The Rooms I Walk Into (and the Ones I’m Done Walking Out Of)
I’ve been in a lot of rooms.
Boardrooms where the tension is so thick it has a smell. Classrooms where students were learning to lead, while their professors were quietly at war with each other. Campus retreats where the agenda is printed and laminated, and everyone already knows nothing will change. Team meetings where a senior leader has been in place for years - beloved by some, resented by others - and nobody has told them the full truth about their impact. I walk in. I facilitate.
I leave.
For a long time, I thought that was the job. And I was good at it. Very good. I still am. But somewhere between the travel days, the packed itineraries, the debrief calls, and the 12-week project plans, I started asking a harder question: Who is this actually serving?
The Work That Filled My Calendar
Let me give you three snapshots from the past few months. Because the work itself is interesting. And the tension underneath is worth naming.
Snapshot 1: The New Leader Who Needed a Real Mirror
A mission-driven organization hired someone into a complex, highly visible leadership role - the kind of role where you’re accountable to almost everyone and deeply understood by almost no one. She stepped in during a period of transition, without the full institutional endorsement those roles usually carry. The people she was now leading had a lot of feelings about that. Her supervisor called me. They didn’t want a generic assessment. They wanted a process that would give voice to the community and give this leader something she could actually use to grow. What I designed was painstaking: a validated 360 instrument customized to their context, qualitative interviews spanning every major constituency, twelve weeks of careful work, a written report, and coaching sessions to make sure the findings translated into something real - not just a document filed in a drawer. This is the kind of work that gets me out of bed.
Snapshot 2: The Team That Named Itself Honestly
A senior leader reached out through a mutual connection. The person I spoke with was bracingly candid: there had been years of dysfunction, some members genuinely didn’t like each other, and the team’s reputation across the organization suffered as a result. I wrote them a proposal for a multi-phase engagement - starting with the inner circle, working outward to the broader leadership group, and eventually addressing the organizational culture dynamics that let this go on so long. I was honest in return: a workshop wouldn’t fix this. The social norms, the exclusionary behaviors, the way this team was perceived from the outside - all of it needed to shift, or any progress would simply erode once I left the building. I know how to do this work. I’ve done it many times. But I’ll tell you what I’ve learned to look for now: whether an organization wants real change, or wants to be able to say they brought someone in.
Snapshot 3: The Room That Was Asked to Design Before Deciding
An organization in the middle of a major long-term strategy initiative invited me to facilitate a session for its governing board. Not a decision meeting - a design meeting. I designed the entire session from scratch: a research synthesis, structured small-group work, a creative design-thinking exercise that asked people to imagine catastrophic failure to clarify what they truly valued, and a structured output that gave the team working on implementation something board-authored to work from. I watched serious people in serious roles get genuinely energized by the process of creating. That doesn’t always happen. It was one of those days when the room surprised me.
The Pattern Underneath All of It
Here's what those three engagements have in common, and it's not what you might expect. They're all real. They're all meaningful. They all represent the kind of work I believe in.
I've been running a solo practice at capacity for years. Strong results. Clients who refer other clients. By most visible measures, it looks like success. But I've also been the person who boards a plane exhausted, facilitates a full-day session with care and precision, and then answers emails on the way home.
And I've said yes when I should have said no. To projects that were adjacent to my work but not quite a good fit. To clients who negotiated my rates and then needed more than any rate could justify. T
The work that looks most lucrative on a proposal often has the worst margins once I account for scope creep, extra calls, the revision rounds I absorbed, and the prep time that never appears in any contract. Meanwhile, the work that energizes me most — sitting with a leader and helping them see themselves clearly, helping them hear truth they've never been told — is also the most efficient, the most impactful, and the place where results actually stick.
What I’ve Decided About Conflict-Heavy Work
I've done a lot of hard thinking about the engagements that live at the intersection of organizational dysfunction and leadership development — the ones where I'm not just facilitating, I'm absorbing.
I know how to do that work. I won't pretend I don't. But there's a meaningful difference between stepping into conflict because the work matters and you're genuinely called to it — and stepping in because someone asked and you said yes on instinct, or obligation, or fear of turning down a referral.
If I walk into rooms like that going forward, it will be because the organization is serious about change, not just about optics. Because the people in the room are actually ready to be honest.
Boundaries, it turns out, are not a limitation. They're a capability. The ability to look at a project and say, "This is not my work right now, or not under these terms," is as much a professional skill as anything I do in a room. Maybe more so. And I spent a long time treating it like a weakness. I still want to sit with the leader who's just stepped into the hardest role of her career and has never had anyone give her a real, rigorous, caring account of her impact. I still want to help fractured teams find enough common language to move forward. I still want to walk into a room full of serious people and watch design thinking do what it does—break open stuck places and make space for something new. But I also want to build the parts of this practice that don't require me to be somewhere else every week.
The work I want to do is the work that changes people. I'm just getting more intentional about the terms.
