Chief Change Officer
#393 Rebecca Sutherns: Career on Her Terms—From Global Aid to Solopreneur Strategy — Part One
Mon, 26 May 2025
Rebecca Sutherns didn’t follow a straight path—and she’s the first to say that’s the point. As a strategy coach and solo entrepreneur for 27 years, she’s helped leaders rethink what’s next while doing the same for herself. In this two-part series, we talk about work-life trade-offs, momentum, and why imagining your future might be the most strategic thing you’ll do. If you’ve ever hit pause or felt stuck in place, this one’s worth a listen.Key Highlights of Our Interview:27 Years Solo—By Design“I’m in year 27 of my own solopreneurial journey.”Why she stayed intentionally solo—and never looked back.The Business Started in the Gaps“If it sounded interesting… and if I could find some childcare, then it was like, okay, I’ll say yes.”How her career grew between naptimes and network calls.The Flight That Changed Her Fees“This guy said, ‘You’re charging what?’ And I ended up in this business school program that totally transformed how I priced.”One plane ride, one wake-up call, five times the income.Why She Chose Not to Scale“I didn’t want the responsibility of paying someone else’s mortgage.”Her unapologetic answer to the growth-at-all-costs model.Reinvention, Repeated“I would just change how I looked at the work.”Why she never pivoted industries—but constantly evolved her lens._________________________Connect with us:Host: Vince Chan | Guest: Rebecca Sutherns, PhD, CPF --Chief Change Officer--Change Ambitiously. Outgrow Yourself.Open a World of Expansive Human Intelligencefor Transformation Gurus, Black Sheep,Unsung Visionaries & Bold Hearts.EdTech Leadership Awards 2025 Finalist.18 Million+ All-Time Downloads.80+ Countries Reached Daily.Global Top 1.5% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>170,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did family responsibilities influence Rebecca's career choices?
My family was going on sabbatical. We were taking a three-month break. And just before that, through a seemingly random LinkedIn rabbit trail, found a book produced by a group called Thought Leaders Business School out of Australia. And I was at a stage at that moment, it was one of those chapter changes for me of saying, am I ready to hire people?
Am I ready perhaps to be hired by a large organization? What's the next iteration of my business? And I read this book very quickly because I didn't want to carry it with us on sabbatical and I only had it in hard copy. So I was whipping through it, trying to get it done before we got on the plane.
And it really grabbed my attention to the point of saying, I think this is going to give me a pathway to what I want the next generation chapter of my business to look like. And interestingly, coming out of Australia, that's where we were going on sabbatical. I had never been to Australia before.
And the one day that I ended up working on that three month break was to meet with one of the people that worked with this thought leaders business school at that time. And over the course of that year in 2017, I became more and more interested in the work they were doing, partly because they had a structured pathway for self-employed people to scale up.
And I don't know that I even knew that was possible. I think I had other growth pathways in my head. They weren't seeming to fit very well, but I wasn't sure it was even possible. I think, too, that one person could scale up their impact and still stay a fairly lean, small organization.
fast forward a little bit, but I ended up going back to Australia later that same year and getting involved as a student in this thought leaders business school. And over the next three to three and a half years was involved in growing my business through that program. And it seemed crazy to me.
I, as I said, I had never been to Australia before and I ended up going twice that year and it's to extricate myself from my busy practice and my family life and fly to Australia almost on a whim to invest in some business training.
felt pretty crazy and i wondered if i would show up almost like a little demanding of do you know what it took for me to get here and figure this out but it was the opposite i was just like a big sponge i was so excited to have that kind of adventure i love to travel so that's a big part of it for me but it was just like being surrounded by people who were doing interesting things in their business and who were inspiring in their
level of ambition and in painting a picture of a future that I didn't even know could be possible. And that led into that three plus year student journey, which took us into COVID. And then out of that, again, about three and a half years ago, reached what they call black belt level at that program and became a faculty member with them.
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Chapter 3: What were the pivotal moments in Rebecca's entrepreneurial journey?
If you don't know what you're trying to create in your practice, in your life, if you don't even know something is a possibility, the likelihood of you pursuing it is very low. But if you have a really detailed,
I picture it being like instead of sketching something out in pencil, if you've actually filled in the colors and the shading and the details of it, the likelihood of you being able to achieve that or move toward it is much, much higher. So that's one piece is helping people think. see the possibilities and actually encouraging them to build in the details of it.
Because people can speak in generalities about what they want their future to be like, but they may not be able to describe it in detail, partly because they haven't taken the time to do that or had the prompts or encouragement. But sometimes, like I mentioned with my thought leader's business school journey, I had never heard of scaling up as a solopreneur. I didn't know that was a thing.
Or one concept they talk about a lot in that program is dollars up, days down, which basically means getting more money in for working less. And I hadn't realized how ingrained in me that direct correlation between hours worked and money in the door is.
And they turned that on its head for me and said, no, it's quite possible to work less and make more, not to have to put time and money on a linear kind of relationship together all the time. Things like that where your mind just goes, oh, didn't even know that was a possibility. Now that I do, I can let my imagination meander through that path and go, huh, what would that be like?
So I think one piece with my work is giving people opportunities exposure to the possibility of a different future and helping them get the details of that in really in more detail than they otherwise might. And then I think another piece is almost like a reassurance piece. And I say that carefully because I think when we are in transition,
or even considering some sort of transition, there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of unsettledness. We feel untethered because you have to say goodbye to something before you can say yes to the new thing. And it's a little bit, you might have heard the image of kind of a trapeze artist that has let go of one bar and hasn't yet grasped the other.
And there's this moment, or maybe a long moment, of...
unsettledness and I think having someone alongside you in that moment to say this is normal you are not going crazy this is you will feel solid ground again this is what that liminal threshold space feels like I think having some people that have that can come alongside you in that journey and reassure you that what you're experiencing is in fact what it's like
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Chapter 4: Why did Rebecca choose to remain a solopreneur?
Thank you so much for joining us today. If you like what you heard, Don't forget, subscribe to our show, leave us top-rated reviews, check out our website, and follow me on social media. I'm Vince Chen, your ambitious human host. Until next time, take care.