#393 Rebecca Sutherns: Career on Her Terms—From Global Aid to Solopreneur Strategy — Part One

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Hi everyone, welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer.

I'm Vince Chen,

your ambitious human host.

Our show

is a modernist community for change progressives in organizational and human transformation from around the world.

Today's guest is Rebecca Southens,

strategy coach, facilitator, and someone who's been running her own show for 27 years.

She trained for international development,

hit pulse 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.

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 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 at in a job where there was nothing medically available to be able to take against malaria.

And I was traveling to Africa a lot 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.

Like it just was a really tricky time and in a job that I loved that I thought was my dream job, but was proving not to be sustainable with the other hopes that we had for our lives at that time.

And so eventually through a couple of other transitions and some time passed, but thankfully we were able to have our kids and that was really the focus of my work at that time.

And so my paid work was a little bit on the side at that time and that so the business that i'm now in started during a time when i had a whole bunch of little kids at home and was

finding work that fit inside that so literally i remember it being if it sounded interesting if the people that called me sounded like folks that i would enjoy spending time with if i could find some child care then it was like, okay, if that sounds interesting to me, I'll say yes.

And so it ended up just being this collection of, yes, interesting, but random projects that when I looked back on my CV a few years into that, it was just a mess.

It was interesting stuff, but there was no real kind of plot line that you could easily follow.

And so what I would say is that the journey has been one of growing intentionality in terms of saying, what do I want the thread that connects my work to become?

And also, what do the other responsibilities that I've chosen in my life give me space to try?

For example, really wanted and needed in those early days to have a lot of flexibility.

And that led to a decision to stay as a solopreneur as opposed to growing a larger firm where I might have hired a bunch of people to do what I do.

Certainly had opportunities to do that, had enough demand for the work to do that, but didn't want the responsibility of feeling like I was on the hook for helping pay other people's rent or mortgages or having to really lock down some lack of flexibility that I felt like I needed at that time if one of our kids had a doctor's appointment or a soccer tournament or something like that.

But I think over time, some things have stayed very consistent, including working as a solopreneur, but other things have shifted over that time where I can be much more,

much more deliberate, intentional, clear about the kind of work I want to take on.

about the areas of work I want to specialize in, even about the lack of flexibility now that, or I shouldn't say lack of it, but the high, the lower need for it that I have now that I don't have the same caregiving responsibilities that I had at that time.

And so certainly over the journey, on one level, the CV looks like it's 27 uninterrupted years of entrepreneurship, which it is.

But I would say about every three to four years, there have been some very significant either mindset shifts or strategic shifts that I've made in the business to suit where my head was at, where my life was at that time.

And that's one of the beautiful things about being self-employed: we have the latitude to reinvent what we're doing.

And so, on the one hand, there's this sort of long story, and on the other hand, there are all these shorter chapters that have each involved some transition for sure.

When I look at your website, it honestly feels like you cover everything,

especially for large institutions.

I saw the range: schools, higher ed institutions, government agencies, private companies.

You work with executives, you work with individuals, you've published a book, you've got a book club, and even what looks like off-site coaching programs or retreats coming up.

That's a lot.

And I imagine you did not launch with everything all at once.

You probably went through your own transitions, testing, adjusting, evolving the whole practice over time.

So rather than diving into all 27 years,

we need a whole series for that, maybe just share a bit about the journey of building this practice.

What were some of the major turning points?

Were there moments where you had to start over or rebuild from scratch?

Anything that really shaped the way your work looks today,

especially while helping others through their transitions?

I think one of the big kind of big decisions early on was to focus with mission-driven leaders.

I'm very interested in working with clients that whose mission aligns with values that I share.

So I would not be someone who would be good at helping, I don't know, know, some random private sector factory build more widgets.

I don't, if I don't care about the work they're doing and can't connect it with some values that are important to me, that was a way of being more selective about who to work with.

And also choosing to really focus on facilitation and coaching that came along.

But when I think about if I drew the timeline of the 27 years and one of the major inflection points came about seven years ago, 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 from 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 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 a thing to, 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.

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.

And that community of people, that methodology, but also just the change in mindset and how I show up in the world.

has been really dramatic.

And for example, it probably close to quintupled my income.

It gave me a whole different set of people that are role models and mentors and colleagues.

It added another dimension to my work as a mentor and faculty member within that program.

But I think it also created a cadence in me of more consistent experimentation over time.

And I'm very accustomed now to a rhythm of trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't.

and just really leveling up my game.

I'm someone who loves to learn.

I'm really, I am very curious and interested in a lot of things.

And so, this gave me a structure in which to do that.

So, as I look back on the story of the business over the 27 years, that what now is the seven-year chapter certainly will figure very prominently in that storyline because it changed the game for me.

As I was listening to your story, one word came to my mind.

Actually, it's not even my word, it's yours.

The word word is

reimagine.

That's exactly what you are doing now for your clients, for individuals, and you've done it for yourself too.

You've mentioned that first move, how you went somewhere, came back, studied, learned, and transformed.

That's the process.

It sounds like that spirit of reimagining is at the core of everything you do now.

But before someone even get to that breakthrough moment,

there are a lot of challenges.

Things that block them from even starting to reimagine.

Whether it's mindset, fear, financial pressure, and just feeling stuck.

feeling incapable.

They're always barriers.

So in your experience, what are some of the biggest challenges people face

before

they can truly reimagine their future?

And as a follow-up, could you share any examples of how you've helped someone move through that dark place and reach the other side?

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Yeah, absolutely.

And I think that word reimagine has become so important to me because I'm more and more convinced that until we can picture something, literally

imagine a vivid, detailed picture of it in our heads.

It's really hard to to move toward it.

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 picture, 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 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 bops or encouragement.

But sometimes, like I mentioned with my thought leaders 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 was.

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, oh, what would that be like?

So I think one piece with my work is giving people

exposure to the possibility of a different future and helping them sketch 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.

There's some work on transitions that.

A guy named Bruce Feiler has done and he talks about life quakes.

And life quakes are massive transitions that shake us.

And what I appreciate about his work, small sample-ish in the US, but I don't know if it applies other places.

I would assume it would.

But what I appreciate is that he talks about those life quakes happening more often than we think and lasting longer than we think.

And so I think if we can normalize for people, We've got this interesting combination right now of transitions of change speeding up.

Like you said, when I said a three or four year reinvention cycle, there's some research coming out right now that suggests that many businesses, about 20% of them, are reinventing themselves faster than their own business cycles, than their own budget cycles.

We've got this pace of change speeding up on the one hand, but we've also got this personal lived experience of transitions taking longer than we think.

Those life quakes really shake us sometimes for three to five years.

And so you have this three to five year cycle and you have this accelerating pace of change also.

And that can serve to be destabilizing for people.

And so part of what I do is normalize that, but also help them have some, maybe put some vocabulary to it.

So sometimes when we're feeling like I need to make a change, but I'm not sure what the next chapter is going to be, helping people kind of name what they're craving is, I think, a really helpful offering.

And I do that through coaching.

Yes, I've got a little diagnostic tool I can tell your listeners about.

But I think that there's, in my work, I'm noticing at least five kinds of categories of what people, particularly around midlife, although it doesn't have to be, are craving that they sometimes have trouble even putting words to.

Because sometimes people have gone through a long period of time in a particular role, maybe as a parent, maybe in a particular job or job identity, where you go, This is who I am, this is what I do.

And sometimes transitions can rock our identity, and we need some time to go, oh, okay, where am I now?

What, who am I now?

Who is the next version of me?

And I've got stickers.

They just arrived at my desk today that say that version of me is no longer in print.

And it's okay.

What's the new version like?

And so I think part of what I can do is help people normalize that experience and give some language to it so that they can begin to make some choices that energize them and move toward that vivid picture of the future that we began to imagine together.

And that can happen organizationally, corporately, systems-wide, and it can happen personally.

And so, I'm always working at those multiple kinds of altitudes to say this can be a collective experience organizationally and sectorally

in communities, but it also can be an individual experience between myself and a client 101.

Let me try to summarize.

Correct me if I'm wrong.

First,

reimagined is about creating a vision.

But many people either don't have a clear vision, or if they do,

it's not specific enough.

That's where you step in.

Help them define it, make it real, and break it down into something they can actually see and articulate.

Then comes the reassurance.

like getting a personal trainer.

They are not just paying for the gym.

They are paying for for someone to keep them accountable, motivated, and moving forward.

That's the role you play,

helping them stay disciplined, reminding them that it's hard but doable, and that the result is worth it.

You also bring in tools, not just to help them execute, but to make sure the progress is sustainable.

And this applies not just to individuals, but also to organizations.

Sometimes the organization knows it wants to change, but doesn't even know what needs to change.

You help them discover that first and then guide them through the process.

Did I get that right?

Absolutely.

And I think a lot of the tools that we traditionally use are rearview 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 CB.

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, 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,

I don't know if it's inertia or the 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.

That's it for today.

We've covered Rebecca's own private pack journey, from global work to solopreneur life.

But next, we get into what she's learned from helping others through their turning points.

In part two,

we talk about drawing the future before chasing it, finding momentum when motivation is gone missing, and why midlife might be the best time to reimagine everything.

See you there.

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 Vin Shen, your ambitious human host.

Until next time, take care.