Is This Actually Yours to Do?
This week I'm facilitating a working session for nonprofit Executive Directors at the PANO Collaborative Conference in State College.
I've been thinking about what I want the room to feel. The word I keep coming back to is exhale. Not relief from something solved — the specific exhale that happens when something you have been carrying without language finally gets named precisely enough that you can look at it directly.
The session is called Where You End and the Role Begins. Ninety minutes. No slides. One question that runs through every part of it, in different forms:
Is this genuinely mine to do — or am I doing it because I don't trust what happens if I don't?
That's it. That's the whole practice.
Most Executive Directors I work with can answer that question clearly on a quiet Tuesday morning. And then something lands — an email, a staff dynamic, a board conversation — and the answer disappears. Not because they forgot. Because knowledge was never going to be enough on its own. The gap between knowing and doing it differently doesn't close by understanding it more deeply. It closes by practicing a different response, in real time, under actual pressure, repeatedly.
What I want people to leave with isn't a strategy or a system. It's a sense that there is something they can actually do when they are standing at the center of their organization feeling overwhelmed. One question. One thing to put down this week. One decision that was never actually theirs to begin with.
That is a small thing. It is also not a small thing.
Here is what I want you to take from this issue — whether you are in State College this week or not.
Before the end of this week, ask yourself honestly:
What did I take on this week that was never actually mine to solve? And what would it look like to put one piece of it down — not forever, just for now?
Write down whatever comes. Not to analyze it. Just to name it. The naming is where everything starts.
I work with women nonprofit Executive Directors on exactly this — the gap between knowing and being able to do it differently, and what it actually takes to close it. If this letter is landing somewhere real, I would be glad to talk. You can book a free 30-minute conversation here.
