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Our story
We know because we lived it.
We know the super early or late night blocks of work, because it's the only time you're not in meetings. We know the skipped lunches and convenience food, the 3am spiral about a problem that hasn't happened yet. We know what it's like to look up from your screen and realize you can't remember the last time you truly felt joy.
We know how the threshold moves. What felt unacceptable three years ago becomes background noise. What felt like ambition starts to feel like just survival. You keep telling yourself you'll get back to yourself after this project, this quarter, this milestone.
The milestone arrives and you're already onto the next one. We know the boss who tells you to do more with less.
We both stayed longer than we should have. The system is very good at making sure you don't look too closely. It recruits your integrity, your professionalism, your identity as someone who doesn't quit, and it hands you language to call it your lack of time management or loyalty.
We couldn't keep pretending this was ok, and we're building this to help others rediscover their own agency.
The people behind itWe're Alison and Nicole.
We're Alison and Nicole.
We know that agency comes with awareness.
Alison
Burnout hit a few years ago. The reliable paycheck stopped, and I had to reassess everything — including how much of my “what's next?” was shaped by old titles, fear of the unknown, and what other people would think.
One thing I knew for certain: I was never going back. Not to the ladder-climbing, not to the toxic workplaces. I had to unlearn my own beliefs about work and worth while figuring out where my skills actually fit. I launched courses, spoke about the future of work, and eventually built a coaching practice supporting human-centered leaders navigating all of it.
Creativity came back. So did clarity — the auto-pilot paycheck stopped feeling like safety, and the idea of a terrible boss started feeling like the real risk. I'm proudly independent from the way I used to think about careers and money.
Glimmer is built from those hard-won lessons. So you don't have to go it alone.
Nicole
I spent nearly three decades in tech watching smart, capable people slowly disappear inside their jobs. I did it too — longer than I should have. I was a solo parent to a child with complex medical needs, performing seamless leadership while learning to compartmentalize things that deserved far more than a compartment. I was trained in UX to see exactly where systems fail people. It took me years to apply that lens to my own life.
What I found on the other side was simpler than I expected. Slower workouts. Walk and talks with my son. Two books a week. Cooking something delicious and actually tasting it. Being present for my own life — not as a reward for getting through the hard part, but as the point.
That's what Glimmer is for me. Not a business. A demonstration that there's another way — and that you don't have to wait for a dramatic moment to start finding it.
Why we built it
There's a version of support that arrives too late and asks too much.
There's a lot of infrastructure for what comes after. Résumé tools. Interview prep. Career coaches who help you find the next thing. Most of it assumes you already know something is over.
What we kept noticing — in our own experience and in the people we talked to — was that the useful thing wasn't advice. It was connection. It was finding someone who was still in it, or had been in it recently enough that they hadn't smoothed over the hard parts yet. Someone who didn't need you to be further along than you were.
Someone who could sit with you in the uncertainty before you'd decided anything. Before you knew what you wanted. Before you were ready to call it a problem.
That doesn't really exist in a formal way. There's no infrastructure for the part where you're still showing up, still performing, but something has shifted and you can't quite name it yet.
We didn't build Glimmer because we figured it out. We built it because we wanted the thing that didn't exist when we needed it.
What we made
Here's where we are.
Glimmer is still being built.
What exists right now is the Fear Buster Launch Series — three workshops designed to help you look at the things that feel too scary to look at. Your finances. The gap between what work is and what you need it to be. Who you are outside of what you produce. Real tools. Real decisions. No magic.
We're also building a network of experts — people with the kind of plain-language knowledge that's usually kept behind closed doors. Employment rights. Financial options. The things you didn't know you needed to know until you needed to know them.
This is the beginning. We're building it the way we think it should be built — slowly, carefully, and without pretending it's further along than it is.