Chief Change Officer
#268 Rebecca Sutherns: Building a Life That Flexes—Not Breaks — Part Two
Tue, 1 Apr 2025
In Part 2, the focus shifts to how Rebecca helps others through turning points—especially people who are accomplished, capable, and a little too comfortable. She challenges leaders to imagine the future before chasing it, unpacks how midlife isn’t a crisis but a creative window, and talks through what momentum really looks like when you’re not sure what to do next.Draw the Future – “You can’t walk toward what you haven’t pictured.” Why strategy starts with sketching, not spreadsheets.Elastic Leadership – A stretched mind stays strong. A stuck one snaps. How to find your own tension point—and work with it.Rebecca's book: Elastic - Stretch without snapping or snapping backMidlife Isn’t the End of the Book – It might be the best chapter. Rebecca reframes age as a lever, not a limitation.Momentum Beats Motivation – Motivation is moody. Momentum is movement. Here’s how to find it again.Parenting, Coaching & Boundaries – Why coaching your kids is a terrible idea—but letting them crash your book club isn’t.This isn’t an episode about reinvention theory. It’s about what to do when you’ve stopped moving—and how to start again, without blowing everything up._________________________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 story?
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.
Chapter 2: Why should strategy start with imagination rather than data?
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 CV.
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.
Chapter 3: How can curiosity and imagination evolve with age?
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.
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.
Chapter 4: What role does momentum play in personal and organizational change?
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.
Chapter 5: How do individual and organizational transformations compare?
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.
So, for example, if I'm in a private sector firm that values shareholder value, profitability, revenues, market share, those kinds of things, you still need to have a bit of a conversation about those things. benchmarks of success, those performance indicators, but it's generally pretty well understood.
In the kinds of work that I do organizationally, because I'm working in largely big community-facing initiatives, so that might be a university, it might be an organization working, say, in food security or affordable housing or a multi-service social service large agency or something. We often have to start with conversations collectively about what are we going after? What does a win look like?
Because sometimes the wins are very hard to define or other various people around the table have different definitions of what a win looks like. So one thing that's different in an organizational and individual context is organizationally, we need to have conversations as a group or multiple groups
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Chapter 6: Why is defining success crucial for transformation?
To say, is the picture in your head of success matching the picture in my head or his head or their head or your head? And really develop that shared joint picture of success. Whereas when I'm working one-on-one, I only have to have that conversation with one person. But the conversation is similar in that... You can't easily go after something if you don't know what it is you're going after.
So I intentionally build into the strategizing processes that I do. And that's personal strategy and organizational too.
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.
So I mentioned earlier, part of for me earlier in my career was, 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 I 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 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 environment, 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.
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Chapter 7: How can midlife be a creative opportunity rather than a crisis?
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. 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 is 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.
that it's hard you feel like you're supposed to know the answer to that and some people really can just come up with the answer very quickly but for others it takes some time to reconnect with what makes you sing what lights you up and organizations can drift away from that too so I see a lot of similarities kind of a big picture dot connector kind of brain so I seeing the similarities across those two modalities is clearer to me than seeing the differences.
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Chapter 8: What does it mean to view history as a springboard to the future?
Earlier, you said something that really stuck with me, that history is a springboard to the future, not a drag or inertia. It made me think of the comfort zone. Sometimes that zone becomes so comfortable, people don't want to leave it. Given your own life experience, Raising four children, now with two grandchildren. You've lived through many transitions yourself.
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 launchpad 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.
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 stretching. Will you be adaptable or not? Will you adapt or not? It's about what's your personal preferred pathway to adaptability.
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