Hi! I’m Megan Goering Mellin.

By Day

By day, I’m a coach for Impact Entrepreneurs. I work with founders, leaders, and innovators who are motivated by a spirited desire for impact that uplifts themselves and others.

I ask, “Who gets to create and innovate?” again and again. I tend to return to the question, “Whose voices matter?”

Most of my personal work ends up challenging myself (and our societies and structures) to realign our actions, behavior, and resources on personal, organizational, and societal levels. “Toward what?” you might ask. I’m still scratching at the way to name or depict that - but it’s something like Ubuntu, something like “a world that works for all life,” and something like transformational respect or a spirit of unabridgable dignity for each being and all of existence.

I practice ecological and personal integration through Way of Nature and participation at First Light Farm. My personal path involves friendship, relationship, family and therapy as practices toward spiritual integration. I’ve been experimenting since 2017 with the TheoryU theory of change that outward transformation begins from an internal leverage point. I show up each day voraciously attending to that work.

On the Side

On the side, I read, write, explore, and build companies and products. I also teach, advise, and codevelop/produce online courses on creativity, like the amazing Approachable Design with Nate Kadlac.

I’ve worked in management consulting, corporate fraud and financial investigations, venture capital, SaaS tech, professional services, design/design thinking, philanthropy/nonprofit sector, and online and offline education.

I’ve studied and taught Prototype Thinking with Tom Chi and J Li, which still influences me massively. I helped NASDAQ build the early stages of its Milestone Maker accelerator, including coaching programs, innovation content, and program strucure.

Today, I teach innovation with organizations like Pracademy in Bergen, Norway, NASDAQ, and other amazing global crews. I’m a passionate member of Rachel Rodgers’ “We Should All Be Millionaires: the Club,” a wonderful place to meet other diverse entrepreneurs and changemakers, and I co-lead my local Stanford GSB Women in Management circle.

At Home

At home, I build a family and art (healing and laughing hysterically) with the one-in-8-billion Joe. I track wealth with friends. I build resources about it, dig into dismantling racism and misogyny starting with me, and do my best to weave that into nature and local community practices in cahoots with First Light Farm in the Snoqualmie Valley of Washington State. I camp as often as possible on the Olympic Peninsula, and think a lot on inside/outside systems wellness, inspired by writers like Donella Meadows and Carol Sanford.

The Themes

Much of my joy stems from the practice of building a better world (more humane, more joy & life-filled, more colorful and spirited). I do believe that happens both inside-out and outside-in. I love having Zoom tea with new friends, co-conspirators, other mischief-makers, members of creative couples or inspired marriages/life-partnerships, and spirited folks from every culture! My people are usually up to something similar (and often sort-of-hard-to-describe-right-now), usually with some voraciousness or twinkly-eyed passion. If that’s you, reach out!

For me, this path involves a mix of corporate and decentralized innovation (sometimes personal and interpersonal), reclaiming creative identity, forging language for and unraveling layered trauma, some of which shows up on a cultural level, and lots of experiments that frequently end in discoveries but not always commerce.

As human beings, we both live inside an economy, and our humanity will always transcend that. (Frankly, our beingness will also always transcend our species.) I hope this process, path and site will always be under construction, and that you’ll help me clarify many future iterations.

The Vibe

I try to keep it both hilarious and deeply real. I’ve loved running and operating 400-person orgs for Google, teaching university courses, sketching art and jumping in the river for grown-up summer camps, teaching yin yoga and revering the intersections of longstanding wisdom traditions, and prototyping kooky online products and experiences (work-in-progress here) for improving our lives and claiming our power. I do a lot of personal work across intergenerational trauma, just-for-fun creativity, personal healing, and transformational leadership, and I’m a big fan and advocate for therapy and particularly trauma-informed support for pretty much everyone.

My favorite online writer since Dear Sugar is Athena Meriwether on Quora. The top two articles I’ll inevitably tell you Everything About are Donella Meadows’ Leverage Points and this HuffPo article from Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks on 7 principles for creating a conscious relationship, which has basically been a stone tablet for me since ~2012.

More and more often, inspired by Myisha T. Hill, I do my best to make messes and mistakes in the process of speaking up about diversity and psychological safety for every body. This can sometimes be intense, but I’m committed to learn from it and come back to curiosity and compassion for myself, for others, and all of us, every time.

So that’s the flavor! If this is your jam, take an upcoming session of Approachable Design to get to know me really really quickly, and/or let’s noodle together on Twitter about how this world is unfolding and where we’d like to see it move to next.

May we finish once we’re dead! May all our published typos take us by surprise.