#393 Rebecca Sutherns: Career on Her Terms—From Global Aid to Solopreneur Strategy — Part One
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What is Rebecca Sutherns' background and expertise?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Our show is a modernist humility for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world. Today's guest is Rebecca Southans, strategy coach, facilitator, and someone who's been running her own show for 27 years.
She trained for international development, hit pause to raise four kids, and ended up building a career that never stopped evolving. In this two-part series, we talk about the moments that change everything. Career profits, creative rocks, and what it really takes to keep moving forward without burning out. Rebecca's story is sharp, honest, and refreshingly unpolished. Let's get into it.
Good morning, Rebecca. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Chief Change Officer. Finally, talking to someone from Canada again.
Thanks very much, Vince. It's good to be here. I'm in year 27 of my own solopreneurial journey. So I have an entrepreneurial background and I work as a facilitator and a coach. And the difference for that for me is that the facilitation work is primarily group-based work, helping people with strategy. And so I think about strategy for organizations and even for whole sectors or communities. So getting groups of people together who are working on a problem or a challenge that is bigger than any one organization can work on alone. And how that has morphed for me, though, is that as I worked with executive directors, CEOs, board chairs, increasingly got into more of a coaching space with those leaders and began working both one-on-one and in smaller groups with them as well.
And over that time, the most recent kind of version of all of that has landed me in a place of focusing on helping organizations and individuals reimagine their next chapter. I'm starting to lean pretty heavily into the ideas of imagination and curiosity and experimentation in my work. So most people would know me as a strategy coach and strategy facilitator. The other pieces of my work that have been really important to me are that I'm also a parent of four people in their 20s currently and a grandmother to two. I say that partly, it's more than a sidebar for me. Those relationships have been part of what have shaped my business journey as well. And in that kind of transitions coaching have really given me some experiential credibility maybe in the transitions work that I do. And so it's That's what I enjoy is helping leaders and the organizations they work for navigate the uncertainty of transition and through that build their adaptability. So I do also work as an adaptability quotient professional coach, which is an interesting tool.
We can talk more about it if you want, but it helps people. build, not just build their adaptability skills, but actually identify their preferred way of adapting because all of us need to adapt. We don't get to choose that, but we can choose the pathway we take to get there. So those are some of the areas that I'm most interested in right now.
What made you decide to start that practice? Was there a specific moment or experience that sparked it?
And that's partly actually why I mentioned the family responsibilities I had, because it's funny how when you tell a story backwards, in retrospect, it can all sound so organized and deliberate and tidy. Certainly living it forwards isn't always like that. And so for me, my priority, I started my career in international development, worked in that space and doing a lot of traveling for the first five or six years. And then had to make a career change at that point because we wanted to have a family. And I was in a job where there was nothing medically available to be able to take against malaria. And I was traveling to Africa a lot. And that was also safe during pregnancy. And so it put me at this kind of major inflection point of saying, it's a very hard conversation to say to your boss, oh, by the way, I can't travel anymore for work, even though that's 30 or 40% of my time. so that I could clean out my system so that six months from now we can start thinking about trying to have babies.
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4 chaptersSpeakers
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