Alaina McMurtry

Alaina McMurtry has spent over twenty years in the rooms where leaders are made — training teams at companies like Allstate, Toyota, Delta, Abbott, and Morgan Stanley. But across those two decades she noticed what most leadership playbooks skip: the real work isn’t managing other people. It’s having the courage to see, and be seen as, your whole self.

That conviction runs through both. Her children’s book, Are We Black on the Inside?, turns an unflinching eye on identity and belonging — the questions we carry but rarely say aloud. Simple. But Not Easy. — Can You See Me? brings that thread into the professional world: a leadership narrative about what it costs to perform instead of show up, and how authenticity becomes the foundation for everything else.

A corporate trainer and hypnotherapist based in California, Alaina writes the way she works — warm, direct, and more interested in truth than polish. She believes the inner work comes first. Both books are an invitation to begin.