Executive coach Jessie-Lynn MacDonald on why real change starts with a conversation, not a strategy, and how one person's energy shapes a whole team.
GROWTH PILLAR: Leadership & Ops
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs / Corporate escapees / Leaders building systems
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A new way to think about culture problems, a real story about coming back from a serious setback, and one shift — curiosity — that changes how a room feels.
Most leaders try to fix culture problems with a new program or a new system. Jessie-Lynn MacDonald says that misses the real starting point.
Jessie-Lynn is an executive and transformation coach. She helps leaders and teams see what's actually holding them back — stress, limiting beliefs, or a lack of clear direction. In this East Trade Winds session, she explains why burnout, conflict, and low engagement are human problems first, not systems problems. She shares how one person's energy in a room can change how everyone else shows up — and how that ripple moves from a person, to a team, to a whole organization.
She also shares her own story. A head injury at 20. Being told to go on long-term disability. Then being told, three years later, that she'd never manage university again. She went anyway. Graduated with high honors.
Key topics covered:
Guest links:
Jessie-Lynn MacDonald — Website · LinkedIn · Facebook · X · Instagram · Blog
Co-hosts: Percy Barr and Wayne Pratt
— PARTNERS ON THIS EPISODE —
East Trade Winds — free weekly networking, community first, sales second.
Profit10 — a free ten-question snapshot that shows coaches and consultants where a client's business is leaking profit.
Gentry Learning — real estate education from Fred Crouch, courses, listings, and an investor club.
Next Steps
Jessie-Lynn (00:05)
so welcome everybody. so I wanted to start off today by asking you about thinking about a person who has changed your life. And I don't want you to overthink it. I want you to think of maybe somebody that just comes to mind. Maybe it was a teacher, maybe it was a parent, a coach, a friend, a colleague.
And maybe it was somebody who believed in you before you believed in yourself.
And then I want you to think about
We tend like s we tend to think about like change as something that is strategic or it's something that we develop plans for, we set goals for. But some of the most significant changes happen in our lives. They don't begin with a strategy. They begin with a conversation. They begin with a question. They begin with an idea. And it might be that somebody sees something in us that we don't see in ourselves.
think about the person that you were thinking you you just thought about. That's too many thinking in there. But if you think about that person, something happened in that interaction. Maybe that you felt valued, maybe you felt seen, maybe you felt heard. maybe they they asked you a question that you still remember. And something changed. It doesn't have to be something dramatic.
But maybe you started to see yourself differently.
Now when we see change, It changes how we see changes what becomes possible. So in our businesses, sometimes we're thinking about things from a strategic lens, but what if the biggest opportunity in your business isn't something that you need to do, but something that you need to see differently?
When businesses are approaching a problem, a lot of times when I work with organizations, they bring me in for a specific situation. it could be that someone's not performing, there's conflict on a team, there's low engagement, innovation isn't happening, people are burned out, or culture is unhealthy. I'm working with a large global organization on this right now. And often we can be trying to solve a problem. Like, we want to create initiatives, we want to bring in programs.
We want to introduce new systems, develop strategies. And none of these are wrong. It's just that often we're trying to kind of solve the problem without looking and understanding the human foundation
And we don't exist in isolation. So, if a company asks me to go in to talk about well-being or to look at the well-being in the culture, it's not that. it can't just be that we don't exist in silos. And as humans, like we don't arrive at work and suddenly disconnect from being human. Like everything that makes us human, our experiences influence us, our thinking influences us, our relationships influence us, our environments influence us, and likewise we influence them.
Everything is connected.
So if you look at this when you see this is you, this is the self, this is the individual. But once you start to understand yourself from that different perspective, you see that our relationships can change just from having a different perspective. And not only our relationships, but then what we're contributing to maybe with our teams, maybe with our colleagues, maybe, like
with our clients or customers. And then what happens from that is the organizations start to change. And then when the organizations start to change, there's it goes out into the community. And our communities are where we live. the impact of this is huge. So the question isn't whether you're influencing other people, because you already are, we're all doing that on a regular basis.
in this interaction this morning, it's been beautiful. But everything in how we show up impacts how we experience things. So if you think of every time you walk into a room or every conversation that you have, every question that you ask, Percy had said something about, diffusing conflict. Every assumption that you make, every time you're curious, every time you're defensive,
Every time you listen and every time you don't, you're creating something.
So think about the last time you walked into a room. What did you bring with you? Was it calm? Was it anxiety? Was it curiosity? Was it pressure? Was it possibility? Was it judgment or hope? You know, it can be any number of things. But we bring an energy into the space that we're around.
And we often focus on what we're getting from an environment, what we're getting from an interaction, but rarely do we think about what am I contributing to it?
And there's an invisible ripple that happens. Like, have you ever noticed that, somebody can walk into a room into a meeting and they can be anxious, they can be tense. Other people feel that. One person can be defensive and conversations close down. on the flip side of that, like one person's curious and conversations expand.
When one person has courage, they might speak up. I work with a lot of people who they sit at a table and they have imposter syndrome. They don't want to ask a question because they don't want to make it look like they don't know what they're doing or they shouldn't be in that position. So they don't ask the question. But when one person does, that creates an environment that creates kind of a different ripple effect from that. And then other people find the courage to do that.
So maybe one person creates a good energy and then that ripples out.
For me, human potential isn't something that we create. it's very, very like it's a multi-billion dollar industry to say that, we need to manufacture this, we need to build this, we need to develop this, we need to fix people, improve people. And I really, really disagree that that's a starting point. Human potential, we have it here. Human potential is something that we uncover and then we cultivate that.
And then we learn to express it from that space.
when you think about it, think about what if we become more curious. Again, going back to Percy, like you can you can dissolve tense situations, you can have an entirely different experience of an interaction just by being more curious. But be more curious about yourself too, like curious about how we learn, how we grow, how we make meaning, how we develop beliefs in ourselves. Where did they come from?
How do we connect with people? How do we recover? How do we create? How do we innovate? And then from that space, what becomes possible?
And this is the beautiful thing about human potential. It's here. You don't need to become somebody else. You don't need to be that person on stage, that person on social media. A huge challenge right now for young people is that what they see on the screens and trying to emulate that and the ripple effect of the problems that can come from that.
you don't have to be who you think you should be. You can just be who you are. And there's an opportunity to be more curious about who you are. And then from that, it's what's possible when you understand yourself more deeply, when you take away the, limiting kind of beliefs or the the brain chatter that tells you you can't or you shouldn't. Fun fact for me, years ago I
I had head injury and I fractured my skull. And I was told, go on long-term disability. you could you don't have to be doing anything. And this is when I was 20. And three years after that, I went back to university and they told me, You're never going to be able to do this because I'd lost my short-term memory. I had to relearn how to learn. If I had stuck to that story, I would have
Just stayed in Sault Ste. Marie and done nothing. I moved to Ottawa. I went to school, graduated with high honors. You know, you never know. You never know what is possible. And so it's one of these things where imagine what becomes possible when you understand yourself deeply and and you take ownership for that. Like.
Take ownership for how you walk into a room. Take ownership for how you are in a conversation. Nobody makes you be a certain way. we have agency over that. And choose curiosity. possibility doesn't begin with a like major corporate transformation. Sometimes it really, really begins from seeing something differently.
imagine what could become possible. Like meaningful change doesn't require something massive. It requires us just being able to step into the space of seeing something from a different perspective. Now at the beginning of this, I asked you to think about somebody who had done something, who had, maybe made an impact for you. think about that and then think about
they might know the impact that they had over you. And that's the same for all of us. There's a ripple effect that happens. So, we don't see the ripple. But that doesn't mean that that ripple isn't there and that that ripple doesn't happen and it goes to, to various layers, but it starts in the middle, just with the individual.
I'd love to connect. If you have any questions, this is my favorite area. When you say like where can you lose track of time for me? It's in all of this. So I appreciate the time. I appreciate the attention.