Brett Shiel

I spent seventeen years as a classroom teacher, district leader, and national consultant before founding Coaching & Convening in 2017. Since then I have worked with state education agencies, school districts, foundations, and cross-sector coalitions in more than twenty states, mostly on the slow, unglamorous work of helping large public systems change how they teach.

That work put me in a lot of rooms where good people were making worse decisions than they were capable of. Not because they lacked skill or character, but because the conditions had changed and they had not noticed. I did it too. In Any Weather came out of trying to understand that, first for the leaders I coached, and then for myself.

I am certified in Immunity to Change through Minds at Work, and that method for finding the hidden commitments that hold a behavior in place is built into the core of this one. I draw on Stoic philosophy as a practical operating system rather than a set of quotations, and on adaptive leadership, adult development, and twenty years of watching what pressure does to judgment.

I live on sixteen wooded acres in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, where most of the in-person work happens: on the trails, at the stone walls, on foot. I build trails, run, canoe, play guitar badly, and try to make things that last. I moved here from New York City and have not regretted it once.