Dr. Kasi Lacey: On Toxic Leadership, Burnout, Reinvention & Reclaiming Confidence
She Chased Safety All the Way to the C-Suite. Then She Walked Out.
Dr. Kasi Lacey moved out on her own at 16. School was her safe place, so she chased stability the only way she knew how — through her grades, her degrees, and fifteen years building a career in higher education all the way to a president's cabinet. She had the title, the influence, the seat at the table. And then she named the environment for what it was: an abusive relationship. She stayed a long time, for the students and staff she didn't want to leave behind — until she couldn't anymore.
In this episode of Who We Become — Life Beyond Change, Amanda Lentz sits down with Dr. Kasi Lacey — psychologist, keynote speaker, executive confidence coach, author, and founder of HL Legacy Consulting — for a conversation about what happens when the safety you spent your whole life building turns out to be the thing you have to walk away from.
Kasi's work helps high-achieving women unlock unshakable confidence, navigate career transitions, and lead without apology and without burnout. She does that work because she has lived every part of what it requires. This is where it started.
A Safe Place, Built From Scratch
Kasi was raised by a single mom, moving often between Kansas and Texas. When her mother remarried into a situation that no longer had room for her, sixteen-year-old Kasi made a choice: she wanted to finish high school where she was, so she moved in with a friend's family. When that fell through, she moved out entirely — on her own, at 16, working at a retirement home to put herself through school.
She traces it to what she only half-jokingly calls "older daughter syndrome" — a childhood with enough chaos in it that the one person she learned she could rely on was herself. Education became the exit. Get the degree, get the money, survive. That was the equation.
"I always felt like who I could rely upon was me. So moving out on my own at sixteen — at the time, it just felt like, of course, this makes sense."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyThe Accidental Psychologist
With no one guiding her, Kasi applied to college almost by accident — she meant to apply to three schools, sent the wrong application to one, and effectively applied to just one. She was pre-med for about two weeks ("doctor equals safety") before realizing she couldn't stand the science. Then came math, which she was genuinely good at — her life didn't make sense, but equations did. She stayed a math major until junior year, when a 4 p.m. Calc III that ate into her social life finally made her admit her heart was somewhere else entirely: in psychology, and in understanding people.
A small liberal arts college and professors who gave her real one-on-one time showed her that graduate school was even possible. She went on to earn her PhD in counseling psychology at Texas Tech, finishing at 26 — drawn to therapy and research both. And underneath the ambition was the same quiet driver as always.
"The PhD was me chasing that safety. It was truly, doctor equals safety — get this degree and you're untouchable."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyA Seat at the Table
Fifteen years of building later, Kasi had a seat in the C-suite: vice president and dean of student life at a small liberal arts college. From the outside, she'd made it. The reality was more complicated. She got the door open partly because a female VP interviewed her and saw her own younger self in the room — and then, on Kasi's first day, told her she was leaving. A student death, an active Title IX case, one crisis after another: it was a wild ride from the start.
What kept her there was a vision of leadership. She didn't want to clone herself; she wanted to build an environment where people could be who they were and grow into their strengths. But when the VP role first came open, she didn't apply with conviction — imposter syndrome and a lifetime of socialization told her she wasn't ready. She applied anyway, didn't even get an on-campus interview, and later learned from friends on the search committee that they'd been directed to hire a man.
She calls it, with characteristic bluntness, "a punch to the ovaries." At the time, though, the self-doubt won: she told herself she wasn't ready anyway. That year turned out to be the most pivotal of her career. Reading Sally Helgesen's How Women Rise held up a mirror to every way she was playing small — saying "we" when she meant "I," never making it clear to her boss that she wanted the job, shrinking in a hundred small ways. When a new president arrived and the role opened again, she showed up differently. She walked into a genuinely terrifying conversation with the president — a former military general — and essentially told him: you're going to hire me, and here's why.
"It's not something I would have ever done, ever. But I did — and I'm so grateful that I did."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyHe was impressed. She was named interim, then permanent VP. She'd be the only female vice president for years, working inside an institution that had never had a female president and carried a predominantly male board. Kasi is biracial — her father is Black, her mother white — and because, as she puts it, she appears white, she often heard the sexist and racist remarks people made when they assumed no one in the room would mind. The title was real. So was everything she was absorbing to hold it.
When Work Becomes an Abusive Relationship
What struck Amanda most in their first conversation was a phrase we rarely apply to a job. As a psychologist who had spent years working with survivors of domestic violence and doing prevention work, Kasi knew the language of the power wheel — and she knew Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, the ability to speak up, disagree, and make mistakes without fear of retaliation. Slowly, she started recognizing those same patterns at work.
"Work became an abusive relationship. And I stayed for the kids — the kids were my students and my staff. That was my why."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyShe names the trap honestly. On average, it takes a woman seven attempts to leave an abusive relationship, and from inside one it's hard to see clearly. When the harmful behavior wasn't aimed at her, she excused it — maybe it's a phase, maybe it'll get better. For thirteen-plus years it always, on some level, felt like a fight, and her body knew it long before she let herself admit it. She describes fighting, freezing, and fawning her way through, becoming a chameleon who wore black and navy suits to blend into rooms she didn't look like she belonged in. Blending in felt strategic. It was survival.
The cost was physical. As chair of the college's COVID task force, she made the decisions to keep the campus open and safe — a psychologist handed a pandemic — and came home each day, in her husband's words, looking like she was standing at the base of a mountain waiting for a boulder to take her out. She has since spoken about how depleted she'd become: after leaving, she lost 90 pounds, because she'd been giving everything to work and had nothing left for herself. And then the behavior turned toward her directly. That was the true wake-up call.
The Grief of Leaving
Leaving wasn't simple, because it was a loss. Kasi's identity was fused to higher education and to her students; she'd never planned to go. There were golden handcuffs — the salary, the security — and a real grief in imagining who she'd be without the role. The final push came in a meeting with her boss, HR present, where she was called a "belligerent bully" and told nobody liked her. It was the first HR meeting of her entire career.
In that moment, something clarified. She couldn't change his opinion, and she'd done everything she could do. So she took her power back on her own terms — telling her staff and the faculty she'd built relationships with first, and letting her boss be one of the last to know. That was on purpose. That was her moment. To colleagues, leaving with no job lined up looked like a red flag. To Kasi, it was the first fully free decision she'd made in years.
"I didn't want the VP title because of my ego. I wanted to make a difference — because I saw how bad leadership hurt our students and staff."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyBuilding the Confidence Comeback
She bet on herself the way she always had — but this time in a different direction. She joined a mastermind to learn the coaching industry, drew on years of speaking on behalf of the college, and realized she could do the keynote work she'd once paid others to do, only better. She started as a burnout coach, healing her own burnout first, then found her real lane: the psychology of confidence and leadership, taught from both lived experience and clinical research.
That work became her book, Your Confidence Comeback: The Psychology of Reclaiming Your Power, Voice, and Leadership. Its throughline is trust — self-trust, leadership trust, and the trust between an organization and the people it serves. As women, Kasi notes, we often have a complicated relationship with confidence, imagining it has to look like the loudest, most self-promoting version in the room. Her book is for the woman doing the opposite: shrinking, self-rejecting, not even applying for the job.
Perfectionist in Recovery
Kasi calls herself a people-pleaser and perfectionist in recovery, and names both as saboteurs of confidence. Recovery, for her, looks like boundaries and a hard-won relationship with the word no — she's been known to have a whole keynote audience turn to a neighbor and say it out loud. Because, she points out, we teach people how to treat us. Saying yes to everyone often means saying no to yourself.
Perfectionism gets the same clear-eyed treatment. It's a thing we chase with no finish line, and it quietly blocks the very connection we want.
"No one connects with a perfect, polished robot. The more we learn to love our own imperfections and just show up, that's where the real connection is."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyIt's a leadership principle as much as a personal one: a leader who performs perfection earns no trust, while the one who says "I made a mistake" first gives everyone else permission to be human, too.
The World She's Building for Her Daughters
Kasi has two daughters, and they are the clearest measure of what changed. Her oldest is old enough to remember the earlier version of her mom. Not long after Kasi left, her daughter looked at her and said it plainly.
"Mom, you are so happy. You got a new haircut, you got a new car — and you got a new body."
— Kasi's daughterThat, Kasi says, is the best gift she could give them: seeing a mother live in her purpose. She wants her girls to grow up watching a confident woman go after her goals — and to one day work in places that respect, value, and trust them. And she's quick to name the double standard baked into a question she gets constantly about traveling for speaking: would anyone ask her husband, if he were the one on stage, how he manages it all?
Who She Is Now
Amanda closes by asking the question the whole conversation has been building toward: from the 16-year-old who left home, to the woman who left the C-suite — who is Dr. Kasi Lacey now? Her answer is that she's all of those versions at once, finally integrated rather than at war with each other. Still a high achiever, but grounded now, secure, genuinely loving herself — quirks and all.
"If my 16-year-old self could see who I am, she would be in complete awe."
— Dr. Kasi LaceyWhy This Conversation Matters
Dr. Kasi Lacey is a psychologist who had to become her own patient before she could do her best work — a woman who built stability from nothing, and then found the courage to walk away from it when it stopped being safe.
As Amanda puts it in her closing: the inner critic is not the authority on your worth. Your track record is. Your resilience is. And the fact that you're still here — still building, still choosing yourself — is evidence enough.
Where in your own life have you been calling something "just you," when your body has been trying to tell you the truth?
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