Stitched is not healed | Elena Sarango-Muniz | TEDxThird Ward Salon

What if your greatest strength isn't something you built but something you survived? In this talk, Elena Sarango-Muniz challenges the way we think about professional excellence. After 25 years in HR, she discovered that the qualities making leaders exceptional often trace back to childhood wounds... to old verdicts we've spent our careers trying to overturn. Your perfectionism, your caretaking, your relentless drive, they all have a story. But here's the paradox: stitched wounds are not the same as healed wounds. Learning to live with what shaped us isn't weakness. It's wisdom.

This talk is for anyone who's ever wondered why they work so hard, who they're really trying to prove something to, and what might change if they stopped trying to erase their wounds and started learning from them instead. Elena Sarango-Muniz is an executive coach and former HR leader with 25 years in global corporate environments. She works with senior leaders to uncover how their greatest professional strengths often began as old wounds they've spent careers trying to overturn. A Peruvian immigrant, Elena brings a mentor's warmth and a storyteller's eye to the work of emotional intelligence. She believes our scars tell us who we are. The question is whether we're still bleeding into them. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx