Chief Change Officer
#267 Rebecca Sutherns: Building a Life That Flexes—Not Breaks — Part One
Tue, 1 Apr 2025
Rebecca Sutherns didn’t set out to become a solo strategy coach. She trained for a global career, then paused it to raise four kids, said yes to client work when she could find a babysitter, and ended up building a 27-year practice on her own terms. In Part 1, she walks us through the pivots and trade-offs that shaped her work—not from a five-year plan, but from being fully in the moment.Key Highlights of Our Interview:When the Global Plan Hit Pause – How a promising career in international development took a backseat to malaria pills, pregnancy, and timing.The Business Started by Saying Yes – “If I liked the people and could sort childcare, I did the job.” No vision board, just real life.The Accidental Mentor – A conversation in Australia flipped how she charged—and earned her five times more.Why She Didn’t Scale – Rebecca explains why staying solo wasn’t a fallback, but a deliberate choice to stay agile and human.Reinvention in Real Time – Every few years, she didn’t change jobs. She changed her lens.If your resume doesn’t make sense on paper, Rebecca’s story will remind you: maybe it’s not the paper that needs fixing._________________________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.12 Million+ All-Time Downloads.Reaching 80+ Countries Daily.Global Top 3% Podcast.Top 10 US Business.Top 1 US Careers.>>>140,000+ are outgrowing. Act Today.<<<
Chapter 1: Who is Rebecca Sutherns and what is her professional background?
Hi, everyone. Welcome to our show, Chief Change Officer. I'm Vince Chan, 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.
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.
Chapter 2: How did Rebecca Sutherns balance family and career?
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 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 understand 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 percent 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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Chapter 3: Why did Rebecca choose to remain a solopreneur?
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 childcare and
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 intentionally.
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 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 I shouldn't say lack of it, but 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 is that we have the latitude to change. 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.
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Chapter 4: What were the major turning points in Rebecca's career journey?
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 decisions early on was to focus with mission-driven leaders. I'm very interested in working with clients whose mission aligns with values that I share. So I would not be someone who would be good at helping, I don't know, some random private sector factory company Build more widgets.
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... It 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 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. 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.
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Chapter 5: How did an Australian business school influence Rebecca's career?
And 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. 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 transition 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 growth. 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 a seven-year chapter in
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 is re-imagine. That's exactly what you're doing now for your clients, for individuals, and you've done it for yourself too. You mentioned that first move, how you went somewhere, came back, studied, learned, and transformed. That's the process.
It sounds like that spirit of re-imagining is at the core of everything you do now. But before someone even gets 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, there are 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 stuck place and reach the other side?
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