My Unexpected Journey
From Nonprofit Leader to Independent Consultant
I remember the day I decided to leave my nonprofit job. I sat at my desk, laptop open, staring at a blank email draft. My hands hovered over the keyboard. I knew once I typed my resignation, everything would change. Fourteen years at the same organization was ending. I felt terrified and relieved at the same time.
Many people ask me how I became a consultant. They assume I had some master plan or strategic vision. The truth is much messier and more human. I stumbled into consulting because I needed income while figuring out what I actually wanted to do with my life. What started as a temporary solution became something I genuinely love.
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The Moment of Decision
Consulting wasn’t a career path I chose. It kind of felt like a last resort.
I worked in the nonprofit world for 14 years. I started off as a grassroots environmental organizer. I worked on campaigns to reduce mercury pollution from a chemical plant in West Virginia and to pass a statewide update to the renewable energy portfolio standard in Minnesota. That led to managing regional and national campaigns, and eventually serving in senior leadership for a large national nonprofit.
For almost a decade, my job was Chief of Staff and Senior Vice President. Practically, my portfolio was meetings and management. I didn’t love it. For a long time, I wasn’t happy, and I knew I needed a change, but it wasn’t clear how.
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High Speed Rail
My friend (and now co-founder, Aaron) shared an analogy that helped me understand my situation. Aaron was talking about a previous personal relationship, and he said it was like being on a moving train. While the train is roaring down the tracks, it feels impossible to get off. But periodically, the train pulls into a station. That’s your chance to get off, but you have to recognize it and then have the courage to do exit. In Aaron’s case, his partner got a job offer that would require relocating across the country. Train in the station!
My job felt like being on that high-speed train, and I couldn’t see how to get off. How could I let my colleagues down by leaving? Was I less committed to our important work than they were? We were trying to save the planet — were my feelings of happiness and pleasure insignificant relative to such a goal? All of these currents conspired to keep me on the train far longer than I would have liked.
Then in early 2020, COVID changed everything. Most large organizations were forced to change their work circumstances, their goals, and their plans. I didn’t agree with some of the decisions my employer was making. Finally, I realized this inflection point was actually a train station. Time to disembark.
I took 2 weeks off before starting consulting, largely to have more time to bake.
The Accidental Consultant
Having been at the same place for so long, I didn’t know for sure what I wanted to do next. I wasn’t ready to make a lateral move to another nonprofit or campaign. That’s what I would have been suited for, given my resume. But I didn’t want to keep doing the same thing. I knew I needed some time to reflect and take stock.
Consulting just kind of happened. News spread that I was unemployed, and several friends and colleagues reached out. Most were offering full-time jobs at their nonprofits or companies, but I said I was only available part-time as a consultant.
Exploring My Passions
I wanted part-time work. because I had three things I was interested in doing next.
I got really good at baking.
First: becoming a professional writer. I majored in Comparative Literature in college, and I had dabbled in writing short stories my whole life. While in school, I had a dream of writing a novel on the level of Anna Karenina or Don Quixote (two of my all-time favorites) that would change millions of young people’s lives.
As I hit my mid-30s, the aims had changed. I thought I could write nonfiction about our political situation, and, with my thought leadership, contribute to the advancement of the values and changes I wanted to see in society. I also harbored a passion for writing science fiction and fantasy and nurtured a slim hope of becoming a successful novelist.
Second, I always loved botany. In college, I helped start the Yale Sustainable Food Project and spent a summer interning there. Before that, I learned from my father, an avid gardener who was always bringing home new varieties of flowers and trees. I mused about starting the equivalent of the Audubon Society but for plant-lovers instead of bird watchers. It sounded like a pleasant way to spend my time, and creating a heavyweight environmental organization aligned with something I cared about would be cool.
Finally, I wondered about entering the think tank side of politics rather than the campaigns and advocacy world where I had spent my career up to that point. Policy wasn’t my precise interest. Debating ethics and values was what I wanted to do. A think tank seemed like the perch from which to do it.
The Power of Trying Things Out
I owed it to myself to give each of these ideas real consideration. I created a powerpoint slide deck where I really weighed the options. I shared it with my partner, my therapist, and a few close friends. We debated the ideas. Some days I leaned one way, and others I thought for sure I knew which thing to do.
Look at this Kouign-amann! Seriously, my baking skills got to be awesome!
But then I did something that I now share with everyone making a career change, because it was critical for deciding: I tried everything out. I found lightweight ways to do try of the things I thought I wanted to do.
First, I enrolled in some online fiction writing classes. I wrote short stories and submitted them to publications. I also wrote a non-fiction memoir about my work in politics and what I wished to change about it. (Several of these newsletters have been adaptations of passages from that work.)
Second, I collaborated with a friend on a botany app. We had a few meetings, we tried out existing tools, and we kicked around ideas for how to build a community of plant-lovers online. I even co-founded a sustainable landscaping company, shaping its mission from the board level.
Third, I explored graduate school as a pathway to the think tank world. I attended PhD program recruitment events and took friends in grad school out for lunch to talk about their experiences. Fortunate to have friends actually working in think tanks, I met up with them for coffee and interviewed them about their world and work.
Finding Joy in the Practice
I did my best to actually experience each of the things I was interested in. It helped me figure out what I didn’t want to do. Because that was one of the biggest things missing from my professional life — loving how I was spending my days. I don’t mean loving it in an intellectual way, as in caring about the impact or believing in it. I mean finding joy in the practice. Does doing that thing bring me into a state of flow? Do I reach for that activity when I have free time? Can I get lost in it? Do I love it!?!?!
When someone asks me for advice on a career move, this has become my go-to, number one. Have you tried doing the thing you’re considering, and did you like doing it? And can you find a fast and easy way to try it out?
An example: a friend was contemplating what his next career move was, and he mused about getting involved in government. I suggested he try it out, and we brainstormed ways he could. This friend met with a few candidates for mayor of the city in which he lived, and one invited him to be an advisor on his campaign. My friend tried it out, and realized he hated doing it.
Chocolate macarons with Nutella filling. Have I mentioned my baking skills got really good?
Consulting as the Financial Foundation
You’ve probably identified the thing missing from all of this: the pay! Exploring all of these ideas sounds really cool, but it’s not like I had a big nest egg from 14 years in the nonprofit world. The backdrop was consulting.
At first, I took on consulting projects for the money. Like I described above, a few opportunities came my way soon after leaving my nonprofit job. It was simple and easy to take them, spend about half my time consulting, and put the balance into exploring what I really wanted to do next with my career.
After trying out each of my ideas in a light touch way, I realized that I loved writing. For several years, I spent my mornings writing and my afternoons consulting. It was a great balance, because I also realized I loved consulting, too.
Why Consulting Works for Me
I took on clients and projects that interested me and that I had a reasonable confidence that I would enjoy doing. I hate meetings. I hate talking on the phone or on Zoom. With consulting, I could take on work where the only expectation was that I would write something. Or create new tools and systems. I didn't have to manage people or meet with them for the sake of meeting with them.
I also got to keep a part of myself back from my consulting. At my nonprofit, or on the political campaigns I worked on, I couldn't do anything but put my entire self (and then some!) into them. I didn't know how to do it halfway. I always ended up exhausted, drained, and unhealthily relating to what I was doing.
Consulting is great because there were built-in barriers. Or maybe I just was able to enforce them better on myself. I never felt guilty about exercising or taking a walk after lunch. I never felt bad about writing a section of my memoir from 9am-12pm on a weekday. No one expected me to be available all the time, so I wasn't.
Chocolate hazelnut babka. Better than any you’ve ever had.
I never missed the camaraderie of working within an organization. I'm a natural introvert and more of a loner, even though I love people and like to spend time with them. When I would go to client meetings and see how close my clients' staff were, I never felt a pang of jealousy. I had that closeness now in my personal life, because I had a better work-life balance, so I didn't crave it from work.
I have liked in my consulting engagements how at the core, there is a desire for another point of view — mine. In the nonprofit world, I was usually tasked with just doing what someone else wanted. As a consultant, there is a fundamental recognition that an external perspective is crucial. I've always been asked to think deep and hard about something, which I enjoy. It feels like freedom to me. Creative freedom, and autonomy.
The Future of Work
I wonder if consulting is a presage to a more atomized world. Maybe a lot of people want the same things I want, so we're changing work into a decentralized network of atomized freelancers who can just do their thing in their bubble and never meet with anyone else. I'm sure something is lost in that world, and maybe something is gained. It just seems like more and more of my peers are aching for this sort of life.
Who is left then to staff these nonprofits and organizations and hire all the consultants? What separates us?
That's a set of questions for another newsletter! In conclusion, I thought consulting would be a temporary solution while I figured out my "real" next step. Instead, it became the vehicle that let me design a life where I could do meaningful work while preserving space for myself. Sometimes the best paths are the ones we stumble onto rather than the ones we plan.