Sarah Hines

Speaker  |  Coach  |  Trainer

For integrating who we are into what comes next. Conversations, explorations, and experiences for navigating life's transitions.

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The Work

The in between deserves more than advice.

Some transitions are chosen. Some arrive without permission. A relationship ends. A role changes. A career closes. A body shifts. A loss redraws the room. What once held shape no longer does.

01

Coaching

One-on-one coaching for people navigating the hard stuff. Identity shifts. Role changes. Loss. Divorce. The slow erosion of something that used to make sense. The moment you realize the map you have been using no longer fits the terrain.

This is not advice-giving. It is not a program with a tidy arc. It is honest, grounded, action oriented work built around where you actually are, not where you think you should be.

Identity after a defining role
Loss and the terrain of grief
Leadership in transition
Divorce and relationship changes
Moral injury and traumatic activations
02

Speaking

Speaking engagements for organizations, conferences, and communities navigating grief, transition, identity, leadership, and change. What is offered is not a motivational arc with a tidy landing. It is an honest accounting of what happens at the threshold, and what becomes possible when we stop pretending we know what comes next.

All topics customized to your audience.

Speaking Topics

Holding Shape in a Shifting World
Compassionate Leadership with Healthy Boundaries
Beyond the Summit
Transitions and Legacy
03

Workshops

Workshops for teams, leaders, and practitioners who support people through transition. Whether you are building organizational capacity around grief, loss, and identity, or developing your own practice as someone who holds space for others, this work gives you the tools, the language, and the grounded confidence to do it well.

Not a certification. Not a checklist. A real shift in how you show up for the people in your care.

Grief-informed leadership
Supporting identity transition in teams
Language and communication in loss
Practitioner development
A guiding belief
Change is not about forgetting who we have been.
It is about discovering how we belong
in what comes next.
About

Sarah Hines

Sarah Hines

Sarah Hines works at the intersection of identity, loss, and transition. She is a coach, speaker, and trainer who has spent years sitting with people in the hard middle of change, the space between who they were and who they are becoming.

Her work moves through three territories: Loss, the terrain most of us were never taught to navigate. Connection, finding our way back to ourselves when the roles that defined us fall away. And Legacy, understanding what we want to carry forward and what we are ready to set down.

She brings both the personal and the professional to everything she does, because she believes the two were never meant to be separate.

Certifications & Training

IFS Practitioner
Mental Health First Aid
Trauma Informed Practice
Death Doula Accreditation
Clinical Trauma Professional Level 1
Certified Funeral Celebrant
Integrative Somatic Parts
Home Hospice Training
Movement for Trauma Therapy Training
Rites & Rituals Practitioner
Edu-Therapy CBT for Grievers Trainer
Field Notes

Field Notes.

May 2026

Leading While Grieving

Leaders did not become leaders because they showed vulnerability or weakness. They got there because they were successful strategists, they led the organization through tough times, or exhibited any number of the qualities that victorious leaders are known for, tenacity, strength, dedication, determination, courage.

It is therefore beyond our comprehension that should a leader experience the death of someone they love, they cannot keep the emotions out of their life's work. But grief leads to unfortunate decisions, every day.

The numbers are staggering. And let's be honest, most organizations don't have a sense of where to help or how to support. Isn't that what Employee Assistance Programs are for? Not exactly. Supporting your employees' wellbeing is not something you can brush off onto your EAP and give yourself a big green checkmark for. It's deeper than that.

It's about the language we use, the understanding of what grief is and how it shows up at work every day. It's about ignoring struggles when someone comes back from bereavement leave. It's the constant messaging grievers receive, be strong, time heals. Language and understanding cannot be fixed by your EAP. This really is an inside job.

McKinsey found that unresolved grief affects fully one-third of the 7,000-plus executives they've worked with, and that organizations are consistently ill-equipped to handle it. The financial cost to US companies runs approximately $75 billion a year. But the loss of leadership capability, and the human suffering behind it, can seem beyond measure.

Scalable Planning. Grief and death are probably the toughest conversations to bring into an organization, so if we're going to do it, let's make the process as simple as possible. Start by articulating the core differences across possible grief journeys, types of grief, spiritual beliefs, relationship structures, and making room for the most common possibilities. When someone requests bereavement leave, give them one package with everything they need. Don't make them hunt through a dated handbook.

Flexibility. Most organizations have a chart that tells us how many days bereavement leave is available based on blood relation. This made sense once. It doesn't anymore. If someone was estranged from their mother and raised by their grandmother, the chart won't honour that relationship. A more inclusive practice considers the relationship itself.

Communication. How we communicate with the bereaved and their team is one of the most important pieces of grief care planning. We need to ensure the whole team has what they need to help and support, that they understand what their colleague needs and for how long. This requires clear communication processes that honour the griever's wishes.

Ultimately, none of this is possible if we continue to honour only tenacity and strength. We need leaders to begin this undertaking with vulnerability. A knowing that passionate employees who show up every day can crack. That grieving is not a sign of weakness, it is an act of love, dedication, and value.

There is so much more to this experience than the operational undercarriage. And if cared for properly, it can have a significant impact not only on your employees' experience, but on the inclusive nature of your organization's culture. It is a chance to put your values into action.

We celebrate momentum. We are suspicious of stillness. In leadership, in organizations, in the cultural story we tell about resilience, forward motion is the prize. The person who bounces back fastest is held up as the example. The one still sitting with it is quietly marked as a liability.

But some thresholds need to be stood in, not crossed. At least not yet.

When we move too quickly through grief, through loss, through the disorientation of a significant transition, we don't actually move through it. We move around it. And what we move around tends to find us later, in our decisions, in our relationships, in the particular flatness that settles in when we've been performing recovery for long enough that we've forgotten what the real thing feels like.

I've sat with executives who haven't grieved a loss from fifteen years ago. Not because they didn't care. Because the moment they walked back through the door, the organization needed them to be fine. So they were fine. And kept being fine. Until the cost of that performance showed up somewhere they couldn't ignore.

Moving forward isn't the problem. Premature forward motion is.

There's a difference between integration and avoidance, and it often doesn't announce itself clearly. Integration is slow. It asks you to carry something while you move, rather than set it down at the door. Avoidance feels like productivity. Like strength. Like being the kind of person who doesn't let things derail them.

The question worth asking isn't are you moving forward? It's what are you moving forward with?

Because the things we don't make room for don't disappear. They just become the invisible weight in every room we walk into. The decisions we can't quite explain. The relationships that keep hitting the same wall. The exhaustion that sleep doesn't touch.

Stillness is not the same as stuck. Sometimes the most important thing a leader can do is stay present to what is actually happening, in themselves, in their people, in the room, before deciding what comes next.

Forward is not always the direction. Sometimes the work is depth.

For most of us, the role was never just a job.

It was how we understood ourselves in the world. How we walked into a room. How we answered the question at every dinner party, every networking event, every family gathering. What do you do? And we knew, without hesitation, without ambiguity, exactly what to say. The role was the answer. And for a long time, that was enough.

Then it wasn't.

Whether the transition was chosen or arrived without permission, retirement, restructuring, illness, grief, or simply the quiet erosion of a role that no longer fit, the loss of the identity anchor is one of the most disorienting experiences a person can move through. Not because the work itself is gone, but because the self that was organized around the work no longer has the same shape.

The question people ask is usually: who will I become?

But that's not quite the right question. Not yet.

The more immediate and honest question is: can I belong to myself in the space between?

Because there is always a space between. Between who you were and what comes next. Between the last day and the first day of something new. Between the role that ended and the identity that hasn't fully formed. And that space, uncomfortable, unscripted, often invisible to the people around you, is where the real work lives.

We are not good at this. We are trained, especially in leadership, to have the answer. To project confidence. To know the next move before the current one is finished. The in-between feels like failure because it looks like stillness from the outside. But it isn't stillness. It's reckoning.

What I've found, sitting with people in this threshold, is that belonging to yourself doesn't require having the answer. It requires staying present to what's true, about what mattered, about what was lost, about what you actually want, without rushing to resolve it into a new identity before the ground is ready.

The role was never the whole of you. Even if it felt that way. Even if you organized your life around it for decades.

You were someone before the role gave you language for it. That person is still here.

For conversations that shape what comes next.

Begin with a private conversation. No performance. No tidy script. Just the first honest threshold.