shortages, and the quiet fear that whatever decision gets made about the bank’s data strategy might turn out to be the wrong one.

Resilience isn’t about not being afraid.

We launched KlariVis in Q1 2020. Three national conferences on the calendar, 180 banks in the pipeline, a team of 13 that my husband and I were self-funding. Then the world stopped. Community banks pivoted to saving their communities with the PPP rollout, keeping small businesses alive. That was the right call for them, and I would have told them to do the same thing. But our pipeline went to zero overnight.

We had one real decision to make. Raise capital and keep going, or walk away. Truthfully, I didn’t sleep for weeks. Thirteen families were counting on me for their livelihoods in the most uncertain stretch any of us had lived through, and my team couldn’t see me sweat. So I went to my home office every morning, and I showed up. What I learned in that stretch isn’t complicated, but it took six months of living it before I could say it cleanly.

Resilience isn’t about not being afraid. It’s about showing up anyway.

I see the same test in the data-strategy conversations I have with community bankers. The fear isn’t irrational. The stakes are real, the market is moving fast, and the implementation decisions are expensive. But waiting doesn’t make the ground firmer. Usually the opposite, because your data-mature peers are moving and the gap widens every quarter.

The swan above the water, the legs underneath.

Every founder I respect tells some version of this story, the swan metaphor. Calm and composed above the water, paddling like crazy underneath. That’s been every day since I started this company. One minute I’m in product design, next minute on a sales call, then prepping a board deck, then a customer call, then a marketing review, then another sales call. I love the work. The grind is real, and I won’t pretend it isn’t.

The community bank CEO is carrying a similar load: credit strategy, deposit strategy, liquidity, regulatory exams, talent pipeline, technology decisions, the quarterly board, the community presence.

I hear the question too often framed as whether to add a data strategy on top of all of it, as if data is another hat. It isn’t. A real data foundation is what makes the other hats wearable in the first place. It compresses the reporting cycle, takes ad hoc requests out of finance’s inbox, and lets the people in the building focus on the work they were actually hired to do.

Properly done, data lets a CEO take a hat off. We’ve watched it happen across 150-plus community banks and credit unions, and the CEOs with fewer, sharper hats are the ones who committed to the foundation first.

What you return to when the pressure comes.

One of the questions today was how I move through self-doubt. In that room, I talked about faith and partnership. Those answers are personal, and they’re mine, and they don’t really belong in a business essay. But the underlying shape does.

Under pressure, you return to first principles. For me, that’s the belief I’m doing what I was put on this earth to do, that this company is solving a problem community banks genuinely can’t solve alone, and that failing isn’t an option.

For a community bank CEO, the equivalent is your institution’s purpose in the community you serve. Not the mission statement in the lobby frame. The actual reason the bank still exists when any one of your customers could move their money to a national bank tomorrow. Know your why clearly enough that when a decision comes at you, you can make the best call you can with the information in front of you and then move on. Sometimes you’ll be right. Plenty of times you won’t. You pivot and you keep going.

This sometimes drives my team crazy. I don’t know another way to do it.

Stop waiting to be asked.

The stretch question at the fireside was what I’d tell a woman who feels capable of more but isn’t being fully seen. My answer came out in about ten words: be curious, do the work, and stop waiting until you feel ready, because you never will.

Take initiative. Lead a project before you’re fully confident you know everything about it. Nobody ever is, and you learn by doing. See a problem, solve it. Don’t just advocate. Demonstrate.

Here’s a live example. I’ve been teaching myself Claude Code. It’s an AI development tool, and it changes almost every week. I’ve got help from my team, but the work of keeping up is mine. Nights, weekends, whenever I can find the hours. Not because I have to, but because the world is moving faster than it ever has, and leaders who expect to keep their bearings have to do the learning themselves.

I tell banker leaders the same thing. The data journey doesn’t begin when your institution feels ready. It begins when whoever’s sitting in the corner office or the CFO chair decides to stop waiting. Your core provider isn’t going to solve this for you, your existing BI tool isn’t going to start producing answers on its own, and no consultant is coming to shortcut the call. It’s your decision, and it’s a leadership one before it’s a technology one.

And one more thing.

The final question: what’s one thing resilience has taught me that surprised me?

The more resilient you are, the more resilient your team becomes.

Resilience isn’t a solo trait. It compounds through the institution. A CEO who makes the imperfect call in the imperfect moment and owns it is teaching everyone else that the future is something you build. A CEO who waits is teaching the opposite.

Every serious conversation I have about a data journey lands in the same place. The decision isn’t about the platform or the price. It’s a leader deciding they’ve been paddling under the water long enough, and that it’s time to show the team what showing up actually looks like.

Your data journey starts here. It isn’t going to feel like the right time. It never does. You simply have to start.