I'm a Planner Standing Up to Talk About What Planning Can't Fix
Notes before three lunches at Central Exchange on the inner work we carry
I've built a lot of presentations. Twenty-plus years of them, for boardrooms and pitch meetings and quarterly reviews. I know how to walk a room through a problem and land on the thing you should do about it. So when I sat down to write the opening line for the first of three lunch talks at Central Exchange, my hands knew the shape of it before my head did.
Then I read it back and cut it. It sounded like a marketing presentation, and this isn't one.
The series is called The Inner Work We Carry. It's an hour over lunch with a room of professionals I mostly haven't met. I'm there to talk about the weight people bring into a room that no strategy accounts for, and what that has to do with how we lead.
Why is a marketing strategist standing up to talk about what we carry?
Because the thing a person is carrying shapes how they show up at work, and no plan I've ever built accounts for it. Nearly a decade as a fractional CMO has put me across the table from founders and leaders who were sharp on the whiteboard and privately holding something heavy. The strategy was usually fine. The person was not. And the person is what decides whether a good plan survives a hard week.
That's the same thing my book is about, in a different setting. What happens to one person doesn't stay with one person. It moves through a family, a team, a whole system. I spent a long time writing about how that works after a trauma. It turns out the quieter version of it is sitting in every conference room in the country.
What happens when the list stops working?
You hit a problem competence can't touch, and that's the exact moment this talk is about. I'm the person who handles things. I make the list, I work the list, I feel better with the list in my hand. That works right up until it doesn't. A diagnosis, a loss, a season where the usual moves don't move anything.
The instinct is to do more, faster. The list gets longer. Nothing lands. And people tend to hide that moment, because competence is the currency we trade in, and admitting the list stopped working can feel like admitting you failed. It isn't. It's the part of the job nobody put in the job description.
What do I want a room of professionals to leave with?
One question about their own work, not a summary of mine. I'm not standing up to hand people my story and have them clap. I want each person to walk out with a sharper question about the people they lead or work alongside. What is the person across from me carrying that I've been reading as attitude, or checked out, or difficult? Curiosity instead of assumption. That single shift changes how a manager runs a one on one, how a founder reads a quiet team, how any of us respond to the coworker who's suddenly hard to reach.
So that's what I cut, and what I kept. Next week I'll stand at the front of a room in Bloch Hall while people finish their lunch, and I'll ask them to put the list down for one hour. Then we'll see what's underneath it.
—
The Inner Work We Carry is a three-part lunch series at Central Exchange, UMKC Bloch Executive Hall: July 14, July 29, and August 12. Register Here →
If you're the list-maker in your world, the planner, the one who handles things, I wrote a short read about what comes after the list runs out.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
Get the book | Subscribe to the newsletter | Book Jessi to speak