Lessons on Leaping

Two Years In

I started We Consulting in 2019. Two years ago this week, I walked away from an employer to work in my business full time.

I did not walk away because I had it all figured out. I walked away because I had figured out that I could not become who I am while still performing who I thought others wanted me to be.

Was I scared when I resigned? Absolutely! I did not know what the next twenty-four months would hold. I did not know whether the business would sustain me financially. I did not know whether the clients I hoped for would find me. I did not know whether I would look back on the decision as the bravest thing I ever did or the most irresponsible.

It’s two years later, and now I know.

What my life looks like now

I have to pinch myself often.

I watch the sun set from my balcony almost every evening. Sometimes I am reading. Sometimes I am sitting with friends. Sometimes I am quietly marveling at the sunset. As a woman who spent thirty years of my career optimizing every minute, doing nothing feels like victory.

On Sundays, I host what I call Sauna Sundays at my home. I invite friends over, we sit in the heat, we drink water, we laugh, we let our bodies release the week’s work. It is one of the rituals I have built into my life on purpose. There’s a standing invitation to people to take care of themselves, together.

I travel more than I ever have. I say yes to trips that used to feel indulgent. I’m going to the places I used to tell myself I’d visit "someday." I have finally learned that someday is a lie I picked up along the way.

Sometimes, work requires travel. When it does, it feels nice not to have to race back to my home to meet someone else’s expectations of my time. Every day, I get to do the work that doesn’t feel like work. I get to coach people through the moments that define their careers. I get to partner with mission-driven organizations on transformational culture work. I get to host experiential learning opportunities for professionals who are ready to move beyond information and into a renewed version of themselves.

I could not be happier.

What my work has become

I am extraordinarily grateful to the people who have trusted me over the past two years.

I have watched senior leaders stop performing certainty and start leading from their own actual conviction.

I have watched others negotiate their exits from organizations they had outgrown, with their dignity intact, and walk into the work they had been silently preparing for.

I have watched heads of school hold their seats through leadership transitions.

I have watched organizations begin to redesign their programs, their staff development, and their equity commitments because they decided the current version of their culture was no longer good enough for the people they serve.

I have watched leaders walk into a room in New Orleans carrying a version of themselves they had outgrown, and walk out days later with a version of themselves they were ready to become.

This is what I get to do now. This is the work, with divine guidance, I dreamed up for myself.

A book chapter, coming this October

I have news that I am proud to share with you.

In October, a research book will be published containing a chapter I wrote on the psychological and physiological impacts of being a BIPOC professional in predominantly white spaces.

The book is titled Educator Support and Sustainability. I authored chapter 8, which draws on twenty years of my own lived experience, hours in conversation with senior leaders navigating the same realities, and a growing body of research on what actually happens to a person leading inside institutions that were not designed with us in mind.

The release date for the digital version is October 1st. Print copies of the text will be available on October 22nd. More details are coming soon, but this publication is the beginning of a longer arc of research and writing I plan to release over the next several years…which brings me to the next thing I want to tell you about.

What’s coming next

The chapter is just the beginning.

Over the next twelve months, I am moving into a season of focused research on liberation. I’m asking questions about what it means, what it looks like in the lives of high-achieving leaders, and how it can be built through structured practice rather than left to circumstance.

That research will inform a course I am building called the Liberation Lab, launching in January of 2027. The Lab will include modules on personal and financial freedom, as well as entrepreneurship. As I experience more liberation, I notice the people I work with have often liberated everything except the parts of their lives closest to home.

Maybe you have thoughts on some of this. Maybe you are living some version of these questions in your own life. I would love to hear from you. My inbox is open. Email me at info@wecoachingandconsulting.com. Your words will help shape what I build.

A word for the woman standing where I was standing two years ago

Perhaps you are reading this and you are standing on the edge of a decision similar to the one I faced two years ago. Here’s what I want to say to you.

You do not need to have it all figured out.

You need to have one thing figured out. Just one. The one you already know.

The rest of the road becomes visible only after you take the first step. That was the scariest thing for me to trust, and it is the truest thing I know now.

The version of me who was too tired, too uncertain, and too afraid to walk away two years ago would not recognize the woman writing this letter today. And every good thing that has happened in these two years happened because I said yes to the leaving before I said yes to what came next.

If it is your time, it is your time.

You are allowed to decide. That’s freedom.

Always looking forward,

Tyneeta
Leadership. Legacy. Liberation.
Founder, WE Consulting