‘It’s less about your duties, more about discovering who you are:’ Leadership coach finds her path

NINA MOINI: Let's transition to our next story, shall we? Transitions are a part of life. Throughout our lives, we go through several major changes, most of us. Yet in many cases, transitions take longer than expected or hoped for. That's the truth.

Vanessa Tennyson has developed over the years a deep understanding of work and life transitions. At age 65, she's in her encore career as an executive and leadership coach. And as a transgender woman, she offers also a rare perspective from experiencing both male and female gender roles as an employee, manager, executive, and business owner. Those are her words.

In our series Connect The Dots, we meet with people who have deep experiences in our community and ask them to share lessons learned about what really matters in life. So joining me now is MPR's senior economics contributor Chris Farrell, who recently met with Tennyson at her office in Minneapolis. Welcome, Chris.

CHRIS FARRELL: It's great to be here.

NINA MOINI: Well, I'm excited to learn about Vanessa. Tell us a little bit about her.

CHRIS FARRELL: Well, she was born and raised in Minnesota. And most of her career was spent at an old line design and consulting engineering firm. And she held a variety of positions at the company and eventually became a co-owner. And she sold her shares in the business at age 60 and, like so many people these days later in life, asked herself, OK, what comes next? What is her next chapter?

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And I'm guessing it wasn't just leisure that she went toward.

CHRIS FARRELL: Far from it. To help her figure out what's next, she became a fellow at a program at the University of Minnesota. And it was designed to help people in the second half of life land on their encore. Sadly, it was a terrific program but it no longer exists.

So during a conversation with several of the fellows, they recommended that she become a coach. So she liked the idea. And she got her professional certificate from Columbia University.

VANESSA TENNYSON: I started in 2018. I was professionally certified in 2020. Zero income. Now it's almost 2025. And I've got an office. And I've got hundreds of clients. And I'm doing really well. And I love it. I've never been busier in my life. I work routinely 12 hour days because I have clients in London and on the West Coast. So I'm in at 6:30 and I leave at 6:30, 7:00.

NINA MOINI: Wow. She obviously must get a lot out of this work. What did you find drives her, Chris?

CHRIS FARRELL: So the reason why-- she loves what she does becomes obvious when I asked her, OK, what really matters to her.

VANESSA TENNYSON: The simple answer is making a difference is what matters to me, helping others to have a less difficult journey, clearing the path, if you will. The longer answer is having a legacy is being able to be fully inside out instead of just outside in. In other words, giving all of myself to people, not just this thing that I have. The clients that I connect deeply with are almost friends.

NINA MOINI: Wow. I liked what she said about helping others to have a less difficult journey because we all know that life can be hard and transitions aren't easy.

CHRIS FARRELL: No. They aren't. And I think you'll like this story.

NINA MOINI: OK.

CHRIS FARRELL: OK. And I found it heartening. And I think it tells you a lot about Tennyson. And her story fits nicely with the theme of NPR's Talking Sense series.

NINA MOINI: Sure. And just to remind listeners, Talking Sense is a really great series that reporter Katherine Richards started that explores the roots of polarization in our state, tries to help people build bridges and have respectful conversations.

CHRIS FARRELL: All right. So let's set the stage here. So we're early in Tennyson's career. And she met a potential client who was a hard right conservative, her polar opposite. Yet he picked her as his coach. And Tennyson wondered, OK, could this relationship work? And what happened affirmed what she said that really matters to her.

VANESSA TENNYSON: And we went in. We coached for nine months. And at the last coaching session, he said, this is the last time I'm calling you my coach and the first time I'm going to call you my friend. And he said I know one thing is true. You're good people. And I want good people in my life. And to me, that was the essence of everything.

Here was this person who under any other circumstance, I would never have even met. And we changed each other's lives over the course of nine months. That's pretty good stuff.

NINA MOINI: Wow. I noticed her company website says that she offers, again, a rare perspective from experiencing both male and female gender roles in the workplace because of her transgender identity. How else does that experience inform her outlook?

CHRIS FARRELL: You know, Nina, you've talked to people where you just enjoy having this conversation. And Tennyson is one of those people. And one reason that she seems so good at helping people navigate their career transitions is that she went from the male form to the female form. And there was turmoil. There's trauma along the way. She and her wife were watching the Bruce Jenner transition to Caitlyn Jenner. And Tennyson's wife turned to her and said, my god, she told your story verbatim.

VANESSA TENNYSON: I don't think about being transgender. I don't think about being female. I just am. Right. When I look in the mirror, I just see-- I see Vanessa. I don't see a woman, or a man, or some essence of something. I see me. And whether I was in a male form or a female form, I was still that person. The female form allowed me to expand into places that I'd always been comfortable but wasn't allowed to express.

NINA MOINI: And did she tell you, Chris, just more about what the experience was like during her transition?

CHRIS FARRELL: So here's one story. I mean, she told me that, for some time, she was angry. And she had friends who couldn't deal with her transition. And how she came to deal with it holds lessons for the rest of us.

VANESSA TENNYSON: I discovered a lot. It was a hard thing to do. But beyond all of that, what I found out after everything was done was I was really angry. And I couldn't figure out why I was so angry. One day it dawned on me that I was angry that people weren't automatically accepting me for who I was and who I am because the spirit of who I always was is always there.

I just changed form. And I had good friends who just couldn't deal with that. And I for some reason was not happy about that. And one day it dawned on me, it's not my job to get them to accept me. It's my job to open their eyes to education. They get to choose to accept or reject me. And I get to be OK with that. And that was a life-changing moment.

NINA MOINI: Wow. That's very powerful, Chris.

CHRIS FARRELL: Isn't that something?

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Did she talk about what she would say to her younger self because sometimes it takes a while in life to come to these conclusions?

CHRIS FARRELL: That's right. That's one of the questions I ask everybody that I do this interview with. And I really liked her answer.

VANESSA TENNYSON: If I were to be able to talk to my younger self or even to the younger people of today is find your value. Find what you have that's important to others, and live there for a while, and see how that works for you. And don't be afraid to experiment. Don't be in a rush to grow up, and get debt, and do all the things. Just experience life as it's supposed to be wherever you're supposed to go with that, whatever your talents are. Don't be afraid of not doing what everybody thinks should be doing.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. I see a lot of threads about trying different things, not following the path that's just laid out by society, or your parents, or whoever. How else does that play out in her work?

CHRIS FARRELL: So many of the people she works with are late in their careers. They worked hard. They bought a house. They advanced their careers. But they're unfulfilled. They're restless. And they turn to Tennyson to help them pick another job or career with their skill sets that's been developed over the years. But Tennyson, her focus is on getting them to understand who they are.

VANESSA TENNYSON: The journey is less about what can I do and much more about who am I and what should I be doing with that. And once we discover who we are, it's really simple because the field opens up. You can do a lot of different things with your experience and your skill set, but who you are actually defines what that should be.

NINA MOINI: Lots of people are afraid to make different transitions in life, too, and maybe ask themselves, can I do this? So how does Vanessa push her clients to explore that?

CHRIS FARRELL: So I did ask for an example. I mean give us a practical step people might want to take when you're thinking about making a transition, say, as you mentioned, changing careers. And she recommended an exercise she calls the five power adjectives. And here's Tennyson reading her power statement.

VANESSA TENNYSON: So my five power adjectives are I live out my values authentically by harnessing my empathetic and intuitive skills to help others find the truth within themselves, creating inspirational and intentional behaviors to live their fullest lives without hesitation or ambiguity.

CHRIS FARRELL: Now, Nina, I have to tell you, she actually did say, that paragraph, it took five or six iterations before she arrived at it.

NINA MOINI: Oh, I bet because it's very intentional. So coming up with the five power adjectives, it seems easy but, like we're talking about, it's probably hard to really narrow it down to a mantra.

CHRIS FARRELL: Yeah. So exercises like that are designed to help you imagine new possibilities, new opportunities, something that is meaningful to you.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. I can really see how her advice makes a difference in people's lives. So that's the note that I want to end on because she really is making a difference.

VANESSA TENNYSON: For me, making a difference is being true to who I am, allowing others to experience what's that like for them, allowing them to feel safe in exploration, allowing them to be comfortable in failure, and helping them in even the smallest way to take a step in the direction that they've been so uncomfortable to take that they are afraid of it. To me, that would be a life well lived.

NINA MOINI: Chris, thank you for bringing us Vanessa Tennyson's story. Very powerful stuff.

CHRIS FARRELL: Thank you.