- Location: Los Angeles, CA, USA
- Local Time:–:–:–
Mindy Danna
I support leaders from all walks of life and types of organizations who are trying to expand their capacity to make good things happen in their lives, their work, and the world.
Two current examples:
- I am also working with the senior leadership team of a global NGO dedicated to fighting inequality, poverty and injustice. Our work is focused on helping them expand their collective capacity as a team to meet the challenges of increasing global crises on numerous fronts with increasingly limited resources.
- I am working with a cohort of 24 senior leaders of a global engineering organization who have been selected to experience a 9-month rigorous leadership development journey designed to shift their leadership consciousness, mindset, and practices.
My clients range from Executive Directors and leaders of nonprofit organizations to senior executives of technology, engineering, and healthcare organizations. I work with individual coaching clients, intact leadership teams, and large cohort-based leadership development programs.
There’s a short answer and a long answer to this question, depending on how far back I reach in considering the “shapers”! I moved quite a bit as a child and upon landing in each new place, I found myself being deeply curious about what made these people in this place “tick” and why. I think this curiosity about human meaning making has been a life-long passion and shaped what I studied and the work I do today.
Early in my career I attended an Immunity to Change workshop with Bob Kegan and Lisa Lahey, and the introduction to Adult Development Theory felt like the missing key I had been searching for! That interest led me to Jennifer Garvey Berger’s Changing on the Job, which ultimately led me to get a Masters degree in Organizational Leadership and do a deeper dive into theories of Adult Development. What I love about this work is there is always more to learn about the human mind, body and spirit and how that impacts how we show up as leaders. I am a life-long student of human behavior and this feels like my life’s work.
“Working with Mindy has been one of the most profound and transformational experiences of my life. She has helped me level up in every aspect of my life — because it turns out that you can’t just deal with the professional without also dealing with the personal. But despite working through challenging issues, I came out of every session with Mindy feeling lighter, more focused and more in touch with my own strengths. She has been an incredible partner on my journey and anyone who gets to work with her can count themselves incredibly lucky.”
I have served on the leadership team for the past 4 years and currently chair our meetings. I am also the account leader on one of our largest clients and have served as co-leader on several of our largest leadership development programs over the past 3 years.
My greatest satisfaction comes from helping our newer and younger colleagues develop their capacity to do this work. To do deeply developmental work requires us to be gifted connectors, honest and compassionate mirrors, and always walk our talk. I see my role as practicing and modeling this for our clients and all of our colleagues.
I am a mother of two daughters in their 20s and I delight in watching them practice “adulting” in their own ways. I am the daughter of a still vibrant 97 year old mother who lives nearby and likes to talk about the latest things she is reading or learning about. I am married to a commercial architect who is passionate about design and most of the time, me. I have a rescue dog who is 14 who is a goofy delight. I enjoy hiking in the Hollywood hills where I live and I spend as much time as I can in the southwest of France with a group of 12 friends who are working on creating an intentional community – an excellent lab, by the way, for studying human behavior!
