Member since September 2026
Tracy Avicolli most recently served as Director of Secondary Teaching and Learning for Hartford Public Schools, where she led curriculum and instruction across the district. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Connecticut's Neag School of Education, where her research examines the experiences of mothers navigating the path to the superintendency — work that sits at the exact intersection of ambition and caregiving she speaks about today.
Tracy brings a rare combination to the stage: real experience leading at a high level while managing the demands of a household, and research-backed insight into why that load falls disproportionately on women. A certified yoga teacher, she also speaks to the nervous-system side of chronic overwhelm, not just the logistics of it.
She speaks on mental load, decision fatigue, and leading — at work and at home — without losing yourself in the process.
I'm passionate about making room for women to lead without quietly disappearing into the role. So much of what we ask ambitious women to carry — at work, at home, in the space between — goes unnamed and unmeasured, and I care deeply about changing that: naming it, studying it, and building real, practical ways to lighten it. My research into mothers navigating the path to the superintendency comes from that same place — wanting to understand exactly where talented women get stuck on their way up, and why. I'm equally passionate about the body's role in all of this; as a certified yoga teacher, I believe real, sustainable leadership has to include the nervous system, not just the calendar. At the center of it all is a simple belief: women shouldn't have to choose between ambition and their own wellbeing.
For twenty years, my calendar looked the same: back-to-back, start to finish, every single day. Meetings, classroom walkthroughs, crises, more meetings. If you'd asked me my identity, I would have answered with my job title before I got to my own name.
And then I left. After twenty years in education, I stepped away to finish my doctorate — a decision everyone told me was brave, and that felt, most days, like free-falling.
Here's the part nobody warns you about. I went from a calendar with zero white space to a life with too much of it. Some weeks, I found myself actually rationing out my own errands — spacing a pharmacy run and a grocery trip across two separate days — because I needed a reason to leave the house. Twenty years of being needed everywhere, all the time, and suddenly I was inventing reasons to be needed anywhere at all.
That's when it hit me: the mental load I'd spent years trying to survive hadn't just been a burden. It had become part of how I knew who I was. Losing the chaos didn't just give me time back — it forced me to figure out who I am without it.
That tension — between freedom and identity, between finally having the space and not knowing what to do with it — is exactly what I talk about now. Because whether you're overloaded or newly empty, the question underneath is the same: who are you, underneath everything you carry?
My origin story starts in a school district, not a classroom. As Director of Secondary Teaching and Learning, I spent years helping a system function at a high level — while, at home, I was doing the same invisible work so many women do: holding the calendar, the logistics, the mental to-do list nobody sees. I started noticing the same pattern everywhere I looked, including in myself — talented, ambitious women quietly stalling out or stepping back, right around the moments where leadership and motherhood collided hardest. That pattern is what sent me back to school myself, into a doctoral program studying mothers navigating the path to the superintendency, because I wanted real answers, not just my own anecdote. Along the way, I became a certified yoga teacher too, because I'd learned the hard way that you can't think your way out of chronic overwhelm — you have to work with the body, too. That's the thread running through everything I do now: helping women lead fully, without quietly disappearing in the process.
Concrete, low-lift systems for cutting the hundreds of small daily decisions that quietly drain a leader's energy.
Research-backed insight into why ambitious, high-performing women stall out — and what organizations and individuals can do differently.
What mental load actually is, why it disproportionately falls on women, and where to start interrupting it — today, not someday.
For twenty years, my calendar looked the same: back-to-back, start to finish, every single day. Meetings, classroom walkthroughs, crises, more meetings. If you'd asked me my identity, I would have answered with my job title before I got to my own name.
And then I left. After twenty years in education, I stepped away to finish my doctorate — a decision everyone told me was brave, and that felt, most days, like free-falling.
Here's the part nobody warns you about. I went from a calendar with zero white space to a life with too much of it. Some weeks, I found myself actually rationing out my own errands — spacing a pharmacy run and a grocery trip across two separate days — because I needed a reason to leave the house. Twenty years of being needed everywhere, all the time, and suddenly I was inventing reasons to be needed anywhere at all.
That's when it hit me: the mental load I'd spent years trying to survive hadn't just been a burden. It had become part of how I knew who I was. Losing the chaos didn't just give me time back — it forced me to figure out who I am without it.
That tension — between freedom and identity, between finally having the space and not knowing what to do with it — is exactly what I talk about now. Because whether you're overloaded or newly empty, the question underneath is the same: who are you, underneath everything you carry?
My origin story starts in a school district, not a classroom. As Director of Secondary Teaching and Learning, I spent years helping a system function at a high level — while, at home, I was doing the same invisible work so many women do: holding the calendar, the logistics, the mental to-do list nobody sees. I started noticing the same pattern everywhere I looked, including in myself — talented, ambitious women quietly stalling out or stepping back, right around the moments where leadership and motherhood collided hardest. That pattern is what sent me back to school myself, into a doctoral program studying mothers navigating the path to the superintendency, because I wanted real answers, not just my own anecdote. Along the way, I became a certified yoga teacher too, because I'd learned the hard way that you can't think your way out of chronic overwhelm — you have to work with the body, too. That's the thread running through everything I do now: helping women lead fully, without quietly disappearing in the process.
Concrete, low-lift systems for cutting the hundreds of small daily decisions that quietly drain a leader's energy.
Research-backed insight into why ambitious, high-performing women stall out — and what organizations and individuals can do differently.
What mental load actually is, why it disproportionately falls on women, and where to start interrupting it — today, not someday.
