Celebrating One Year!
This week marks a year since I launched my consultancy. As I reflect on the past year, I couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity I’ve had to strike out on this new path, nor more certain that it was the exact right thing to do.
As I look at the state of our world, I know, too, how privileged I am to have been able to make this move at a time of such struggle for so many. I feel great urgency to contribute to the work of repairing and reimagining a society that serves a common good and one in which everyone can thrive. There’s so much damage to undo, and so much progress left to make.
The personal growth I’ve experienced over the last year has been immense, the learning energizing, and the work inspiring. I’ve done one big thing I’d hoped to do in this first phase of a new career (in addition to, you know, paying the bills), which was to broaden my perspective—to expand my view, my network, and my impact.
My aims for this first year seemed a lot like fitness goals: I’ve sought balance, flexibility, and stability as I worked to build something strong and lasting. After years of practicing skills and developing expertise within a single context—higher education—I spent much of the last year way outside of my comfort zone, finding a rhythm beyond the academic calendar and exercising muscles I hadn’t used much, if ever (like self-promotion, networking, asking for help, writing in my own voice instead of others’, and being my own boss!).
A few highlights:
Yes, the skills are transferrable. I have experience and perspective that are valuable in contexts beyond any single college or university. Over the past year I’ve had the opportunity to put some of those skills to work helping Angel Pérez and his team at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, Nicholas Dirks and the New York Academy of Sciences, and Lisa Stanger and the Jewish Foundation of Greater New Haven. For those clients and others, my higher ed-grown expertise in brand strategy, thought leadership, and integrated communications has served well.
I missed being part of a team more intensely and even sooner than I expected. I loved our team at Trinity College. I was incredibly fortunate to partner with such deeply mission-driven, talented, creative, and truly awesome people there and everywhere else I worked. So, I’ve been inspired and buoyed by the collaborations and relationships I’ve enjoyed this year with folks at Fastspot, Firestarter Interactive, Heller Fundraising Group, and the Kardia Group, to name a few. And I’m thrilled to have recently joined Kardia as an affiliated coach and the team at Peterson Rudgers Group (PRG) as a senior associate. Starting next week I’ll join another community, leading communications and marketing in a part-time interim role at the College of the Holy Cross, whose campus (as you can see in the photos above) is as beautiful as its people are welcoming.
My gratitude is boundless. I’ve told Julie Peterson that a general networking call I had with her almost two years ago turned out to be the single most powerful conversation I had in helping me to conceive of a career as a strategic consultant. That I now get to work with her and her brilliant colleagues at PRG is a dream. Julie’s advice and perspective—and, frankly, her example—have been enormously valuable to me. I’m grateful as well to many others who have provided words of encouragement and support, practical guidance, valuable referrals and connections, and more, including Sarah Bolton, Anita Davis, Margaret Dunning, Adam Falk, Sandy Genelius, Peter Heller, Andrea Jarrell, Anne Lambright, Pete Mackey, Linda Perlstein, Julie Peterson, Suzanne Silitch, and Sylvia Wehr. It’s been a great thrill to reconnect with a lot of folks and to build new connections with individuals and communities of practice and support. There’s much more of that ahead, including my first in-person ComNet in the fall!
I recently traded my 10-year-old car, which had served me quite comfortably for a long time, for one with a manual transmission—not a fancy sports car, mind you, but rather a vehicle that’s maybe a little tougher and will last even longer (OK, it’s a Subaru. I live in Vermont, after all). I love driving it—I hadn’t realized just how much I’d missed driving a stick shift. I feel more connected to the car and more engaged in the act of driving because I get to control the gears. The analogy isn’t lost on me. Now that I’m running my own business, I love the feel of it, I’m thoroughly enjoying the journey, and I’m excited by the open road I see ahead of me.
