Alice Chen

People, teams and organizations navigating the “in between” and the “yet unexplored” — those living at the edge of what they’ve known, ready to unlearn something and curious enough to discover what’s on the other side.

I’m drawn to leaders who carry more than one cultural inheritance, whose strongest instincts don’t have easy names in conventional leadership language, and who sense that becoming more fully themselves is inseparable from becoming more effective. I work with individuals, teams, and organizations — from Fortune 500 companies to nonprofits to public school systems.

A couple of years ago, a senior leader came to me because something felt off.  After a decade of focused effort, she’d just been promoted into her first CEO role, landing exactly where she’d been aiming.  Yet she told me, “Something feels “hollow.”  She wasn’t sure what or why.

What we slowly discovered together was that in ther service of her goals, she’d also spent a decade becoming the leader her organization normed her to be – and in the process had quietly set down the parts of herself that felt hard to explain and gave her the deepest sense of aliveness – her intuition, her creativity, the deep well of emotion that lived inside of her.  

Together, we began to explore and experiment with what it might look and feel like for her to reclaim some of her unique gifts and allow them to be more visible in her work and on her team. As she reconnected with her whole self, a quality of presence, her team hadn’t seen before emerged as well. A willingness to not-know in public. To experiment and take risks.  To engage in collaborative thinking.  Her way of being as a leader because an invitation to others.  The culture on her team became more creative.  New ideas for products and processes started to appear.  The business acquired some important customers. The bottom line of the company shifted. 

I’ve seen this so many times in my work with clients:  When we stop editing ourselves to fit the room, the room changes.

And this to me happens because inner work and outer results aren’t really separate. They sometimes just look that way from a distance.

I draw widely and hold frameworks loosely:

• Adult development and constructive-developmental psychology
• Polynesian wayfinding as leadership epistemology
• Organizational and systems thinking
• Emergent strategy and design thinking
• Mindfulness and somatic awareness
• Coaching for equity and identity-conscious practice
• Art and creative practice as modes of inquiry
• Human Design, Astrology, Energy Leadership, CliftonStrengths

A winding path I’ve come to trust completely. I began my career as a public school teacher in Hawai’i, moved through instructional coaching, arts leadership, grant writing, and community organizing before landing in leadership development. My formal studies took me deep into indigenous communities in the US and Polynesia — where I kept encountering how different our most fundamental worldviews can be, and how much we lose when we pretend otherwise.

A few things have been especially formative for me:

• Polynesian wayfinding — not as metaphor but as an epistemology. When you literally navigate vast open ocean without modern instruments – by reading stars, swells, birds, and your own felt sense – you understand and relate to complexity, community and life in unique ways. 

• Growing up between. I identify as third culture, having grown up multiracial and multi cultural in places and contexts that didn’t always have words for what or who I was. My own multiplicity lives as both a wound and a lens — and the reason coherence in complexity is my personal practice as much as my professional one.
• Making things. I knit, sew, dye fabric, and photograph. Less as a hobby and more as a mindfulness practice. My maker intelligence teaches me things about emergence, imperfection, and transformation that no framework has ever quite matched.

I am a colleague.

I live in the mountains of western North Carolina with my husband Daniel and two very opinionated long-haired dachshunds — Trevor, who is steady, empathetic, and happy to sleep next to me all day, and Remy, who is dramatic, opinionated and likes to hurl himself off of docks into bodies of water.

I knit and sew most of my own clothes, ice-dye fabric, do visible mending, shoot photography, and play competitive tennis badly enough to still find it humbling. I run a monthly creative workshop series called Art & Alchemy. I write a Substack called Tiny Big Things — dispatches on creativity, aliveness, and the power of noticing the small. I’m a trustee of Tererai Trent International. And I’m always planning the next trip somewhere with good textiles and food I can’t get at home. 

Deep, but not therapy. I’m a thought partner, cheerleader, challenger, and sometimes an uncomfortable mirror. If we walk into territory beyond what’s appropriate for me to hold, I’ll name that and help you and your team to find the right supports.

One-on-one coaching. Group facilitation. Organizational consulting. Workshop design and delivery. Mentor coaching for ICF credentialing.

• B.A., Wellesley College — History, Geology & Theatre (Summa Cum Laude)

• M.Ed.T., University of Hawai’i

• PCC, International Coaching Federation

• ACC and PCC Mentor Coach, ICF-accredited programs

• Certified Professional Coach (CPC), iPEC

• Energy Leadership Index Master Practitioner (ELI-MP)

• Training in Growth Edge Coaching, Immunity to Change, Adaptive Leadership, Coaching for Equity, Adult Development, Human Design

• 18+ years across Fortune 500 companies, nonprofits, public school systems, and individual clients