Chief Change Officer
#394 Rebecca Sutherns: Career on Her Terms—From Global Aid to Solopreneur Strategy — Part Two
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:Midlife Isn’t a Crisis—It’s a Cue“I wasn’t burning out, but I could tell I was flatlining.”How Rebecca used a sabbatical to catch up with herself—not because she broke, but because she was ready for something deeper.What Comes After ‘I’ve Got This’“I kept getting hired for things I could do in my sleep. That’s when I knew it was time to stretch again.”The danger of being competent—and the invitation to do more than just deliver.Stop Filling Gaps You Don’t Want to Own“I could solve the problem, but that didn’t mean I should.”Why she stepped back from team leadership roles—even when others saw it as a step up.Sabbatical as Prototype“It was a test. Could I shift the pace and still be useful?”Why her sabbatical wasn’t a break from work—it was a strategic experiment in working differently.A Career Built Like a Hammock“The structure holds me, but it flexes.”Her metaphor for a work life that stretches without snapping—anchored but adjustable._________________________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 the background of Rebecca Sutherns?
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 Sultans, 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.
are rear view mirror, backwards looking tools rather than future oriented tools. And we're not even aware of that. And so I think sometimes if we look at our data, for example, evidence, whatever that might be, that almost by definition is what has happened in the past, right? We look for patterns that have happened in the past, or we look at our resume, our CV.
Chapter 2: How can past experiences shape our future?
We look at the experience and expertise we're bringing in our biography, our autobiography. All of that is good stuff, and it's really important in getting us to know the specifics of what we love. I love tapping into people's very sort of quirky personal energy around what they love and what their own sort of superpowers are.
But I think the tendency for that is to be backwards looking rather than forwards looking of saying, who could I become? What could I do in the future?
And how could that history be a springboard into a new future as opposed to being an anchor that keeps me defined in a particular way or keeps me working in a particular methodology or whatever that might be that I think we underestimate the potential. I don't know if it's inertia or just the weight of our past.
And as we get older, especially, that past is longer and heavier and ties us into something. And so I think we often think of things like imagination and curiosity being childlike or childhood things. And part of my interest is helping people grow into that rather than out of it. As we do get older, there's more of a history to anchor us.
Chapter 3: What is the role of curiosity in adulthood?
But at the same time, our curiosity actually stems from our memories. And so to the extent that adults have a larger memory bank, we have more experience to draw on to help us, in theory, be more curious, be more imaginative. So there are...
There's good, solid reasons why adults can actually be more curious, more imaginative than kids if we are willing to be a bit more experimental, hold things loosely, stay not quite as tied to our autobiography as we have been. And that also is true organizationally as it is personally, to say we've shown up in the world in a particular way.
We've taken on a particular position, a particular identity. And are we willing to... either change that radically or tweak it in some ways that it'll take us along a path that is more energizing for us. And I think you're right. Helping people, first of all, to have a vision for that and then to fill that in greater detail with someone alongside to be that sort of coach and cheerleader.
I realize that people hire me primarily for energy. It's to build momentum. It's to borrow my belief when they don't have some. It's to have some tools along the way that are going to help them move through that liminal space, which our brains hate. We really don't like the uncertainty of that in-between season.
And so even that adaptability tool I mentioned, it gives people some language and some practical steps to keep moving. Because one of the things that's most motivating when you're going through transition is momentum.
And so if I can help people both initiate and maintain momentum, the likelihood of them being able to then make some of the changes or some of the brave choices that they want to make is that much higher.
You are one of the few guests, or maybe even the first, who has such deep experience on both sides of transformation, i.e. organizations and individuals. So I love to hear your take. What are the similarities between these two types of change? And just as important, what are the differences?
I feel like you're in a rare position to speak to both and probably one of the best people to break it down clearly.
I think one of the similarities is the importance of articulating clearly what a win looks like, what success looks like. And I think in certain business contexts, that might be more obvious than others.
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Chapter 4: How can organizations define success?
lots of time to talk about what the win looks like i talk about how we're not we're not like i sometimes wish i was like a rower or some other kind of athlete that had a finish line and a time clock and you just know if you've improved you know when you're done because you know when the race is over you know if you've improved your time by three one hundredths of a second or something and you just have this really clear metric of success
Most of us don't have that in our individual lives or even in our corporate lives where we go, yes, that was a win. So I think part of what I can bring to a conversation is clarity around the jointly defined picture of success so that you can then go after that because there's tons of ways to define success. There's all kinds of ways to be finding that win.
Chapter 5: What are the key differences between personal and organizational change?
So I mentioned earlier, part of for me earlier in my career, Flexibility to be available to my family was part of my definition of success. I still want that, but I don't need it as desperately now that my children don't live at home. I'm looking for other kinds of abilities to combine paid work and travel. For example, that's one of my newer metrics of success. And I really value learning.
And so I've really built in some experimentation and some learning opportunities very explicitly into my work. And so helping my clients do that as well, individually and collectively, is a really important piece. And I think when you're doing it as a group, it also does depend on work. where in an organizational hierarchy or food chain, you are actually intervening.
So I do tend to work with the boards and the C-suite executives of an organization who have a certain amount of ascribed power, at least, to be able to make the kinds of changes we're talking about. But even in that around the C-suite table or around the board table, you need to have dialogue to say, do we have a shared understanding of what's going on or what we're going after?
And so that's where my facilitation skills do come in really handy because part of what facilitators are good at is structuring a conversation and making elements of that conversation visible to the whole room So that people can go, oh, that's where we are now. Now let's have this conversation. Okay, that's where we are now. Let's have it again.
And so it's providing some structured activities and almost like conversational containers to move a decision collectively forward. That's not that different than what I do in coaching. I provide content. containers, language, steps that say, first, let's talk about this, then let's talk about this. And I think overall what happens, I mentioned that I deal in energy, I do, but also in
sort of feeling like people have some clarity, some insight where you go, oh, just even taking the time to pause and have those conversations has a learning element for the people involved because so often we're just, we're going, right? We're on autopilot, we're doing our things. I think pausing strategically and wisely to say, what do I actually think? What do I actually want?
And I can share a personal example about that. When you, for me, at least when I raised four kids, I hadn't actually asked what I wanted, clearly, for quite a long time. What I wanted was kids. And so once you answer that question, what mom wants may not get asked again very much for the next 20 years.
And it's actually a much harder question than you think, especially if that muscle of asking and answering it has been atrophying. And so part of what I'm helping my clients to do in both of the spheres of organizations and individuals is to say, what do you really want? And that's part of what goes into building that vivid picture of that imagined future.
And that can take some time because it's actually a very, for most of us, it's a hard question and it surprises us
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Chapter 6: How do we reimagine life at midlife?
So when you work with people who are in that more mature stage of life, how do you help them reimagine, gain clarity, and actually take action? How do you get them to use their past as a launch pad Not a reason to stay seated in the same old armchair
I think for me on a mindset level, really going deep in thinking about whether I believe that the best is yet to come or whether the best days are behind me as someone who is at midlife has been a really important exercise. And also thinking about the math of it, because for those of us that live with a certain level of privilege, we can probably expect to live, say, round numbers to 100.
And so if I'm 55 this year and I'm thinking I'm just on the later side of halfway done, if that's true, I think so much of our CV and life experience gets filed in our 20s and 30s. And we still have this ingrained ageism and this ingrained sort of time frame that says something like work goes till we're 65. And then what happens? You've got like potentially another 35 years after that.
Chapter 7: What mindset shifts are necessary for transformation?
And so I think rethinking the math and helping other people to realize that all being well, we have a long story and a lot of life ahead of us, not just behind us, can help. The other thing I think about is I wrote a book last year called Elastic, and you talked about comfort zones.
And it's a bit about that, where we need, if we think about the metaphor of a rubber band is not useful just sitting on our desk. And in fact, if it does just sit on our desk, It gets brittle and you go to use it and it snaps and crumbles in your hand, right? An elastic is only useful if it is stretched. But if you stretch it too fast, too much, for too long, it is also not useful.
And by definition, an elastic snaps back into its original shape. But sometimes snapping back into old shapes isn't what we most need either. So I think about post-pandemic life when people were asked to snap back into old jobs or old ways of doing old jobs. They were going, no, I used to do that, but that's not who I am now.
And so I feel like that helping people through the use of metaphor can also be helpful to say in our midlife or later years, are we still willing to stretch or have we just sat on the desk and we're getting brittle? Are we still stretching, but not stretching so much that we will snap or lose our stretchiness like our stretchy pants.
So I think giving people some images like that to say, what does an optimal level of stretch look and feel like for you? And that's where some of that adaptability work comes in for me, because again, it's not about, will you be adaptable or not? Will you adapt or not? It's about what's your personal preferred pathway to adaptability. So. Some people lean into certain aspects more than others.
So if you're a really persistent, perseverant kind of person, you're going to leverage something like grit or resilience to be adaptable. Somebody else says, no, that's not me. I'm not the climb Mount Everest kind of person, but I am a really good big picture thinker. Okay, big picture thinkers are more adaptable than really highly detailed people. That's useful.
Or I'm going to leverage my team support inside the corporation where I work because our environments and our individual relationships can encourage us to take risks and push our edges of our comfort zone in some ways, whereas other team environments will keep us risk averse and small. So there's lots of different tools in the toolbox to push us into that.
learning spaces without feeling like we're going to snap or without feeling like we're having to take somebody else's path to get there. So that's the reassurance that I enjoy exploring with people is you don't get to choose whether you adapt or not, but you do get to choose the extent and the speed and the pathways you take to get there that feel like you. And so helping people visualize
both the changes that we are moving toward or that are being put upon us, But also what continues, because I think the other thing we can do to reassure our brain and our nervous system is to be clear that not everything changes at the same time. It did feel during some of those darker years that everything was changing. But even in the midst of pandemic insanity, we still had to buy groceries.
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