How Growing Up in Foster Care Shaped Chéla Gage’s Leadership

Jul 23, 2025

Chéla Gage, former Vice President and inclusion expert, details how her foster care upbringing shaped her leadership style. She discusses transforming trauma into purpose, highlighting how her experiences fostered hypervigilance—now a strength in navigating corporate dynamics. Chéla reflects on motherhood as a path of reparenting and giving herself the love she missed, while exploring the dual nature of anxiety as both challenge and asset. Her insights on cultivating inclusion and belonging in the workplace stem from her unique journey of resilience.

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ANECDOTE

Foster Care Builds Leadership Strength

Chéla Gage grew up in foster care learning to read rooms and trust her intuition for survival.
She applies this hypervigilance in leadership roles to create belonging and drive business impact.

ANECDOTE

Owning Trauma as Purpose

A white woman leader told Gage, "There is nobody who has been through what I have been through," inspiring Gage to own her unique life story.
This realization gave Gage confidence and freedom to fully embrace her identity and trauma as purpose.

ANECDOTE

From Recruiter to Inclusion Leader

Gage started as an executive recruiter placing diverse talent but saw they lacked growth and belonging.
She transitioned into inclusion consulting to build pipelines and retention through recognizing people beyond their resumes.

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How does growing up in foster care shape you as a leader? Chéla Gage is the former Vice President Global Chief Inclusion & Diversity Officer, workforce mental health advocate, inclusion expert, and host of the 1 Million Fosters podcast. Gage joins Morra to share how her childhood in foster care shaped her strengths as a leader, her reflections on anxiety and hypervigilance as an asset, and how she’s transforming trauma into purpose.

Chéla’s journey from foster homes and group homes to senior leadership roles at Nissan, Raytheon, and Starbucks is a testament to the power of claiming your story. She shares how her upbringing honed her ability to read a room, anticipate challenges, and build belonging, skills that have made her invaluable in corporate spaces.

Learn more about Chéla Gage: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chelagage/

Key Themes:

✅ Hypervigilance as Leadership Strength: Growing up navigating new homes and caregivers taught Chéla to read the room quickly, identify influencers, and trust her intuition—skills she now uses to drive business impact.

✅ Reframing Trauma into Purpose: Chéla discusses how she once felt shame about her foster care past but now sees it as her superpower, providing her with empathy and perspective leaders need.

✅ Parenting as Reparenting: Motherhood allowed Chéla to give the love she didn’t receive as a child back to herself.

✅ The Role of Anxiety: Anxiety kept Chéla alert and prepared, but she learned to manage in therapy, to reduce constant threat scanning and burnout while embracing her “hypervigilance” as a leadership tool.

✅ Creating Belonging in Corporate Spaces: Through her career in recruiting and DEIB leadership, Chéla discovered the importance of recognizing and honoring people’s whole stories, not just their resumes, to create true inclusion.

Timestamps:

07:09 Hypervigilance as a Superpower

12:59 Transforming Pain into Purpose

18:40 The Role of Anxiety: A Double-Edged Sword

24:14 Inclusion and Belonging

29:51 The Impact of Personal Stories

34:50 Empowering the Foster Community