Guiding actualization and bringing vision to life
So you’ve resolved to level up, to step into the potential of what’s next. Wonderful! Our world needs leaders and courageous humans who are willing to actualize growth, change, and leadership in themselves, with others, and in the world.
We need humans who know the value of going beyond the status quo – those who seek to co-create what’s next; to refine, recreate, reimagine, and reengage in new ways.
This journey, if traversed in earnest, will take you into unknown territory.
So many people don’t ever embark on the real journey of actualization out of fear – fear they won’t be able to control everything, navigate clearly through changing conditions, or rise to the challenges implicit in the journey.
Taking your next chapter to the next level requires a type of self-leadership that becomes intimate with fear, and with choice. Paradoxically, this provides the courage to embark, orient, and discern as you go.
Movement and experience itself are the best teachers for those willing to explore, yet investing in a guide – one who can provide you with uncommonly insightful perspectives and honest reflections – can make all the difference.
Consider the value of“positive disintegration” and state change. Ice is solid, rigid, and strong… and over time, it melts into life-giving water. Water is fluid and incredibly powerful, sometimes flowing with grace and ease, and other times, moving with incomparable destructive force.
Over the course of human lifetimes, water carves bedrock. Yet in the blink of an eye, it can evaporate into a vapor – an unseen form of itself.
State changes, cycles, and consistent evolution are the basis of our interconnected reality. Our systems, our contexts, our human relationships, and our very selves are, by nature, changing, evolving, and fluid.
Learning to “be like the water” is the work of accepting, creating, and directing through that fluidity and change. For those who choose to embrace this perspective and learn to navigate from it, entirely new possibilities and experiences await.
Learning to be like water
“Arrival - on exactly the right path, at just the right time - proves to be inevitable as an outcome of my coaching investment - again and again.
The results of my work with Rachel? Simply outstanding!”
When in doubt, take inventory
During an annual performance review (while working at a creative agency, circa 2018): “Rachel, your strategy work is out of this world, but I need you to slow down a bit in stakeholder presentations – you’re forgetting that not everyone is gifted like you are.”
Gifted? Yes, but…
Gifted.
Hearing it was like some sort of cosmic gong reverberating through space and time.
Today I am forever indebted to that particular manager for his use of the word. I needed that gong and vibration. Gifted was the missing link, the hidden key that helped me connect with my unseen differences. It also acted as a sort of jet fuel for positive disintegration and self-rediscovery.
Always fascinated by the reciprocity between our inner and outer worlds, I found myself forced to tend to my own. I was an externally-focused, career-oriented dynamo who had run out of steam and run out of places to hide from herself. My body wasn’t shy about sending me distress signals, either.
Gifted. It somehow spoke to the energetic chip on my shoulder I’d been carrying around, and to my deep sense of loneliness. It framed the frustration I had always felt for not fitting in and for being “so alien.” It touched into the anger I had been carrying around, because I didn’t understand why I was constantly adjusting and calibrating to meet others. Perhaps most importantly, it was an invitation to explore my identity, shame, and the lack of understanding of who I really was.
A lifelong self-guided learner, deep thinker, and meaning-oriented being, it was clear that I was (finally) going to have to turn all of my high-horsepower cognition, curiosity, and inquiry toward the most personal subject of them all: myself.
Why was I so unhappy, regardless of how much success I achieved? Why was I so frustrated with others and the state of the world? Why did I, alone, feel like I had to find a way to save the world? Where were my motivations coming from, and were they my own? Why was understanding it all cognitively not enough? Why was I experiencing these weird, nebulous physical symptoms that specialists and scans couldn’t diagnose?
Questions led to more questions and depth led to deeper depths. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t easefully or easily find (force) answers and was led into places in which I learned to make friends with discomfort and unknowing.
Profoundly gifted and autistic, some said. Others just saw the gifted part. Either way, these reflections were validating and actuely mirroring, because unseen diversity is real and neurodivergence is real – even if you can’t “see” it, and even if you’ve forgotten (or lived a lifetime without a context for them).
Neurocomplexity was always the missing lens through which the rest of my experience could be viewed in proper context.
During this rebirth/rediscovery process, a previously hidden talent emerged as visible: my incredible strength in journeying into unknown territory in both my inner and outer worlds.
By learning to embrace my unique brand of neurodivergence while tending to the health of my soma, psyche, and spirit, I learned to balance those worlds, creating harmony and coherence.
The entire experience showed me what my work in the world truly is: I’m in the business of transformation and expansion, evolution and growth. I work in the yet unnamed industry of the gestalt, relational dynamics of the inner and outer worlds; of the relationship between story, state, awareness, and how humans operate. My KPIs and success metrics are those related to the whole-istic growth and development of humans and organizationas.
I’m at my best as a thought partner and collaborator to leaders, visionaries, high-achievers, creatives, mystics, and gifted, neurodivergent, and neurocomplex folks.
In truth, I can usually pinpoint the source(s) of issue and blockage in a person, a team, or an entire organization in relatively short order. (Identifying those is just the first step, however!)
I’m a guide and (very non-traditional) coach, consultant, and educator who walks with her clients in creating new ways of Seeing. I’m an intellectual-existential type who will twist the prism of perspective alongside you, again and again, asking provocative and pragmatic questions while offering incredibly thoughtful reflections, insights, and possible paths forward.
“Rachel’s unique intelligence is both dynamic and precise, creating elegant and functional sense inside knowns, unknowns, and the relationships between both. She’s incisive, insightful, uncommonly meta, and uniquely flexible in perspective.
Working with Rachel means you’ll be guided in ways you’ve likely not experienced before.”
My unique expertise is rooted in…
over a decade of organizational and team leadership, business-meets-brand strategy, marketing, community, culture, and communications
leading reinvention, maturation, and measurable growth across a vast swath of business-types and verticals: local/regional, national, and international, B2B and B2C, in-house and agency-side, technology (SaaS, health tech, media), education, travel and tourism, healthcare, manufacturing, civic/non-profits, private equity, startup through IPO, etc.
2900+ hours of dedicated coaching experience working with driven humans, (self)-leaders, creatives, gifted, neurocomplex, and neurodivergent folks
the capacity to See and hold an evolving big picture in parts, sum, and its connective tissue through scale with just enough grip
the capacity to guide what’s now into what’s next, moving ideas into actualization seamlessly, expediently, and with an incredible eye for detail
my own highly-rarified thinking and processing capacities as a HEPG gifted/neurocomplex human being
a lifetime of engaging and cultivating my profound curiosity (we don’t arrive at the ‘right’ answers without the ‘right’ questions!)
a commitment to walking my walk, living self-leadership, and continuously engaging, tending to, and challenging myself
a passion for exploring what’s possible when human consciousness consciously seeks to grow and expand for the greater good of our interconnected reality and a more egalitarian future
Razor-sharp reflection (and the co-creative support that makes you feel like you can take on the world)
Rachel Fell is a coach, consultant, educator, and facilitator based in the Midwest US working nationally and internationally (remote, via Zoom). She’s available for in-person engagements upon request.
In addition to working with gifted, twice-exceptional, neurodivergent adults in the areas of identity, integration, and holistic well-being, Rachel also works with businesses, teams, and independent entrepreneurs on brand, communications, cultural, leadership, and organizational development initiatives.
The Whole Health Project is an online education and coaching cooperative dedicated to democratizing a more complete and integrated understanding of human+ecological health and the practices that influence it. Neurodiversions – a series of exploratory conversations on neurodivergence – is coming soon!