Check Out Erica Gifford Mills’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Erica Gifford Mills.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I didn’t start out with a grand plan to become an author, speaker, coach, and nonprofit founder. I started with a question: How do we help people find their voice when life has taught them to stay quiet?

My professional background is in leadership, human resources, and legal/compliance, so I spent years seeing what happens when people feel they have to be everything to everyone. I founded Balanced Symmetree™ to help women manage boundaries, lead with emotional intelligence, and build lives that actually feel like their own. That work grew into coaching, speaking, my books *The Rooted Life* and *Rooted Leadership*, and the International Women Speakers Summit, where I help other women be seen and heard.

But my story has never followed a neat, inspirational script. I lost my parents, survived a stroke, and went through breast cancer treatment and a double mastectomy. Then, in September 2024, my 24-year-old son, Marine Sergeant Conner Mills, died by suicide. There is no tidy lesson that makes losing my son okay. I miss him every day.

Conner’s death changed the direction of my work, sort of. I founded Rooted In Service to advocate for military and veteran mental health, challenge the silence and stigma around asking for help, and create conversations that may save lives. I went on to earn a master’s degree in military psychology because I wanted my advocacy to be grounded in more than my own experience.

Today, all the pieces of my work connect: helping women use their voices, helping leaders recognize the human beings behind the roles, and urging our military communities to be louder than the silence. I’m still learning how to hold grief and joy in the same life. I’m still getting comfy being uncomfy. And I’m using whatever platform I have to remind people that their story matters, their voice matters, and they do not have to face the hard parts alone.

We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
A smooth road? I’m pretty sure my GPS gave up and said, “Good luck, Erica.”

There have been professional challenges: building a business while working a demanding career, learning to set the very boundaries I teach, and putting my voice in rooms where I wasn’t always sure it would be welcomed. I’ve had to learn that being capable of carrying everything doesn’t mean I should.

The personal challenges have been much harder. I lost both of my parents, survived a stroke, and went through breast cancer treatment and a double mastectomy. In 2024, my son Conner, a Marine, died by suicide. His death isn’t an obstacle I “overcame.” He is my son, and I will grieve him for the rest of my life.

Some days, continuing to show up means speaking on a stage. Other days, it means getting out of bed, answering one email, or letting someone help me. I’ve learned to stop measuring strength only by what I can accomplish. Sometimes strength is telling the truth: “I’m hurting, and I need support.”

That honesty has shaped everything I do now. Through Balanced Symmetree, I help women lead without abandoning themselves. Through Rooted In Service, I speak openly about military mental health and the fear and stigma that can keep people silent. I wish the road had been gentler. But I’m here, still loving, still learning, and still determined to be louder than the silence.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
My work has a few branches, but they all grow from the same belief: people do their best work and live fuller lives when they feel safe enough to be honest about who they are and what they need.

In my corporate career, I work in market compliance. That background, along with graduate degrees in management and human resource management, has given me a practical understanding of leadership, accountability, and the pressures people carry behind their job titles. As the founder of Balanced Symmetree™, I bring that experience into coaching, speaking, and writing focused on women’s empowerment, boundary management, emotional intelligence, and what I call Rooted Leadership™: learning to lead yourself before you try to lead anyone else.

I’m the author of *The Rooted Life* and *Rooted Leadership*, and I host *Get Rooted Radio*. I also founded the International Women Speakers Summit because I wanted to create more than a stage. I wanted women with meaningful messages to have the preparation, visibility, and confidence to be seen, heard, and remembered.

My most personal work is Rooted In Service, the nonprofit I founded after my son, Marine Sergeant Conner Mills, died by suicide. I earned a master’s degree in military psychology and now advocate for military and veteran mental health education, stigma reduction, and conversations that make it easier to ask for help. I’m proud of the community we’re building around that mission, even as I wish with everything in me that Conner were here to see it.

What sets me apart is that I bring both professional training and lived experience to the conversation. I know how to talk about leadership in a boardroom, and I know that life doesn’t pause when someone walks into one. I can be direct, vulnerable, and a little sarcastic, sometimes in the same sentence. Whether I’m working with a woman who needs permission to set a boundary or asking a military community to confront its silence, my goal is to help people say the hard thing, hear one another, and take the next step.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
Over the next five to ten years, I think leadership development will become much more human and much more practical. We’ll still talk about strategy and performance, but we’ll also have to talk about boundaries, emotional intelligence, trust, and what happens when the person leading the meeting is quietly carrying grief, burnout, or fear. Those things don’t disappear when someone puts on a blazer.

AI will change how we work, learn, and communicate. I see tremendous opportunity in that, but it also raises the value of skills technology can’t practice for us: listening, making sound decisions, building trust, and having an uncomfortable conversation with compassion. I expect people to want less leadership advice that sounds good on a slide and more tools they can use on a difficult Tuesday.

I also believe mental health advocacy will move toward more specific, community-based conversations. Awareness matters, but awareness alone is not enough. In military and veteran communities especially, we need to keep asking what makes someone feel safe enough to speak up, whom they trust, and what support is available after they do. My hope is that we become better at listening to the answers and changing the systems around them.

For women in leadership and speaking, I see the same shift toward substance. More women will claim space, share their expertise, and build platforms on their own terms. The question will be whether we give them meaningful opportunities and support, rather than simply telling them to be more confident. That’s the work I want to keep doing: helping people find their voice, use it well, and make room for someone else’s.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://balancedsymmetree.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericagiffordmills/
• Other: https://linktr.ee/ericagiffordmills