Meet Our Founder
Elizabeth "Liz" McCurdy is the founder of Slaying Ordinary — a radical reinvention of workplace leadership rooted in inclusion, data, and lived experience. After two decades as a high-ranking HR executive in complex, high-growth organizations, Elizabeth walked away from the corporate ladder to rebuild the system she once helped uphold.
Diagnosed as neurodivergent later in life, she saw firsthand how traditional HR systems fail the very people they claim to support. What followed was a personal and professional reckoning — and the birth of a new kind of leadership.

Liz's Story
The Turning Point
For years, Elizabeth delivered award-winning HR strategies: scaling global operations, restructuring teams, and leading performance and culture transformations across thousands of employees. But behind the scenes, she was masking burnout, silencing her instincts, and bending to a system built for conformity — not humanity.
Everything changed when she realized: the workplace isn’t broken for some of us. It’s working exactly as designed — and that design needs to change.

The Mission
Slaying Ordinary
Slaying Ordinary exists to challenge outdated leadership models and build new ones that don’t rely on disclosure, diagnosis, or burnout to get noticed. Through tools like the Inclusive Leadership Baseline, the Inclusion Index, and unapologetic content, Elizabeth is creating a playbook for leaders who want to build workplaces that work for everyone.
Her work centers the people too often left behind: the neurodivergent, the chronically ill, the quietly burned out, and the ones who “don’t look disabled” but are carrying the weight of an inaccessible world.

Values
What Liz Believes
True inclusion means not having to ask.
- Data is more powerful than assumptions.
- HR should be about performance, not policing.
- Leadership isn’t a personality trait — it’s a system you build.
- Burnout isn’t a personal failure — it’s a workplace design flaw.
Credentials & Credibility
- 20+ years in senior HR and People Strategy roles
- Built & scaled teams of 3,000+ globally
- Winner of multiple CEO and President’s Awards for innovation
- Creator of the Inclusive Leadership Baseline (ILB) and the I-7 scoring system
- Speaker, strategist, and advisor to startups and Fortune 500s
- Lived experience with neurodivergence, chronic burnout, and systems change
Want to work with Liz?
Elizabeth offers advisory services, fractional and interim HR, consulting, training, and keynote speaking for organizations ready to change and move from performative to transformative inclusion.
The Origin Story of the Slaying Ordinary Movement
After 20 years in HR—spanning multiple industries, organizations, and leadership roles—I saw the same pattern play out again and again.
Inclusion became a poster on a wall.
A line in a strategy doc.
A checkbox at the end of a hiring form.
And all the while, real people—high performers, brilliant misfits, masked strugglers—were burning out, opting out, or quietly disappearing inside systems that were never built for them.
I was one of those people.
Diagnosed as neurodivergent later in life, I looked back and realized:
The systems I spent my entire career building and defending were quietly eroding people like me. Not because anyone meant harm, but because the structure itself only served those who fit “the mold.”
It rewarded polish over clarity.
Charm over truth.
Resilience over rest.
Performance over humanity.
By the time I had my daughter, everything cracked open. The scaffolding that had kept me functioning—external support, learned scripts, survival habits—collapsed. I could no longer hide what I couldn’t manage. My dysfunctions weren’t new. They had just been deeply masked.
And in that unraveling, I saw what most systems couldn’t:
We don’t need more wellness webinars.
We don’t need to keep asking people to advocate harder, disclose earlier, or perform better.
We need to stop trying to fix people, and start fixing the systems we’ve built to exclude them.
That’s why I created Slaying Ordinary.
Not as a brand.
As a rebellion.
It’s a platform to tell the truth about how our people systems actually operate—and to arm people leaders with the tools to finally lead differently.
No more empty DEI language.
No more trauma disguised as professionalism.
No more “bring your whole self to work” campaigns that only apply to the socially acceptable parts.
Slaying Ordinary exists to uncover what’s broken—and help leaders rebuild work in ways that actually work.
Not just for some.
For all of us.