An excerpt from the book

Before We Begin

The opening pages of the Introduction to Raised Right: What Our Kids Already Know About Winning at Work

Available now on Amazon

I need to tell you something I have never said out loud. I have never, not one time, been ready for anything.

Not the new role. Not the promotion I wasn't expecting. Not the diagnosis that changed how I understood my son. Not the move to a new state with a toddler on my hip and a career that needed rebuilding. Not the call center floor. Not motherhood. Not any of it.

Not once.

And I have never, not once, said that out loud.

Because saying it out loud felt like admitting something that the version of me people see doesn't get to admit.

But here is what is also true: not being ready has never stopped me. Not for a single day. Not for a single decision. Because somewhere along the way, in a house where a US Naval Chief Petty Officer got up every morning and did hard things because that was how he took care of his family, I learned the only thing that actually matters when readiness hasn't arrived:

You show up anyway.

You show up and you get ready on the way through.

This book idea arrived because I so desperately needed to leave my boys with something, from me. My legacy. Something that would constantly ring in their heads as my voice, and then, I figured, maybe the world would benefit a little too. I am no expert, I don't pretend to be. Not in parenting, and not in leadership, as I learn, I like to share with others.

But, THIS is for them. In a way that is true to who I have always been. I hope, perhaps, those who read it believe that something in here is for them as well.

I am Kianna.

I am a woman first, and immediately after that, I am their mother. Everything about me stems from those two truths.

This book stems from those two truths.

I was raised in a house that did not produce quitters. My father, Jerry—retired Chief Petty Officer from The United States Navy, the kind of man who extended himself to every child in his orbit who needed a father figure—showed me what doing hard things looks like when it lives in a person's body. He did not lead softly, but he led with love. My mother, Charlotte, raised six kids, most of the time while working full-time and building multiple businesses, with a presence so consistent and so powerful that she was known before I was. My father was the head of our house, but my mother, she stood firm as our backbone. My oldest brother, Devon—the firstborn—left us in February 1996, when I was twelve years old.

I want you to sit with that. Not as a detail. As the moment that changed everything about how I move through the world.

I was twelve. And then Devon was gone. And I learned something that no classroom, no leadership program, and no amount of professional experience has ever taught me as permanently:

Tomorrow is not promised.

The impression you leave with someone may be the only chance you have.

I have been living that truth ever since. In how I parent. In how I lead. In the urgency I feel—the specific, bone-deep urgency of a woman who has known since she was twelve that time is not infinite and what you do with it is the only thing that fully belongs to you.

I wrote this book with that urgency.

There were moments in the writing of it where I felt the weight of it—the fear that if I didn't finish, I wouldn't get to. That these lessons would live only in my memory and my boys', without a page to land on.

I could not let that happen.

So I finished.

Here is the premise of this book, stated plainly:

The lessons we teach our children at the kitchen table are the same lessons most workplaces are desperately missing.

Not similar. Not parallel. The same.

The things I have said to my boys—in frustration, in love, in the ordinary moments that felt unremarkable when they happened—are the things that separate exceptional leaders from average ones. The things that build careers. The things that earn trust, protect relationships, and create cultures where people actually want to show up.

They are not leadership frameworks I developed in a boardroom.

They are the words of a mother trying to raise two good humans in the middle of a life that was asking for more than she had.

And they work.

I am not writing this from a mountain.

I am a woman who has been in the valley—more than once, deeper than I showed, closer to the edge than anyone knew. I stand on the backs of giants. Every lesson in this book was lived before it was written—by me, by my parents, by the mentors, the village, and the people who held things together when I couldn't hold everything at once.

This is their book too.

But mostly—it is for my boys.

I write it so they will always have it. So that even if life takes me somewhere they cannot follow yet, they will open any page and find me there.

You are loved.
You are destined for greatness.
You were raised right.

Now let's talk about what that means.

It starts with a couch.

Continue the story

The couch is just Chapter 1.

Raised Right is available now. Grab your copy on Amazon — Kindle, Paperback, or Hardcover.