Speaker Profile
About
Background and Approach
Most high-achieving women do not call themselves perfectionists. They call themselves driven. Disciplined. Someone who holds herself to high standards.
ChristySlanaker spent twenty years in that story — building revenue, leading teams, managing partnerships across fintech and international payments — before she understood what it was actually costing her. Not the career. The self. The version of herself that existed when no one was watching and nothing was being produced.
ChristySlanaker.com is where that reckoning became a framework. It is a personal brand hub, a speaking platform, and the origin point of two distinct but philosophically connected projects: one that helps women recover from perfectionism in their professional and personal lives, and one that prevents girls from inheriting it in the first place.
Who this site is for
If you are a high-performing woman in your thirties or forties who has done the therapy, read the books, understands cognitively that your worth is not tied to your output — and still hesitates before the meeting, still rewrites the email four times, still cannot rest unless everything is handled — this site is for you. That gap between knowing you are capable and consistently acting like it is not a mindset problem. It is structural. The work here is about closing it.
If you lead a team, run a department, or are responsible for execution in an organization that keeps announcing strategy that never quite becomes action: The Dark Horse Advisory, accessible through this site, is for you. The same root issue that stalls individual women stalls leadership teams. Perfectionism does not disappear when you get promoted. It runs the meeting.
If you are raising a daughter and noticing your own voice in her self-criticism: SteadyHeart Stories, also accessible through this site, is for you. Prevention is easier than repair. The work begins earlier than most people think.
This site covers practical ground for people searching for help with recovering from perfectionism, building confidence that lasts under pressure, women's leadership development, execution coaching for remote and hybrid teams, speaking on burnout and high-performance identity, children's emotional regulation books, resilience tools for girls, how to close the gap between self-awareness and action, and what it actually takes to lead well when anxiety rather than incompetence is the real bottleneck.
Let 's talk.
The brand family
ChristySlanaker.com sits above two sub-brands that share its philosophy. SteadyHeart Stories carries the thesis into childhood, where prevention work, building girls who trust themselves before the world tells them not to. The Dark Horse Advisory carries it into the workplace, where helping leaders and teams stop emailing strategy and start executing it. One person stands behind all three. Same framework, two directions, one question running through everything: what does it cost to perform confidence you have not yet built from the inside out?
My Philosophy
The world does not need more optimized people.
It needs steadier ones.
This site is not wellness content. It is not a productivity system. It does not offer a ten-step plan to become your best self. What it offers is a framework built on real conditions — grief, organizational pressure, the specific exhaustion of performing at a level that slowly disconnects you from yourself — and a body of work designed to help people find the steadier version of themselves that was always there underneath the performance.