Episode Details

Reflections from host Sarah Olivieri ...

I had a conversation with Becca Pearce recently — executive coach, former nonprofit CEO, brain tumor survivor, author of You Don't Have to Achieve to Be Loved — and one thing she said has been sitting with me since.

She was walking through the ten realizations in her book, and she said this: vulnerability is the key to making change because if you're not vulnerable, there will be no change.

That's not a soft observation. It's a description of a mechanism.

And the more I think about it in the context of nonprofit leadership specifically, the more I think most leaders are trying to create change without doing the thing that actually makes change possible.

When nonprofit leaders tell me they're stuck, the conversation usually starts with the usual suspects:

• Not enough funding

• Not enough staff

• Too many competing priorities

And yes, those are real. But they're rarely the root of the problem.

What I see more often is this: leaders are operating inside a set of assumptions they've never questioned. About what success looks like. About what their role requires of them.

About what good leadership is supposed to feel like. And those assumptions — most of them inherited, not chosen — are doing a lot of quiet damage.

When your actions are out of alignment with what you actually value, everything gets harder. Not because you're doing things wrong, but because you're measuring yourself against a standard that was never yours to begin with.

Becca put it plainly:

"You're probably living somebody else's definition of success."

That's true for individuals. It's also true for organizations.

Here's what I see happen in nonprofits specifically. Most organizations start out on a clear path — usually tied directly to the founder's vision, their proximity to the problem, their lived understanding of what needs to change. That clarity is one of the great assets of early-stage nonprofits.

Then things shift. Funders come in with their own definitions of impact. Industry norms start to accumulate. Boards begin setting direction — and boards, while essential for oversight, are watching the journey from the outside. They aren't walking it. And when the people setting the path aren't the ones who have to walk it, the path usually isn't as good as the one the organization would have found for itself.

So the mission stays intact. But the how — how to pursue it, what it looks like in practice, what success actually means day-to-day — gets progressively shaped by other people's expectations. And the leader is left trying to execute someone else's vision with their own energy. No wonder they're exhausted.

This isn't because people are bad. It's because the system makes it very easy to inherit a direction without noticing you've done it.

Here's the part that tends to make high-achieving leaders uncomfortable: to question those inherited assumptions, you have to be willing to not know. You have to be willing to look at what you've built and ask honestly whether it's what you actually want to build — and whether the way you're measuring success is actually measuring the right thing.

That's what vulnerability means in practice. Not oversharing. Not performing openness. It means being willing to ask:

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