Your career is an ever-evolving story. Make it yours.
I’m Kelly Nash, creator of Career Authorship™.
For more than 15 years, I’ve lived on both sides of the career conversation: building my own career inside corporate America and helping other people navigate theirs.
I know what it looks like when a career looks great on paper but doesn’t fit in practice because I’ve been that person, and I’ve sat across the table from hundreds of others who were questioning what comes next.
I also know how careers actually work inside organizations. How advancement decisions get made, what leaders are looking for, how people get positioned for opportunity, and why some of the most talented people can become the most disconnected from their own career story.
Today, I bring that inside perspective to the people and organizations I work with, helping individuals navigate what’s next and helping organizations create the conditions for their people to grow, move, and build careers worth staying for.
How I wrote my own story
How It All Began
I never planned to be a career coach.
It started in early 2018 with a blank page, a pen, and an idea to start a career blog — a choice that would change everything.
As someone who picked up a pen and loved to write from an early age, I felt a pull to share my experiences navigating the corporate world — how I overcame burnout, advocated for myself, and made my own career moves that aligned with my aspirations.
That pull became The Lipstick & Ink® Blog: a space designed to empower women with honest career advice, practical resources, and real stories about the challenges and triumphs of corporate life. I shared the guidance I wished someone had handed me a clear roadmap for. I was doing that work while fully embedded in corporate, living the portfolio career while writing about it.
From Words to Work
Lipstick & Ink® began as a creative outlet, but it evolved into events, career resources, resume services, and eventually coaching. Each step was a natural extension of the one before it.
At the same time, I continued to author my own story, my corporate background shaping everything I built. I shifted into employee experience and development from account management and customer success and started to see up close the disconnect between organizational strategy and individual career reality.
I found myself working in that space between the two, helping people navigate their careers from inside an organization while seeing firsthand what happens when employees don't have the tools, visibility, or agency to shape what comes next.
That experience changed the way I thought about career development. It’s not just about climbing the ladder. It's about understanding who you are, what you bring, what you want, and how to make intentional moves from there.
Authoring What’s Next
That journey eventually became Kelly Nash & Co. For more than 15 years, I’ve worked inside corporate America, building my own career while helping other professionals navigate, grow, and advocate for theirs.
For individuals, I combine 15+ years of corporate experience with coaching and career strategy to help mid-career high achievers understand what's no longer working, decide what they want next, and build a strategic path forward.
Because I know what it's like to build the career you're supposed to want — and what it feels like to realize you're ready to write something different.
The throughline is Career Authorship™: the belief that your career is not something that simply happens to you. You can take ownership of the story, make intentional choices, and author what comes next.
Becoming the author of my career
The career rewrites that taught me how to author what comes next
My own Authorship Awakening happened more than once.
It happened when I realized burnout wasn't the price I had to pay for success. When I chose curiosity over the career path I had already built. When I advocated for a role that didn't exist yet. When becoming a mom changed what I wanted from work. And when a corporate layoff reminded me that no organization could ever be the author of my career.
Each time, I had to stop following the script I was on and decide what I wanted to write next.
From Advertising to Tech
I began my corporate career in advertising, but after years of 14-hour days and limited room to grow, I knew it was time to make a change. I followed my curiosity toward tech, an industry where I'd be challenged, learning constantly, and surrounded by change.
I got strategic about my transferable skills, leaned into my network, and eventually landed a role at Salesforce. It took six months and more patience than was comfortable, but it led to an 11+ year career that shaped everything that came after. That move taught me something I now help clients understand: you can trust your own read on your career, even when the path forward takes longer than you planned.
From Customer Success to Employee Experience
Building Lipstick & Ink® on the side did something unexpected. It didn't just become a business. It helped me understand what I wanted from my career inside corporate America, too. I realized I wanted to do for employees what I was doing for my coaching clients: help people understand themselves well enough to grow with intention. So I advocated for something different.
I voiced my aspirations, took on new projects, and built the case for a role that didn't yet exist. More than 18 months later, I transitioned into employee experience, overseeing strategic career programming inside Salesforce's Customer Success organization of 9,000+ employees.
That work changed the way I understood career development. I watched programs designed around individual career growth contribute to measurable improvements in employee sentiment and retention. It confirmed that career alignment isn't just a personal goal. It can be a business outcome, too.
From Career Growth to Career Alignment
Becoming a parent in late 2023 recalibrated what success meant to me. For most of my career, growth had been easy to measure with bigger roles, more responsibility, more recognition, another level to reach. Suddenly, those measures stopped being as important. I started asking different questions. What do I actually want my career to make possible? What kind of life am I building alongside it? And who do I want to be while I'm doing it?
Growth stopped being about simply moving up. It became about building a career and a life that fit who I was.
From Layoff to Authoring My Next Chapter
In early 2026, after more than a decade at Salesforce, my role was eliminated. I won't pretend it was easy. Having the script rewritten for you by someone else is disorienting in a way that's hard to understand until it happens to you. But underneath the disappointment, I recognized that I knew how to navigate this.
I'd spent years helping other people figure out what was no longer working, decide what they wanted next, and make strategic moves forward. Now I had to do the same thing for myself. Not because I had all the answers (I didn't), but because I knew I still had the pen.
I could decide what this chapter meant. I could decide what I wanted to write next. And I could refuse to let someone else's decision become the last word in my story. That experience didn't just reinforce Career Authorship™. It lived it. And it gave this work a depth I couldn't have learned from coaching other people alone.
Every career move I've made — the pivots, the risks, the rewrites, and the unexpected turns — has brought me closer to work that feels meaningful and a life that feels like mine. That's what I want for you, too.
My approach
My work sits at the intersection of identity and strategy, built on a simple belief:
You need to understand who you are before you can make intentional decisions about where you're going.
Whether I'm helping an individual navigate their next career move or an organization invest in the people who drive its results, the work starts in the same place of understanding who you are and what you're actually building.
The Intersection of Identity & Strategy
Most career support starts with tactics. I start somewhere different: with you.
For individuals, that means understanding your values, strengths, motivations, and the career story you've been living — and whether it's actually yours.
That foundation changes everything downstream. A resume written from genuine self-knowledge reads differently than one assembled from job descriptions. A networking conversation rooted in real clarity lands differently than one built on rehearsed talking points. And a career decision made from self-knowledge is different from one made simply because it's the next logical step.
For organizations, that same principle scales. The workforce challenges companies are struggling to solve — disengagement, attrition, stalled internal mobility — are often identity problems before they're performance problems. When employees don't have clarity about who they are and where they're going, they disengage, leave, or stay in roles that don't serve them or the business. Career Authorship™ is the framework that addresses that gap at the organizational level.
Whether I'm working with a single client navigating a pivot or a leadership team designing a talent development strategy, the work starts in the same place: clarity about who you are and what you're actually building.
The View from the Inside
I spent 15+ years inside corporate America, including 11+ years at Salesforce, where I built and led career development and employee experience programming for a 9,000+ person Customer Success organization.
I saw firsthand the invisible divide between what organizations expect from their people and what high achievers actually experience:
High performers being rewarded with more work, rather than more alignment or a real trajectory.
Brilliant professionals diluting who they are just to fit standardized job descriptions.
Capable leaders becoming increasingly dependent on corporate validation to know their own worth.
That insider perspective shapes how I work today. For individuals, I understand how talent is evaluated, how internal decisions get made, and what it takes to advocate for yourself inside a complex organization. For organizations, I understand what meaningful career development looks like because I've built it from the inside.
Credentials & Training
Certified Coach (ACC), International Coaching Federation (ICF)
Career Coaching Certification, New York University
Google #IamRemarkable Facilitator
A few fun facts
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Midwestern gal
Born, bred, and currently reside in the Chicago suburbs, where I live with my husband, Adam, and son, James. I lived in the city for 10 years and (no bias) firmly believe that Chicago is one of the best cities in the world.
The essentials
You’ll never catch me without my sunnies or lip color in my purse. I love lipstick and lipgloss so much, I decided to create my own.
On the move
You’ll often find me out for a walk, trying a new restaurant, vacationing with my loved ones, or planning my next travel adventure.
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Curious soul
I’m a personal development junkie and a sucker for astrology, human design, psychic readings, all the things! It all has led me to approaching life with a spark of curiosity and an eagerness to learn and grow.
Ready to write a chapter that actually feels like yours?
You’ve already proven you can succeed in someone else’s system. Now it’s time to decide what you want to write next.