What I'm learning about healing, and leading
Inside this issue
What the Room Is Teaching Me: Transformation Through Healing
A Distinction I Can’t Unsee: Healing Our Meetings
A Question Worth Sitting With: Confronting Truth
There are moments when I can feel the work I do, quietly working on me… while I’m still in the middle of doing it.
The past month has felt like one of those seasons for me.
Seventy-three change agents are now three weeks into our xchange Guide Certification. Around the same time, we received word from the International Coaching Federation that our certification will now earn 34 Continuing Education Credits.
That kind of recognition is never the point… but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel meaningful. Mostly because it signals that this work is reaching places it needs to reach.
What feels even more alive right now is something harder to measure.
Over the last few weeks, five global organizations have stepped into partnership with xchange to rethink how they gather, how they develop leaders, and how they build learning communities.
Sitting this close to those conversations, it feels less like business growth and more like watching a necessary reinvention, beginning to shift in real time.
But the moment that has stayed with me most happened in an event we hosted with Raj Sisodia and Nilima Bhat, as they walked us through the seven steps from their new book, Healing Leaders. (Here’s a recording of the interview. Enjoy.)
There was something in that conversation that didn’t just land intellectually.
🌿 What the Room Is Teaching Me
Transformation Through Healing
As Raj and Nilima explored the inner journey of leadership — Know, Love, Be, Choose, Express, Complete, Heal — one line kept echoing long after they said it:
“Hurt people hurt people. But the opposite is also true: Healed people heal people. Healed leaders heal leaders — and their organizations.”
I’ve been sitting with that sentence.
It brought up a question I don’t always slow down enough to ask myself:
Where have unresolved parts of me shaped how I show up… with our team, with our clients, or even with my family?
And right alongside that came another, larger realization:
As someone who supports thousands of facilitators and change agents, what ripple of influence am I helping set in motion through the rooms they’ll hold… and the conversations that will unfold inside those rooms?
Influence isn’t something we occasionally step into.
It’s something we are generating all the time, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
My late friend and teacher, Dr. Danny Friedland, says it simply:
“You cannot not have influence.”
Something I’m carrying forward: Every room is already shaping people. Sometimes the most responsible thing we can do as leaders is notice what we’re bringing into that room before we try to change anything inside it.
🔍 A Distinction I Can’t Unsee
Healing Our Meetings
For years, we’ve talked about our work at xchange as helping transform meetings into meetings that transform.
Lately, another word keeps showing up for me.
Healing.
Not in a dramatic or mystical sense. In a very practical, relational sense.
A lot of what feels broken in conferences, leadership gatherings, and communities doesn’t come from a lack of intelligence or preparation. If anything, most of these spaces are filled with brilliant people.
What’s often missing is a flow.
Flow of honesty.
Flow of perspective.
Flow of energy and information, between people who are still, in subtle ways, protecting themselves or performing roles they think the room expects from them.
When that happens, wisdom gets trapped.
Most experienced conveners understand the importance of strong teaching. I still believe deeply in great teaching.
The challenge sneaks in when teaching quietly replaces asking, listening and hosting space for the room to become the teacher.
We can forget, the real cost of a gathering has almost nothing to do with the budget.
It’s the interaction patterns that never change.
It’s the conversations that almost happen, but don’t.
It’s the creative solutions that live somewhere in the room… but never quite surface.
And the collective impact that is consistently under achieved.
Meetings rarely struggle because people don’t know enough.
They struggle because there isn’t a container created that invites what we do know.
What I can’t stop noticing: Modern science, and indigenous wisdom… say the same thing. When a system (organization, community, etc.) is struggling, the solution is always to create, strengthen, or repair the connections between the parts of the system - the people in the room.
💬 A Question Worth Sitting With
Confronting Truth
When I reached the last pages of , one question followed me out of the book and into the rest of my week:
What truth is my leadership — and my life — asking me to face next?
The answer that surfaced for me wasn’t particularly comfortable.
It was the realization that I’m being asked to share what this work is teaching me more consistently, with more courage… with you and with our community.
I captured this question, along with nine others inspired by the book, in a short reflection you can read here. It’s about a three-minute read.
If the post hits for you, share with your team, your partner, your colleagues. Use these questions to see what can open up.
Sometimes the questions that change us aren’t the ones we rush to answer. They’re the ones we finally allow to stay open long enough to do their work.
Stay Curious,
Jon Berghoff
P.S. If you’re curious what it looks like when meetings truly begin to shift, and sometimes even heal, join me for my next live workshop.
I’m not sure how many more times we’ll offer this experience openly and without charge. If this conversation stirred something for you, I’d genuinely love to meet you inside that room.
And if someone came to mind while reading this, bring that with you.
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I’m Jon Berghoff, founder @ xchange. This is a semi-regular, oddly formatted, rarely edited, learning update. If you lead, teach or convene groups, and believe in collective human potential please read, forward, or reply. I love hearing from you.
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