Lara Indrikovs · Founder
I have spent my whole life learning what transforms us.
For twenty years I kept something up. A version of myself that went over well, a version of the plan that sounded right. It worked, and it cost more than I understood at the time. Getting that energy back changed what I could build. Now I light the way back for other people, so they can build what only they can build, whether that's a life, a company, or a calling.
The origin
I spent my whole life asking which half of me was allowed.
Refusing to answer became my profession.
Most people know some version of this. You are too much of one thing for one room and not enough of it for the next, so you learn early which parts of you travel and which parts stay home. I learned it between two countries, and then the question kept arriving in new costumes for the next twenty years.
Holding several worlds at once turns out to be a form of perception. It is why I can sit in front of a model that says go, every number checked, and still hear the wait underneath it. I hear the chord where most people learned to hear one note.
That is the part I kept putting away. Keeping it away took energy I did not know I was spending, and getting it back is the whole of what I do now.
The two careers
It started long before the data.
The calling
Advertising found me first.
I interned at Leo Burnett before my senior year of high school, studied at the country's top advertising program at UT Austin, and built my early work around US Latino and Latin American media, the cultures I came from.
The rise
Media Director, and early.
I was running national campaigns for Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Visa, Bacardi, and Domino's before most people find their footing. Advertising was never a stepping stone for me. It was a calling, and I had answered it.
The turn
Then a client asked a question I could not answer.
She wanted the projected return on three different media plans. I did not have the tools to tell her. What I did have was the willingness to go and get them.
The deepening
I went where the question led.
I earned a master's in data science at Northwestern and spent the next thirteen years deep in enterprise data and analytics, including Twilio and Rackspace. Data and IT turn out to be the one seat in a company that sees the entire cross-section. Marketing sees marketing. Operations sees operations. Data sees all of it, because eventually every decision becomes a row in a table.
What I did with that seat was build teams. Across four continents, in two languages, with people who had been told their strongest quality was the one to tone down. I promoted the analyst everyone found difficult and watched her become the person the executives called first. Several of the people I led now run their own teams, and the ones who tell me it mattered do not mention a dashboard.
I led dozens of transformation initiatives in those years. And the further into the numbers I went, the more the work kept coming back to people.
People who knew me called it a transformation.
From the inside it was simpler than that. Nothing new arrived. Nothing was fixed, because nothing was broken. That is what transformation actually is, in a person or a company: what full strength looks like from the outside. The change lasts because nothing was suppressed to produce it.
What that looked like
Becoming a mother rearranged the list.
Before, every hour had a job and every job had a metric. Then there was a person who did not care how efficient I was, only whether I was actually there. There was no longer enough of me to run two versions, so the performed one went first. What was left was the one that had been doing the real work the whole time.
My standards did not drop. The list got honest about what was on it. That is the same thing I now do inside companies, which spend an enormous amount keeping up a version of themselves for the room.
The turn inward
From the outside, it looked like everything was working.
Inside, I was running in pieces. The strategist in one room and the rest of me in another, with a quiet sense that something true was waiting underneath all the noise.
Slowing down that much let me finally hear it. What followed was an awakening I had not planned for and would not trade. I began to trust what I had always sensed. What my body knew before I did. What was true in a room before anyone said it.
I had been practicing yoga since 2008 and teaching it since 2013. I trained as a sound healer and a space activation practitioner. For a long time I kept those worlds far from my work.
The day I stopped is the day my leadership, and my life, began to feel whole.
Coming home
I built Illuminating Potential as a way home.
The work was born where clarity meets compassion, and where ambition stops fighting alignment. I help people illuminate what is already there, come home to all of who they are, and lead from the same self in every room.
I return the energy that fragmentation has been spending, in leaders and in the organizations they run.
This is what I mean by Strategy and Soul.
I walked it myself, so I know the way. That walk back is now my work, and it is simpler than you would expect. When you can see the whole thing, you can say the true thing plainly. Usually only two or three things actually matter.
Where it comes from
One way of perceiving, applied to everything.
This is what I mean by Strategy and Soul. I see the whole thing at once. Twenty years of building the analysis taught me exactly where the data stops. What decides the outcome is usually the thing everyone knew and nobody said.
Strategic clarity
- Right hand to CIOs, CDAOs and CMOs, in the room where the call gets made
- McKinsey Academy Hispanic & Latino Executive Leadership Certification
- Master's in data science, Northwestern
Energy intelligence
- ICF Trained Coach
- Space activation practitioner
- Certified sound healer and yoga instructor
- Intuitive
All of it comes to work now.
Companies fragment the same way people do.
Strategy lives in one place and belief lives in another, and the organization spends its energy managing the gap. The gap never shows up in a dashboard. People hide it from the very systems that measure them. The status is green because the room does not feel safe. So companies end up with more reports than ever, and trust them less than ever. The numbers are honest about a company that is not being honest with itself.
Anything said in a meeting, typed in a report, or logged in a system, a machine can now analyze cheaply. My work is in what never gets said out loud. That part decides whether the rest was worth buying.
The work now
I do this with people and with organizations.
With individuals, as a coach. With organizations, as a consultant. One method runs through all of it: Awaken, Align, Actualize, Amplify.
For your organization
Consulting
The team that can deliver this already works for you. Most of their energy is going somewhere else. Strategic clarity and alignment for AI and data initiatives: what you are actually solving for, whether the plan connects, and how to operationalize it so your team actually delivers it.
Free, ten questions. Or take The Read.
For you
Coaching
If you have been translating yourself to be heard, this is the room where the whole of you is welcome.
Free, six questions. Or explore coaching.
I work with a small number of clients at a time, on purpose. Depth does not scale, and depth is the offer.
I also speak, facilitate, and collaborate on the human layer of AI and change. See speaking and media.
An invitation
If you have been living some version of this, I would love to meet you.
A short, warm conversation about where you are and where you want to go. Fifteen minutes, or start with The Mirror.
Lara
The Mirror. Six free questions.
Start