Carrie Heimer reintroduces herself and shares her HR background and personal mental-health journey, then launches Connect with Carrie, outlining weekly conversations on anxiety, stress, resilience, self-compassion and reflective takeaways.
Carrie opens the live with a warm hello and briefly reintroduces herself to the audience, explaining that some viewers may have met her before during HR community lives. This short opening sets a friendly tone and orients returning and new viewers.
Carrie shares personal details—wife, mother, and grandmother—and outlines her 30-plus years in HR leadership, including her role as CHRO for Red Wing Shoe Company. She explains she took early retirement to become a caregiver, providing context for her life transition.
Carrie recalls caring for her mother who later passed, which prompted reflection about her next chapter, and then candidly shares her lifelong struggles with eating disorder, anxiety, depression, and perfectionism. She also describes admitting herself for treatment in 2015 and frames this experience as the impetus for her current passion to support others earlier in their mental health journeys.
Carrie introduces her series 'Connect with Carrie,' outlines the kinds of topics she will cover—anxiety, stress, resilience, self-compassion, and more—and describes the session format of a focused topic with takeaways for reflection. She invites viewers to provide feedback on meaningful topics and encourages them to join the weekly lives, ending with gratitude and a friendly sign-off.
Hello everyone. So excited to be here today. My name is Carrie Heimer and I've had the chance to meet some of you before during the HR community lives, but I'm back after a few months of being away and excited to reintroduce myself. So again, my name is Carrie. I am a wife, a mom, a grandma of three beautiful granddaughters. And I've spent the last three plus decades working in HR leadership, most recently as the CHRO or head of HR for Red Wing Shoe Company. I took early retirement in late 2024 to be a caregiver for my mom who at the time was battling cancer.
And she did pass away in early 2025, which gave me an opportunity to figure out what it was that I wanted to do in this next season. And one of the things that I knew I always wanted to do in this next chapter was something that the convergence of leadership and mental health. My why is very personal. have had my own lived experience, like many of you, with various mental health conditions. And my earliest memory was in sixth grade. I began a very dangerous dance with an eating disorder. And then over the years, my mental health manifested itself in the form of anxiety, depression.
I had huge perfectionistic tendencies. And always this general feeling that I was not enough or I wasn't doing enough. And on the outside, people watching me in my career and as a mom, I'm sure thought I had it all together, but the reality was I didn't. And it all came to a crashing head for me in 2015 when I admitted myself into a mental health facility to begin a very critical journey to heal and recover from what I had stuffed down for many, many years. And so in this season, that's my passion.
My heart's work is to be there for other people and maybe help some find the resources and support that they need sooner than I did. And so on our live streams, it's called Connect with Carrie. My goal is to just talk real talk about things that are happening in life. You know, that might take the shape of anxiety some weeks. We might talk about stress, resilience, self compassion, self worth. There will be a range of topics that will all fall under an umbrella of really living well and leading well, and I truly want your feedback on topics that would be most meaningful to you.
Each session I picture starting with a one focus topic, maybe a prompting question, an idea or two that might be helpful for you for the topic, and then hopefully leave behind some things that you can reflect on between the time that we meet. So I hope you'll join me on these weekly lives. I'm really excited to be a part of this with all of you and we're stronger together. So thanks so much for tuning in and I'll look forward to seeing you next week. Have a great day.
