Not long ago, a woman came to Lewes Leadership Lunch for the first time. We had originally connected because she was exploring the possibility of doing some work with me. I thought she was coming to experience L3 and get a better sense of me and what I had created. She did. But what happened afterward had almost nothing to do with working for me.
A few days later, she sent me an email. She told me that something in her had been dormant for a while. She had largely stepped away from the social media for her own business after having surgery earlier this year, and she was trying to figure out what she wanted the next season of her life and work to look like.
Then she came to L3.
She listened to the stories. She participated in the conversations. She connected with other leaders. And somewhere in
the middle of all of that, something stirred.
The next morning, she sat down with fresh energy around her own business. She created her first social media post in months, mapped out a month of content, and started dreaming again about what she wanted her business to become.
Then she shared something with me that I haven’t stopped thinking about.
She had come into the room believing she might be exploring an opportunity to help me build something I was passionate about. She left wondering whether this season of her life might actually be about remembering that she was still allowed to dream about what she was passionate about, too. That inspired me.
I’ve spent more than a year building L3. I’ve invested time, energy, money, thought, worry, and an enormous amount of love into creating a place where people can come together and have conversations that matter. And like most people who build something, I’ve wondered at times what will come from it.
Will it create coaching opportunities? Speaking engagements? Relationships? Collaborations? Will it grow? Will all this
effort eventually lead somewhere I can’t yet see?
Those aren’t unreasonable questions. But her email made me wonder whether sometimes we’re so busy looking for the return we expected that we miss the impact we never thought to measure.
Maybe the result isn’t always something that comes back to us.
Maybe it’s a conversation someone keeps thinking about on the drive home. A question that causes someone to reconsider a decision. Two people who meet because they happened to sit beside one another. A story that gives someone courage at exactly the moment they need it.
Or maybe it’s a woman who walks into a room thinking she might be looking for a job and walks out remembering that she has a dream of her own.
That’s the strange thing about creating something meaningful: we rarely get to follow the ripple all the way out. We don’t know what someone does with a question we asked, a story we shared, an introduction we made, or a moment when we encouraged them to see themselves differently.
This time, someone was generous enough to come back and tell me.
Her email also made me think differently about leadership. We spend a lot of time trying to measure our impact by the outcomes we intended to create. Did the person do what we hoped? Did the initiative produce the expected result? Did our advice work? Did the conversation lead where we thought it would?
But perhaps some of our greatest impact happens when someone takes what we’ve given them and does something with it we never could have predicted.
I thought this woman might come into my world and help me build something. Instead, something I’d built helped her remember what she wanted to build.
I couldn’t have planned that outcome. I certainly can’t take credit for what she chooses to do next. That’s hers. But I can be grateful that, for one afternoon, something we created gave her a place to reconnect with a part of herself that had gone quiet.
We don’t always get to see the ripple of what we put into the world. This time, I got to see one, and it reminded me that not everything meaningful can—or should—be measured by what comes back to us. Sometimes the impact is what gets awakened in someone else.
Which leaves me wondering: How many ripples have we created that we’ll never know about?
A conversation someone needed. An introduction that changed something. A few words of encouragement that landed
at exactly the right time. A question that stayed with someone long after we forgot asking it. And maybe an equally important question: Who has created a ripple in your life without realizing it?
If someone comes to mind, maybe today is a good day to tell them.
Here’s to your greatness,
Misti Burmeister
Misti Burmeister is a leadership communication expert who helps founder-CEOs and senior leaders build trust, strengthen accountability, and create ownership through courageous conversations and human-centered leadership. Her work focuses on helping leaders notice what others miss in human dynamics so they can communicate in ways that help people succeed — not just comply.