About Shel
Guide on the side, resolving what matters to you
For most of my career I was the guide through the challenge — not a subject matter expert. The engineers and operators knew the refinery. The product development teams knew their markets. I knew how to move through complexity alongside people who knew things I didn’t. Reading what the challenge actually required, and matching the approach to fit.
That role expanded in two directions, iteratively.
Sometimes a challenge pulled me to expand:
A role improving how professionals used data for decisions became a co-lead on a safety culture initiative. Cross-functional team development led to designing and facilitating a global summit. The challenge grew and I followed it.
Other times I brought expanded approach in:
Scenario-based methods and external market intelligence into scientific strategic planning. Deliberately introducing the unknowable into a domain that preferred certainty. A relational dialogue process to appreciate differences in collaboration. I could see a fit before it had been named.
My music collection is equally eclectic.
The complexity of the challenges kept expanding.
From decisions with relevant information to decisions in the genuinely unknowable, from linear processes to systemic ones, from narrow groups to diverse participants with competing interests and no shared map.
An authentic knack blossomed.
Synthesizing across disciplines and holding each in its own context makes me a poor groupie to any single expert. I respect what each knows in their context, without ranking one above another.
I was aware of something deeper but didn't trust it.
What was driving the outcomes in every system wasn’t primarily the strategy or the structure. It was the people inside it, and how they interacted with the strategy and structure. The driving force was the dynamics.
That recognition, absent external support and internal confidence, is what eventually brought me into therapy practice. Not as a departure from the organizational work, but as its deepest iteration. Here the same guide role applied, at the most intimate scale.
Therapy process says stay at the level of the symptom. A more effective approach was to follow it to the root contribution. Get below the presenting pattern to the layer needing restoration. Let benefits simultaneously emerge across functioning. I learned and built confidence to let myself be shaped deeply by all of these experiences.
I am still a guide. Now I also bring deep understanding of the terrain.
Not only what shapes human beings inside systems, but also what stays hidden yet gets in the way, and how to genuinely shifts things rather than cope. The spiral keeps widening.
For a long time I believed my hummingbird nature was a problem.
Moving from challenge to challenge, from discipline to discipline. Enlivened by breadth, not depth. I thought I was supposed to be a jackhammer. It took finding my freedom from within to discover that following the curiosity did lead somewhere specific: the human dynamics of flourishing. Following it was spot on.
I love being in nature as much as I love expanding understanding of human nature. Dynamic and circular. And if the part of me that occasionally needs to be right instead of in relationship shows up in our work together, you can expect a repair. We’ll grow through it.
I navigate the same complicated personal and professional terrain as many of the leaders I work with. Here is what I am finding, at this lifestage:
Making decisions consistent with my core values; letting go of the conditioned should ones. Trusting intuition as reliable information rather than noise to be overridden. Ease on the inside, even with chaos at the edges. Caring deeply without carrying burden. Focus on what is within reach, without being pulled under by what is not.
These are not achievements. They are an internal guidance system. Some days I navigate them well. Some days the old patterns reassert themselves and I notice, and begin again. That noticing is the work.
I was raised in the cooperative culture. My father spent his career working inside a system built on a simple premise: the customer is the company. Not as slogan — as architecture. Value flowing in both directions.
I watched him lead that way every day. With employees. With customers. With suppliers and competitors supporting a broader community. I saw it firsthand while filing patronage tickets and dusting shelves. My donations to the community. And experienced the culture of cooperative care years later as a summer employee.
He would have had things to say about all of this. What he modeled, and what gets lost when systems drift from their founding purpose, is part of why this work matters to me. Not as nostalgia. As evidence that a different way is possible and has been lived. Not bound by an era, but by commitment.
It took most of my career to recognize what I had seen early on with the cooperative.
Moving through different organizational cultures, I adapted, constricted, believing the misfit was mine to resolve. I slowly noticed the parallel. The workplaces where I expanded, were the ones where the culture nurtured rather than extracted. It was reciprocated by me proactively bringing more of me to resolve the company's challenges. When that was accepted and incorporated, viola, we have circular dynamics of growth.
The ones where I contracted were the ones where adapting meant leaving something of myself outside the door. That recognition didn’t arrive as a theory. It arrived as a pattern I had been living, in continual exchange with every environment I moved through, long before I had this language for it.
What I've come to believe:
We have been limiting vitality and flourishing across human systems through leadership dependence on fixed methodologies and frameworks of studying the past. Leadership for the present and future go beyond them toward the human potential that already lives within each leader, unique to them, waiting to be brought forward.
Leaders deserve an option that reinvigorates their confidence and clarity in their own trajectory through expanded knowledge to wisdom. Of heart-mind-spirit coherence. Not a better framework. A different orientation entirely.
“The work changed how I show up in all of life.
And I believe others deserve the same option.”
I'm passionate to keep guiding, keep giving.
I work with executive leaders across sectors. Some by title, some by influence. They acknowledge the edge of what their frameworks were designed to do and sense that something more aligned and sustainable is possible.
The work is iterative, relational, and unpressured. I serve as mirror and guide alongside the leader’s own discovery. Not as authority or teacher. The expedition generates its own map. I don’t hand it to you. I sit alongside while you learn to read it.
This work happens at three scales: within the leader, within the organization, and across boundaries. The same philosophy and the same approach operate at each level. Scale is an organizing principle — not separate methodologies. What’s around influences within; what’s within influences the surround.
It is for leaders who are ready to follow their own signals inward, to the vital spiral outward.
The trailhead starts wherever you are.
Whenever you are ready.
If something on this resonates, let’s talk.