I Didn’t Set Out to Write a Book. I Set Out to Survive.

About a year ago, I attended a conference and needed a place to upload a handout externally.

That’s it. That was the beginning.

At the time, I was still working in corporate leadership and didn’t really have a platform of my own, so I clicked “write article” on LinkedIn and noticed there was an option to create a newsletter. I decided to try it.

The first entry was called Big Girl Panties Diaries — Entry #1: What 35 Doctors (and One Boss) Taught Me About Finding My Voice.

At the time, I wasn’t trying to build a brand, write a book, or become “a thought leader.” Honestly, I was just trying to survive a season of life that was changing me in real time.

My daughter Hailey had been battling long COVID for years. Endless appointments. Specialists. Uncertainty. Advocacy. Exhaustion. Trying to explain an invisible illness to systems that didn’t fully understand it yet. I quickly learned that if I didn’t speak up for her, she wouldn’t be seen clearly inside those systems.

At the exact same time, I was also leading large-scale transformation work inside organizations. Oddly enough, both experiences required the same skills: clarity, emotional steadiness, difficult conversations, trust, and learning how to lead when nobody has perfect answers. Looking back now, I think that season changed the way I saw leadership entirely.

Because whether I was sitting in a doctor’s office or a boardroom, I kept seeing the same thing happen over and over again: people struggling to feel safe, heard, informed, and grounded during uncertainty.

So, I kept writing.

Some articles became deeply personal reflections through Big Girl Panties Diaries: The Unfiltered Edition. Others explored organizational transformation, resistance, leadership, communication, emotional intelligence, and the human side of change.

At first, those topics felt separate. Now I realize they never were. Some of the writing came from a place I didn’t fully understand at the time: career grief.

Over the past several years, I’ve written a lot about reinvention, identity shifts, uncertainty, and what happens emotionally when the version of your life or career you thought you were building suddenly changes shape.

There’s grief in that. Not always dramatic grief. Sometimes it’s quieter than that. The grief of outgrowing old versions of yourself. The grief of losing routines, titles, certainty, or identity. The grief of realizing your priorities have changed after hard seasons reshape you.

At one point, I wrote: “You don’t just lose a job. You lose a rhythm, a routine, and a version of yourself you built your whole life around.”

I think a lot of people were carrying some version of that feeling, especially after the past several years of collective disruption. And honestly, I think that’s part of why the writing connected with people. It wasn’t written from the outside looking in. I was living it too.

And through all of it, both of my girls were growing up in the middle of this strange season of uncertainty and reinvention alongside me. Hailey taught me what advocacy, endurance, and invisible resilience really look like. Watching her navigate long COVID, POTS, endless appointments, and a body that didn’t always cooperate changed the way I think about strength entirely. And Anna somehow became the emotional glue holding all of us together. She’s the bridge-builder in our family. The one making people laugh, creating connection, pulling people in, noticing who needs care before they ask for it. Honestly, both of them shaped the way I think about leadership more than any executive training ever could.

Over time, another pattern started emerging too. I kept returning to the same organizational questions: Why do so many transformations succeed technically but struggle behaviorally? Why do leaders celebrate go-live while employees quietly drift back toward old ways of working? Why do organizations focus so heavily on implementation while underestimating adoption?

As I looked back across more than 130 articles, I realized I could actually see the framework forming in real time before I even had language for it.

There were articles about advocacy and finding your voice. Articles about emotional intelligence and why “soft skills” aren’t soft at all. Articles about resistance, trust, burnout, leadership presence, reinvention, and what happens to humans during change when leaders focus more on systems than people.

I wasn’t just writing about organizational change. I was writing about what humans need in order to move forward when uncertainty shows up. Somewhere along the way, I also started noticing that the most important dynamics inside transformation were rarely the loudest ones. The breakdowns that mattered most often happened quietly underneath the surface: hesitation, emotional withdrawal, low trust, misalignment, silent resistance, leaders saying the right things publicly while teams privately drifted back toward what felt safe and familiar.

Over time, those observations started organizing themselves into something bigger than individual articles or disconnected ideas. Eventually, that framework became The People Stack: the invisible human operating system underneath successful change. And the more I wrote, the more I realized I wasn’t just documenting transformation. I was decoding the human side of it in real time.

Earlier this year, I attended another conference almost by accident. I was actually supposed to be somewhere else, but sometimes life has a funny way of redirecting you exactly where you need to go.

I attended a session on self-publishing. The facilitator walked through practical steps: platforms, publishing tools, formatting, ISBNs, royalties, cover design, marketing, all of it. I left with pages of notes and a giant checklist. But the most important moment happened afterward. We started talking about my writing and the work I’d been doing over the past year, and he said something I don’t think I’ll ever forget:

“You’ve already written your book. Most people here are trying to figure out what they want to say. You’ve been saying it for over a year.”

That sentence completely changed the way I saw everything. Because he was right. The more I looked back across everything I had written, the more obvious it became that the themes had been there all along. The stories, leadership lessons, observations about trust, resistance, uncertainty, adoption, and emotional steadiness were already sitting across more than a year of articles. I wasn’t starting from scratch. I was organizing patterns I had already been living and documenting in real time.

So, over the next several months, I started pulling everything together while simultaneously building my consulting business, speaking at conferences, recording podcasts, creating workshops, and learning far more about self-publishing than I ever expected to know.

At some point I apparently became a person with strong opinions about font spacing, Kindle formatting, glossy covers, ISBNs, and DRM settings. Nobody warns you that writing a book means rereading your own words so many times that eventually language itself stops sounding real. There were nights I was editing chapters at midnight while questioning every life decision that had led me to obsessing over page margins.

Very glamorous author behavior.

Writing a book had always been one of those “someday” dreams for me. I remember attending women’s leadership conferences years ago and seeing speakers on stage talking about work they deeply believed in. They had books. They had frameworks. They had built businesses around helping people navigate challenges they understood personally and professionally.

And I remember thinking, “I want to be like that when I grow up.”

Apparently, this was the year I decided to stop waiting.

I also think part of what changed is that after enough hard seasons, you stop waiting to feel perfectly ready. You realize clarity often comes through movement, not before it. The truth is, I didn’t write this book as a get-rich scheme. I wrote it because I care deeply about the human side of change.

I believe organizations spend too much time measuring implementation and not enough time understanding adoption. I believe resistance is often misdiagnosed. I believe trust is the invisible infrastructure underneath transformation. And I believe leaders need practical ways to navigate uncertainty without losing people in the process.

Last fall, I launched Julie Whitten Consulting with the hope of building work around exactly those conversations through keynote speaking, workshops, executive advisory, and transformation leadership support.

This book became part of that foundation. And honestly, I’ve loved every second of this journey. The writing. The speaking. The conversations. The connection. The messages from people saying, “I thought I was the only one feeling this way.” That part matters more than anything.

One of the biggest surprises has been realizing how many people were hungry for conversations that felt more human. Not just polished corporate language or performative positivity, but honest conversations about uncertainty, burnout, leadership, fear, resistance, reinvention, trust, and what it actually feels like to move through change in real life.

The more I reflect on this journey, the more I realize the book didn’t appear out of nowhere. Neither did the business. Both were built slowly through years of leadership experiences, advocacy, speaking opportunities, difficult seasons, relationships, writing, and saying yes before I fully understood where those yeses would lead.

One of the articles I wrote earlier this year included the line: “What looks like speed is often just alignment.” That feels especially true now.

Because from the outside, The People Stack may look like something that happened quickly. But from the inside, it feels like decades of experiences finally organizing themselves into language. And somehow, it all traces back to a single LinkedIn newsletter article written because I needed a place to upload a conference handout. Turns out the handout wasn’t actually the thing I was supposed to share. And if I’m being honest, there’s probably another book somewhere in all those BGPD articles too. Maybe it's the sister book called The Panty Stack?

Because while The People Stack focuses on organizational change, I’ve also spent years writing about the personal side of change: career transitions, caregiving, uncertainty, reinvention, identity shifts, fear, resilience, hope, and learning how to keep moving forward when life refuses to follow the plan. Turns out those stories were worth telling too.

So, if you’ve been here since Entry #1, thank you. If you’ve read the articles, commented, shared, encouraged, or supported me along the way, thank you. And if we haven’t caught up in a while, reach out. I’d genuinely love to hear how you’re doing.

BGPD Rule #1 still applies: When you find your voice, use it. Especially when it shakes.

Maybe that’s the real surprise in all of this. I thought I was processing a hard season. I didn’t realize I was building the foundation for the next chapter of my life.

This Friday, May 15, The People Stack officially launches. If you’d like to learn more or grab a copy of The People Stack: Why Change Fails (and What Actually Fixes It), you can find it here.

Thank you to everyone who has supported this journey, encouraged the writing, shared the articles, invited me into conversations, or reminded me to keep going when I questioned whether any of this mattered. Turns out sharing the story mattered more than I realized.

Related Reading / Where This All Started:

📖 Big Girl Panties Diaries — Entry #1: What 35 Doctors (and One Boss) Taught Me About Finding My Voice

📖 If You Call It a Soft Skill Again, I Will Scream

📖 Career Grief & the Art of Reinvention

📖 The Hidden Risk Between “Built” and “Adopted”

📖 The Most Dangerous Resistance Is the Kind That Looks Like Agreement

📖 Calmfidence in Chaos: The Leadership Presence That Makes Change Stick

📖 Happenstance, Yeses, and the Business I Didn’t Plan

📖 When You’re Grateful—but Still Bracing Yourself

📖 The Sister Who Holds Us Together (With Gummy Bears, Hugs, and Fierce Love)