In this week’s episode, we have the pleasure of speaking with Dr Rebecca Sutherns, a member of the Thought Leaders programme faculty and a seasoned strategist based in Canada. With an impressive 27-year career, Rebecca has navigated various roles from international development to strategic consulting — always keeping alignment with her personal values at the forefront.
In this episode, we discuss Rebecca’s unique approach to balancing work and life alignment, her successful transition from promoting her company Sage Solutions to building her personal brand, and the many ways she’s redefined the traditional career path. We explore her multi-faceted career, which includes organisational strategy work, coaching, keynote speaking, and authorship, all while embracing adaptability and flexibility as core tenets of her professional life.
Rebecca also shares candid insights about redefining success in the later stages of her career, her profound impact on community-facing organisations, and her ongoing journey into an experimental and flexible lifestyle. Whether it’s facilitating multi-sector collaborations or inspiring individual leaders through life transitions, Rebecca’s story is a testament to the power of adaptability and the importance of living in alignment with one’s values.
Join us as we embark on this rich conversation, packed with practical advice and inspiration for redefining success on your own terms.
Key moments:
[00:00] Intro and Rebecca’s Background
[05:13] Transition from International Development to Consulting
[12:46] Work-Life Alignment and Career Choices
[20:39] Revenue Streams and Business Model
[29:16] Flexibility, Adaptability, and Brand Evolution
[38:53] Advice on Career Path and Personal Goals
[45:31] Personal Life, Empty Nesting, and Experimental Lifestyle
[52:21] Final Thoughts and Call to Action
Resources mentioned:
- Elastic by Rebecca Sutherns
- Everything you want by Lisa N’Neill
WORK-LIFE ALIGNMENT
Anna Lundberg:
Okay. Hello everybody and welcome back to this month’s interview. And I’m here with Dr Rebecca Sutherns. And interestingly, Rebecca and I, as ever, have some unexpected connections. And Rebecca is currently in the faculty of the Thought Leaders programme, which I have mentioned actually a couple of times on previous episodes. But I will let Rebecca talk about her background and introduce herself properly. So, Rebecca, lovely to have you on.
Anna Lundberg:
Please let us know and little bit about your backstory.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Thanks so much. It’s really good to be with you. I’m actually based in Canada, so given where you are and where I am, it’s interesting that our mutual connections are actually in Australia. So I’m in the 27th year of my own strategy practise. I love to help groups of people reimagine their next chapter for their organisations, most often in community facing spaces like large nonprofits and philanthropic organisations, health organisations and universities. But out of that has come kind of bigger picture and smaller picture stuff. Bigger picture being working in strategy across sectors and more specifically working with individual leaders, usually board chairs and CEOs, helping them reimagine their next chapters. So often these are high achieving, often women who are facing transitions in their own lives and trying to figure out what that looks like.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And so the transitions, coaching has become a big part of what I’m doing as well. And as is often the case when life and art and work all sort of imitate themselves, I’m certainly going through some of those big transitions in my own life over the last number of years that have informed my understanding of a lot of that work.
Anna Lundberg:
Yeah, I love that. And I know we’ve already got so much in common beyond the Australian connections. And it’s similar to the work I do in the corporate space. So looking forward to hearing obviously how you’ve arrived there. And I’m curious, so you’ve been in this space almost three decades. What were you doing before? Did you have more of a traditional career as an employee before you started out by yourself?
Rebecca Sutherns:
I did. I worked in the international development space and not for long. I had about five or six years in that space initially. And what happened was my husband and I were interested in starting a family. And at that time my job was very travel intensive, mostly to sub Saharan Africa. And as a result it meant that I had to make a big. That was a big inflection point for us actually, because there was nothing I could safely take during pregnancy against malaria and so had to make a decision about a major job change at that time in order to welcome the possibility of kids into our family. And that felt like a really hard and lousy choice at the time because it’s a really hard conversation to have to say to your boss, oh, by the way, I need to either take time off or switch jobs so that I can clean out my body of all the meds that I’ve been taking for the next six months with the possibility of maybe getting pregnant, which will also then mean that I won’t be able to travel for a period of time after that.
Rebecca Sutherns:
So out of all of that, ended up switching from a really intensive travelling role into a less intensive travelling or non travelling role in that space. And thankfully we did eventually have four kids, which meant that our focus, my focus shifted much more primarily to the kids. And in that time was a approach to do a number of contracts and kind of didn’t think of it as making a conscious step out of sort of in that space, nonprofit, corporate into self employed life. I don’t think I realised anything about what that would look like 30 years later. It was literally, does this sound interesting? Will it use my brain? Can I find, can I find child care? And as that evolved over the years and I began to say, okay, time to start looking for a different kind of role that’s going to suit our family. Now realised that what I had been doing, I loved it, it suited our needs really well and I loved the variety of it. And so it was really a gradual transition of mindset on my part more than of the actual work. The work evolved too and I took on more of it and was more specific about what I was looking for and all the things that you want to be doing when you’re, you know, trying to get a business to grow.
Rebecca Sutherns:
But I don’t even think I thought of myself as a business owner or entrepreneur until much, much later. And so even though I’ve been doing it for 27 years and I do have some clients that have been with me pretty much that whole time, maybe to them it hasn’t changed that much, but in my head and in the way that I frame it in the context of my, the whole picture of my life, it’s changed. And I think that that topic of reimagining success in that context is pretty important to me too.
Anna Lundberg:
I think I’ve never had anti malarial medication being one of the triggers for a career change. So that’s right on the podcast, definitely. And I love the questions, you know, is it interesting, challenging and, and can I get childcare? I think especially now, again, almost 30 years later, of course, the flexible work arrangements is such a hot topic and so important. It becomes more and more the top criteria and for a lot of people. And I’m really interested in this because I studied international development, I did sub Saharan African politics, I did some internships at NGOs and UN and I naively thought coming out of university that that was the way to make a difference and, you know, have an impact and help the world and so on. I’ve since adapted how I view how I can make a difference. And I’m curious for you too. I imagine there’s been that transition.
Anna Lundberg:
You were really in the field doing amazing work. And then I imagine you mentioned mindset there. There’s a bit of a shift then to, you know, strategic consulting still in that space of NGOs and charities and so on, as I understand. But can you talk to us a little bit about that, how that shifted from the work you were doing in Africa to more of the office work, I suppose as well, in a different context.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Yes, true. And again, I feel like I’m often kind of going higher altitude and lower altitude in some ways. Right. So the lower altitude piece of that chapter of my story was the biggest difference I was making was in the lives of the four people I was raising at that time. And then also at a more sort of macro systemic level, being involved with a variety of organisations at the strategic level and being able to speak into and kind of maybe cross pollinate across a number of organisations that are all making a difference in a variety of ways. So it stayed consistent for me to want to be focused in mission driven organisations whose mission and values I find compelling and important in the world. And so there’s a really strong values alignment for me. I’ve never been somebody who could be highly motivated by helping, you know, some random private sector company sell more widgets.
Rebecca Sutherns:
That wasn’t really my, my thing at any point, but I think my, my impact now is in the, the breadth of organisations that I can help focus their energies in a really targeted way and help them figure out what a win looks like. Because I think that’s what I really like about the sectors that I work in. I think when you’re working in very traditional private sector work, there’s not a lot of conversation about the metrics of success. They’re sort of known and shared. It might be profitability or market share or shareholder return, that kind of thing. But in the spaces that I work in, it would seem obvious, but it’s not the least bit obvious what success looks like. And if you ask maybe around any given leadership table or board table what their key measures of success are and what it looks like to have a really big win, you know, the range of answers you get are mind blowing. And so part of what I do is I help those answers start to line up with one another so that in a sense those folks can all be rowing in the same direction because often they are not aware that they aren’t.
Rebecca Sutherns:
It’s not a conflictual, you know, oh, we’re not getting along and the company is moving in polar opposite directions. It’s not like that. It’s that they often haven’t created the space to have the conversation to say what is a big win in our sector and what are we actually going after that we can hold ourselves accountable for. And, and that has led, as I said, into the. Some of the more individual work to say, what does success feel and look like for those individual leaders that are also around that table?
Anna Lundberg:
And so I have to ask you then, what are the metrics of success for you and how have those metrics changed in those 30 odd years?
Rebecca Sutherns:
Such a great question. I think there’s always more than one, right? But I think it is figuring out who my primary audiences are and whom I’m. Who I’m trying to. You mentioned impact, right? Of who I’m trying to impact. And so I’ve always had a very integrated story across my family responsibilities and my work responsibilities. And so I’m pretty clear that I’m not a work life balance person. I’m not sure what that balance actually looks like, but I think having alignment between the kinds of things that are important to me around the kind of person that I’m showing up to be with, both the people I love and the people I serve corporately is really important to me. And so that’s, that’s the first piece for me is really being showing up in a way that provides clarity and alignment and sort of warm energy and, you know, good support to those folks.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Whether they, you know, come into my life through family relationships or work relationships, those are very important. And that alignment piece comes through in the sense that my work is about helping people line up what they say is important to them with what they actually do. And so that can be mission alignment for organisations that could be major problem solving across a community, whether they’re trying to address food insecurity or affordable housing or environmental law or whatever it might be that they’re into. If they say they want to make a dent in that challenge what can we be doing to make sure things get all lined up in that way? And for me now, as I’m reaching the later stages of my paid work career, some of the success for me is making sure that I have a lot of options. I’ve got a lot of choice right now in my life and I really count that as a really big win to be able to have a lot of discretion over how I use my time and who I choose to work with and what books I choose to write and, you know, whatever that might be. And so that feels like an enormous indicator of success for me. And now that I’m into more grandparenting than parenting, being able to make sure that I can arrange my schedule both to, to travel a lot, which I love, and also to spend a lot of time with, with my grandbabies, that’s a pretty big deal for me.
Anna Lundberg:
I think that’s such a powerful insight that it’s about choice. Because if we feel like we have to do certain work, even though it’s against our values or it doesn’t fit with our family life, whether it’s young children or ageing parents or own chronic illnesses, that’s a horrible situation to be in. So insofar as we can have the financial success, yes. But then also for that to allow us to make the choices that work for us, that is absolutely a big sign of success. And I’m with you on the integration. I love the word alignment as well, versus balance. It’s such a black and white world we live in, isn’t it? Either you have money or you have the freedom. And either you’re doing valuable, impactful work or you’re earning the, you know, seven figure salary, whatever.
Anna Lundberg:
And you know, naively perhaps, but I like to look for people and I believe in the possibility to have a little bit of both. Maybe it’s having it all to some extent, but being able to have that purpose and impact, share values with your clients and be. Have that integrity and while still, you know what, being rewarded financially for the work you’re doing and being able to live the life that you want. So can you tell us more about your business model then in that case? So I love that you talked about you started kind of with a strategy work and of course you continue with that and you’re leaning into this area which is more about the transitions and reimagining that next chapter. So what are your sort of different income streams, if we can peek behind the curtain?
Rebecca Sutherns:
Yeah, absolutely. So the bulk of what I do probably 2/3 of it would be organisational strategy work. And for that most organisations know they need a strategic plan. They understand that that’s a sort of a cycle that, you know, is familiar to them. And so that piece of work for me is that’s kind of the steady income piece. People know me as a strategy facilitator. I’m really committed to collaborative strategy and so I design really participatory kind of engaging processes over a four to six month period to work with a large organisation to help them articulate their new priorities and make sure that those line up well with their identity statements and with the, then the detailed planning that they take care of internally. So that’s the bulk of what I do.
Rebecca Sutherns:
But sometimes what happens is an organisation that is work that I’m working with, we realise that they can’t really make an impact in the challenge that they’re trying to face if they don’t partner well with others in their space. And so sometimes that leads to multi organisation strategy, which is another part of what I do. And so that might be getting all of the funders together from a particular organisation or all of the players who are trying to address a housing crisis all in a room together. And so in that context I’m facilitating, you know, could be groups of 100 people rather than a board table of 12 to all align their efforts in a coordinated way toward helping a particular problem get solved. And so a chunk of my work is involved in that higher altitude kind of multi organisation work and then probably about a 20% or a quarter of what I’m doing has evolved much more into the one on one coaching space. And even in that space I’m doing group, group experiences, immersive group coaching. Because my, you mentioned thought leaders business school. My, my experience there, both as a student initially and now as faculty, has been that there’s great power in working on your own ST stuff alongside other people who are also working on their own stuff.
Rebecca Sutherns:
So if my strategy work is involving helping a group come to consensus about something, my coaching work is not that it’s, there’s no need for the group to align together on something, but it’s still really quite lovely to work alongside someone else who is travelling a similar road to you. And so it’s kind of, I picture it being like parallel play for toddlers, right? You’re kind of doing your own thing, but you’re in the company of other people. And so that’s the new edge of my work now where I’m creating experiences where individuals can come together to think about this idea of reimagining their next chapter. But they’re not doing it completely alone. They’re doing it both with me and sometimes with other people who can kind of just give them some sounding boards or asking some similar questions. But there’s no need for that group to come together. So those are kind of the main sort of service delivery income streams for me. The other three things that are worth noting, one is that I do a lot of keynote speaking now on this reimagination space.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Another is that I’ve written three books that are part of that, part of that piece. And so some of the work that I’m doing is straight writing. And certainly the blog that I write every week now is a continuation of that. And that really has come out of an adaptability kind of space. My first book was called Nimble and who knew just heading into Covid how important that topic was going to be? And so I’ve been become one of the earliest certified coaches using a tool called the Adaptability Quotient. And I help individuals and teams measure and improve their adaptability. So some of my writing and coaching work has a lot to do with that space. And then I also run a, I run an online book club that is, it’s once a month, it’s one hour and I read the books so the participants don’t have to.
Rebecca Sutherns:
It’s for people who are too busy to read as much as they’d like to. And because I’m somebody who reads a lot anyway, we usually cover four to six current leadership and business and self help titles a month and they can come and just listen to my summaries of those and they can decide if they want to read them themselves or say that they have or whatever they choose to do. So that’s called Wiser by choice. And that’s a, that’s another piece of the work. So those are kind of the, the main chunks that are keeping me busy and also allowing me to, to kind of look at the, the whole picture, say over the course of a year rather than any given week and say, you know, how is all of that working? And so some of it happens remotely. I do a lot of digital and in person work which gives us the flexibility to be based lots of different places over the course of the year.
Anna Lundberg:
Which I love, I love that. I love the mix. I think so many of us, if not all of us, are these multi passionate, interesting people, have all sorts of different ideas and projects you want to do. And there’s all this Pressure to have a niche and to force yourself into some books. So hopefully that’s. And I know it will be inspiring to people listening to see all the different threads but of course you have built that up over time and I imagine if you today started from scratch, you wouldn’t be able to create all those things in parallel at the same time. And I also love the community piece that you mentioned, even with the so called individual work, because me too, I’m having been fiercely independent initially from just wanting the freedom to travel by myself and then now because of the flexibility it warrants me with young kids, I’m at the beginning of that journey on my side and not living in London and a big city anymore and so on. And even I am leaning into the community space, both my own work.
Anna Lundberg:
I’ve relaunched one of my business accelerator programmes from some years ago and I’ve joined things too because there’s so much as you say to be. I like that, the parallel play of toddlers. We inspire each other as much as we can learn from the so called official expert and the sort of curriculum. I suppose I’m also curious then about your personal brand building because obviously you’ve had a long time to do it and yet there have been pivots. Not to mention that the world has changed a little bit since I imagine when you started. And what changes have you seen or adapted to how you’ve been building your brand and getting in front of the right people?
Rebecca Sutherns:
Yeah, it really has changed. I think one of the biggest changes for me was actually through this thought leaders programme rather than working under my company name, I had a company, I still do have a company called Sage Solutions, but I work under rebeccasutherns.com now and so making that decision over and over again. But certainly at one particular point to say no, I’m going to promote my personal brand as opposed to my corporate brand and deciding that I’m going to position myself as a high impact solopreneur rather than as someone who has hired a lot of people and built a company brand. That was one really big decision, I think another over time, I would say about every maybe five years there has been a really noticeable, to me at least shift in kind of the. It isn’t quite the tagline, I wouldn’t say, but it comes out that way in terms of the way that I would describe what I’m doing. So you heard me say that my interest now is in helping people and organisations reimagine their next chapter. That’s something that took me A while to land on and is feeling really good for right now. And, you know, I don’t know, three, four years from now, maybe it’ll be time for a new iteration of that.
Rebecca Sutherns:
But I think as someone who’s really embraced my personal brand, it’s super important to me that that brand obviously take on the personality that I bring to it and not be misaligned with that. And so figuring out what kinds of marketing, for example, or what kinds of conversations I want to be involved in, or what kinds of books I want to write, or the kinds of clients I like to take on, you know, that has all been part of making sure that it lines up with the kinds of contributions that I can make. I mean, it’s. I’m really good at connecting dots and sort of untangling complex problems and helping them, sort of helping people see them. And in discrete, almost like conversation chunks, I’m really as a facilitator, I’m good at taking something complex and breaking it down into individual conversations and creating containers for people to, you know, first talk about this, then talk about that, then talk about this next thing, and at the end being able to weave that together into something coherent. And so if I can be doing that across these multiple altitudes, but also sectors, because my work is across public and private and community spaces and individual lives and often multi expressions of that. And so I recently had a client where we were pulling together elected officials, social agency employees and people currently living on the streets into a common room to solve problems together for the housing crisis in that particular community. I’m really comfortable working across cross.
Rebecca Sutherns:
I just love variety. I think that’s a really big value of mine. So I like variety in my participants. I like variety in the kind of work that I do. I like variety in where I am based to do my work. And so I feel like the brand kind of matches that. I don’t want to lose focus, but I do. I am pretty nimble in terms of being able to adapt to a variety of contexts.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And also it has something to do with energy. Because when I actually dig into what people hire me for, yes, they hire me for strategy or coaching or speaking, whatever that might be, but they’re actually the currency that I’m dealing in is energy. I think both because I am a high energy person and the processes that I facilitate are energetic, but also because I think it recharges our batteries when we are working in alignment with our deepest values and when we are also on the same page as the other people, we’re we’re working with to be able to all move in the same direction, all of that is actually energising. Or if we’re learning how to adapt in ways that suit our best way of adapting, as opposed to just feeling overwhelmed or depleted by the need to pivot yet again. All of that kind of focuses other people’s, my clients energy in a particular direction. So for me that’s. That energetic exchange is a really big part of the brand.
Anna Lundberg:
Love that. And you’ve obviously landed on something very powerful. Being nimble and adaptable. I think those are sort of the biggest skills that you could possibly need in today’s environment, let alone the last few decades.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And yeah, well, they certainly have been. I mean, if you look at pretty much any of the big sort of future of work reports or those kinds of things, everyone’s identifying some variation of adaptability as one of the, if not the number one employability skill of the future, which makes sense. I mean, if we are, if we are changing. You know, I, I read a thing the other day that was talking about businesses reinventing themselves. About 20% of businesses are reinventing themselves more quickly than their budget cycle. And so, you know, that’s an incredible pace of change. And if we can equip people to not just move at that speed, but at least to adapt, like to see the need to adapt as an ongoing baked in process and not as an exception or as an occasional thing, but more as a way of being in the world. I think people are going to have a lot more, not just success, but a lot more contentment.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Because I think if we’re feeling like we’re constantly trying to catch up or have this weird sort of nostalgia for the way things used to be or waiting for things to stop moving or something, that strikes me as a recipe for being disappointed.
Anna Lundberg:
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. Absolutely. Yeah, you’re right that it’s one of the top skills touted everywhere. And it’s, it’s both scary in a way and reassuring because I think for so many of us. One of my articles that gets a lot of interest is around being a generalist over being a specialist. And I think so many people resonate with that and feel frustrated when recruiters and job descriptions say, no, you’re not the right fit for here and they want someone who can do this one little thing. And I think especially with AI and so on now, and especially all these changes you’re talking about, what you need is those people who have worked across different sectors who can talk to the tech people and the creator people and who can adapt. And as you said, for that to be second nature, rather than that, oh, I have to change again.
Anna Lundberg:
I also wanted to pick up on the point that you said about early on, in fact, tie that in, that your personal brand has, of course, for you and internally in our brain. I don’t know about you, but it’s very easy to overthink and constantly analyse what is my little elevator pitch spiel? What is my umbrella message? How exactly am I? And there’s this nuance and the content and the newsletters and so on. From the outside, maybe people haven’t noticed those shifts, even though it could be quite transformational on the inside. So sometimes we worry too much. And yet it is also a really important decision for the intention of how we’re showing up and where we’re going. But at the same time, people perhaps don’t pick up on those things as we go. So again, it’s sort of, I always think, scary and exciting. It’s transformational and also subtle.
Anna Lundberg:
You know, it’s all those contradictions, I suppose, in the process. And I’d love to ask you as well about your work life integration. We talked about that before and you mentioned sort of being in the empty nester stage of your life. So I’m curious, what does a typical, if there is such a thing, day or week look like? I’m always interested to hear how people set up their working routine and what your year looks like. I suppose now that you have that luxury of having the choice to pick who you work with and when you work and when you travel, when you go with the grandkids, it sounds pretty ideal to me.
Rebecca Sutherns:
It is, really. I mean, I’m very thankful. And we work sort of as a principle of kind of life by design as best as we can, but recognise the immense privilege that is baked into that. So I’m really grateful to be at the stage that I’m at. It’s. It feels like it’s been, I want to say, hard won in some ways. And that’s not, oh, I’ve paid my dues. It’s.
Rebecca Sutherns:
It’s taking me a while to adjust to it, is what I would say, because my parenting life was a really enjoyable, important phase of my life. And the. I think we talk a lot about empty nesting, but we don’t talk about emptying nest. And our family had probably close to a decade of the nest gradually emptying. And I know for a lot of my friends that are a similar stage to me, they have, you know, their kids are leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back. We haven’t had that quite as much other than during the pandemic. But what we’ve had is because we have four kids, it’s spread out over time. And so, you know, the kids have appropriately.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And, you know, I’m delighted for them, but they have sort of gradually left over time. But what that meant for me was that, you know, I. My kids joke that I always say that I like having all the chicks in the nest. You know, I really love having everybody together. And I remember saying to my husband at one earlier stage of that process saying, if they can’t all be here, I actually want none of them here. Like, I think I can do empty nest, and I think I can do all of them, but I’m not sure I can cope with some of them. And that was true for me for a lot of years. And so I was obviously working and doing my thing in the midst of it.
Rebecca Sutherns:
But I feel like I’m sort of settling into. We’re now in. This is the beginning of the third empty nest year for us and. But, you know, preceded by, I think eight or nine of. Of gradually moving into that. And Bruce Feiler, in his work on life transitions, he talks about life quakes as big transitions and that they take an average of five years each. And if that’s true, what I’m describing is maybe not quite as prolonged or exhausting sounding as maybe it comes out. So anyway, all of that to say that here I am at the other side of that and starting to learn my way into what this phase looks like.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And my husband and I have really tried to treat it experimentally, like a bit lightly to say, huh, we’ve never been in this stage before. Let’s try a bunch of stuff and see what fits. Partly to see if there are pieces that we want to include long term and also to say maybe we don’t need to. So one example is that this year we’ve worked for one month each. Like three. Three different months, one month at a time in three different places from where we normally live and have arranged our work to work remotely from there, partly because a couple of our kids live far from us. And so we’ve. We’ve relocated briefly to where they live and another time to Europe to give our moms a chance to spend some time in Europe with a bit of extra support and supervision.
Rebecca Sutherns:
So we’ve been trying to, you can hear, even in the way I describe that, trying to you know, test out some locations, but also to use our work to facilitate some of the other relationships that are really important to us. And so when you look at the whole course of my whole year, three months separately were like that, four months we are based at a lakeside cottage that we’ve just finished renovating to be. Have enough bedrooms to hold everybody. And so, you know, that’s kind of seven months of the year. The other five, I’m, I’m where I, I live about one west, one hour west of Toronto. I work out of my house on purpose. I didn’t want the sort of requirement to be worrying about paying rent or a mortgage or something on my office space. But my work itself is probably now sitting at about 50, 50 digital and in person, which I is interesting because I’ve, I’ve coming out of the pandemic, have maintained a digital practise alongside an in person one and also figuring out what some of those hybrid events that are still lingering need to look like.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And so there is this combination for me of having to juggle whether I’m actually physically going somewhere or whether that’s happening in front of a screen and so managing those different formats as well as the different locations and then working on those various types of work that I mentioned, whether I’m, you know, actively getting ready for a keynote address or working on my next book or doing the facilitation of the workshops that I do. And then, you know, there’s some other sort of what I would call professional community involvement which would include being on the faculty at Thought Leaders Business School. I sit on the board of the International association of Facilitators, so there’s some pieces like that. And so any given week there is no rhythm. This week I just got back from being away for a month and so a lot of in person work is happening because I have not been around to do the in person stuff. And so I find it very helpful to look at the year rather than at any individual week or even month because a snapshot that zoomed in like that doesn’t really give the whole picture. So I’m trying increasingly to work to remember that there will be certain periods of the year that are very intense and other parts that are, that have a bit more spaciousness to them. But if I can look at it a year at a time, that really helps.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And we have two of our grown kids live walkable to us where we live and two, as I mentioned, live far. And so thankfully the one of the ones that has the grandbabies lives very close and so that’s a daily piece of what we’re involved in or who we’re involved with when we’re home.
Anna Lundberg:
Well, thank you for painting such a vivid picture. It really helps to bring to life sort of these theoretical concepts, I think. And it’s interesting how there are those seasons. Some of what you described reminds me of when we leave the corporate job to start our own business. It’s a bit of experimenting and seeing what fits and what we want to do and those five year cycles. Even for me, I suppose it’s sort of five years. My children are now five and four from having, you know, newborns and toddlers. Now they’re both in five days a week.
Anna Lundberg:
And I’m beginning to go again. Oh, okay. You know, last year I had a bit of a rethinking where I want to head and I’m getting a bit more ambitious because I’m now able to go a bit further afield. I’m doing more in person things as well. So it is that cycle. And again, I think that’s quite freeing to think as much as I’m a fan of an intentional business model and strategy and sounds like you are perhaps as well, it’s really liberating to know that you can and will evolve as you, your family, your aspirations and situation evolves as well.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Absolutely. And I think there’s a piece about a lot of it is internal. Like it’s a lot of it, it’s mindset for me. So one of the big turning points for me was actually the decision to get involved with thought leaders business school. And I don’t want to make it too much about that, but that was a really momentous investment for me because I. It involved flying to Australia, it involved a significant financial investment and it involved me being willing to acknowledge that my work life was that important to me to figure out how to extricate my life, myself from, you know, four busy teenagers at that time and fly halfway around the world and invest a significant sum of money and give a lot of time into something that was purely work and professional development related for me on a bit of a. On a. I was, I was making a bet on myself basically to say could it be that the scaling up of the solopreneurial journey that they describe could be part of my story? Could that be true? Am I willing to give that my full attention and some significant investment at some significant cost to the rest of my family and the other parts of my work to give that a shot? And thankfully it worked.
Anna Lundberg:
And when was that, Rebecca? When did you.
Rebecca Sutherns:
That was seven years ago. And so I first started with them. We were on, had just come back from sabbatical with our family and in 2017 I started that journey with them and worked as a, as a student in their programme for about three and a bit years and then have been on faculty now for another three and a bit. And yeah, I mean, it sounds, you know, when people look back on a story, it sounds much more coherent, right. Or somehow inevitable that it, you know, it all had to end up that way or, you know, know, no big deal, this is how it went. But at the time, from the front end, when you don’t know the end of the story, as most of us don’t at any point when we’re living the middle chapters of something, that was a pretty big risk and a pretty significant mindset shift because my work up to that point in my head had been. I was the, I was the flexible one in my work. You know, if any of the kids, whatever had a dentist appointment or a dance competition or fell off the bars at the playground, I was the one that got that call.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And for me to shift into a work arrangement that, that sacrificed some of that flexibility for the ambitions that I had around my work and also to find work that felt anything close to as meaningful to me as the parenting work I was doing did. That was. That took some time and was. And so I think having that moment of going all in on this thought leaders piece, it wasn’t really about thought leaders, it was about. That happened to be a good fit for me at the time, but it was about making that significant investment in my work. And back to an earlier thing we talked about, for me, that was about being inspired by the company. I keep making sure I was surrounding myself with people whose worlds were big and who were deciding to show up in a way that was going to make a big impact, was I hadn’t realised I was missing that until I stepped into that space, particularly amongst high achieving women. And it seemed very aligned with the kind of work I was trying to help others advance in the world.
Rebecca Sutherns:
So that was a really. It’s just a part of my story that I’m really thankful for.
Anna Lundberg:
And as we wrap up, I’d love to hear what advice would you give to someone perhaps who’s like you seven, or let’s say seven and a half years ago, so, you know, successful in your solopreneur practise, perhaps, but then having these itchy feet, maybe feeling that there’s something more. And could I. What is possible for me, what advice would you give to that person?
Rebecca Sutherns:
Well, let’s pick up on that thread of being inspired by the company you keep, because I think if we have some role models, not necessarily people that we want to copy exactly, but people who are living sort of in a way that we would. We’d like to emulate in the sense of how. How big are they? And, you know, are we. And I’m not saying bigger is always better. Back on the indicators of success. I’m not that concerned about specifically the qualities of those role models so much as to say, do they inspire you and are they giving you a sense of what is possible? And if you have some people in your life that do that and if you have a pathway, like, I think that’s what thought leaders gave me, was a process to say, if you want to get from here to there, here’s how to do it. And in some ways, that’s what my work does now, with both strategy and coaching, is to say, let’s really get clear on what you’re going after. What do you want? And I remember at that time, my friend from New Zealand, actually, Lisa O’Neill, she wrote a book, not around that time, called everything you want.
Rebecca Sutherns:
And I remember looking at it going, huh. I haven’t asked myself that question in a very long time. You know, a lot of the pieces of things that I wanted were seeds that were sown 20 years prior to that. And I was now living out the happy and less happy consequences of those big decisions from many years ago, but I hadn’t actually revisited in recent years was what I wanted. And so I guess that’s what I would encourage folks to do is the combination of be inspired by the company you keep and get really clear about what you want and find somebody, whether that is a programme or a person who can map out a pathway with you to get there. Because it’s really hard to sort of sketch in the details of what you want, let alone make sure that you’re clear on the roadmap to get there. And so there’s. There’s very much a get the help you need kind of message in that, for me.
Rebecca Sutherns:
So defining what. What success looks like and having those cheerleaders and coaches along the way to help you get there, I think we all need that, whether we’re just starting out or whether we are, you know, 20 years in the way I was at that time.
Anna Lundberg:
Yeah, I think that’s so, so important. So clarity on what matters to you what success looks like to you. The pathway and then the community and the accountability and the inspiration. I remember years ago, and I always said, oh, I want to be a writer, but I never wrote or anything, right? But then I joined writing groups where everybody there was writing, they were writers. And suddenly something that seems like, oh, I can never do that crazy idea, ridiculous pipe dream becomes a, oh, of course I can. Like, how do I do it? You start listening to podcasts, you know, free groups, community things, or as you said, a paid programme, the business accelerator. And to find people also at the right level, I think if they’re too far removed, I find that, you know, someone’s earning, I don’t know, three figures more than whatever the maths of that is. You know, it’s just.
Anna Lundberg:
And they’ve got teams and teams. I always find, you know, with content, we compare ourselves to these big influencer creators. We’ve got massive teams of social media creators and so on, I think. Then suddenly it doesn’t become so inspirational. So it’s always looking ahead enough to dream big while making it okay. As you said, there’s a clear pathway to. I can see how, albeit it is a bit of a stretch. I can see how I could do that.
Anna Lundberg:
And you begin to believe it, which is really exciting and absolutely. Rebecca, I’ve loved this conversation and as I can imagine, I’d love to continue the conversation. And where can we continue conversation? Where can we find you online? Read more about what you do and perhaps get in touch if something here resonates.
Rebecca Sutherns:
Thanks for asking that. The easiest way is simply to go to my website, which is my name, so it’s Rebecca southerns.com Southerns has no O in it. People spell incorrectly. So it’s rebeccasutherns.com and if you go to that forward slash podcast, there’s some. There’s a couple of options there. I’m happy to send you a copy of my most recent book, which is called Elastic, and that’s the subtitle of that is Stretching without Snapping or Snapping Back. And so you can get a free copy an ebook of that there. But there’s also kind of a diagnostic, almost like a quiz there, that if you’re kind of craving something in the next chapter of your life and aren’t sure kind of what that feeling is and how to name it and what.
Rebecca Sutherns:
What that might be kind of nudging you towards, there’s a little diagnostic there that’ll give you some, some tips. And you’re also welcome to sign up for that book club that I mentioned. It’s free and it is a, it’s a monthly gathering where we cover four to six recent books books in an hour. So I think it’s actually the highest value work I do in terms of how much you can get in an hour. And if folks are interested in my paid services, you can certainly explore the site and look into some of the upcoming immersive coaching experiences. We’re heading to Costa Rica in February for nine days as part of that. So I’m hearing that there’s two spots left on that trip and hoping to get another one on the calendar for later in 2025 or early in 2026. And so if anyone would like to be involved in that, they’re welcome to explore that part of the site as well.
Rebecca Sutherns:
So it’s Rebecca.
Anna Lundberg:
Southerns.com youm had me at Costa Rica. Thank you so much. Such a fascinating conversation. Some really useful tools there that I hope people will cheque out as well. Thank you so much Dr. Rebecca at Southerns. I think of it as being north, not south, so I wouldn’t have put an O in there. But you know, you never know.
Anna Lundberg:
It’s important for your personal brand to have the spelling and we’ll put of course all the details in the show notes as well. So thank you so much for being so generous with your time and your insights today.
Rebecca Sutherns:
I appreciate the opportunity. Thanks very much, Anna.
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