60 seconds with shannon wooten: “in a culture ripe with diversity, we relate to difference reactively.”

Some conversations stick with you long after they're over. Whenever we speak with Shannon Wooten, we leave with that feeling – we’re left with aha! Moments and big, deep questions for ourselves. 

Shannon has a way of asking the kinds of questions that make you pause; the juicy, existential ones that linger in your mind for days because they're less about finding an answer and more about seeing yourself, and the world around you, a little differently. She thinks big, keeps it real, and approaches every connection with a deep curiosity about what it means to be human. 

Over the years, we've had the privilege of partnering with Shannon across a number of projects and opportunities. Collaborating with someone who can hold life's biggest questions alongside creativity is both energizing and inspiring. Her latest creative chapter is Swan & the Bendy Flower, a beautifully written children's book that explores belonging, resilience, and radically accepting yourself. (Spoiler: it's just as meaningful for grown-ups.)

We caught up with Shannon to talk about the thread that's connected every chapter of her career, what authenticity actually looks like in practice, the inspiration behind Swan & the Bendy Flower, and what she hopes people remember when they're torn between fitting in and being themselves.

— toth shop team

toth shop (ts): You've built a career that spans coaching, organizational leadership, curriculum design, project management, and writing, including two published books. Across these different chapters and projects, what has remained constant about your work?

Shannon Wooten (SW): I've always been curious whether someone's private participation reflects their public convictions. Whether the way they lead, relate, choose, and show up when no one is watching coheres with what they say they stand for. And how they respond when life reveals they're not relating the way they believed they were.

I've always wanted to understand how people maintain coherence while life keeps changing around them. How they adjust to new realities, relationships, responsibilities, opportunities, grief, success, and uncertainty without abandoning the integrity of who they are. To me, that's where leadership lives. Not in perfection. In participation. In treating presence as a privilege.

I'm fascinated by the quiet decisions people notice, overlook, and sometimes intentionally ignore. The moments when someone chooses honesty over performance, resonance over reflex, respect over reactivity, boundaries without punishment, care without self-abandonment. I'm fascinated by how people discern what to reveal, what to protect, and how they decide who gets access to what.

Those moments have always felt like insider information to me. They reveal far more than behavior. They reveal the agreements people are living, the standards they're leading from, the atmosphere they're cultivating through their participation...and sometimes, why...as well as what they think is possible in them.

Looking back, I realize that's been the throughline of every chapter of my career. Whether I was leading projects, designing curriculum, coaching, writing, or supporting organizational initiatives, I was always looking beneath what was happening to understand what was organizing it. 

ts: "Authenticity is authority" is a phrase that's closely associated with your work. What does it mean to you, and how do you put it into practice every day?

SW: To me, authenticity is a creative expression of authority. It isn't simply self-expression, and it isn't saying whatever you think or feel without regard for anyone else. It's the ongoing practice of discerning what is true for you in relationship with reality, and consciously allowing that discernment to organize how you participate.

Sometimes that looks like saying yes because yes is true. Sometimes it looks like saying no because no is true. Sometimes it looks like changing your mind because new information has made a different relationship more congruent than the one you held a moment ago.All three are authentic expressions of authority.

The authority isn't found in never changing. It's found in consciously authoring how you relate as life continues changing.

For me, authenticity means taking responsibility for participating in ways that honestly reflect what I presently discern to be true, while remaining open to the reality that life, relationships, and new information may refine that understanding...sometimes in the very next breath. It isn't rigidity. It's congruence.

ts: Your latest creative project is the children's book Swan & the Bendy Flower. What was the question, feeling, or experience that inspired the story?

SW: Swan & the Bendy Flower grew out of an observation that occurred to me. Difference gets interpreted as deficiency. I became fascinated by noticing how quickly we assign meaning to difference. How rushed we feel to be or get something 'right'. How hungry we are to discern definitions and make clarity, connection, or consideration, absolute.

We rush to make meaning absolute. We assume something bent must be somehow weakened or broken. Something unfamiliar must be wrong. Something we don't immediately recognize requires explanation or correction.

Not because people are trying to be cruel, but because many of us have never been shown another way of relating to what we don't immediately understand. That observation became a leadership practice and participation question for me.

Experience tells me very little in life is absolute. At best, everything is what it is… until it isn't.That's the perspective, and the leadership experience, that inspired this story: noticing how in a culture ripe with diversity, we relate to difference, reactively.

Swan & the Bendy Flower became my way of exploring that question through a story gentle enough for children while still offering something meaningful to the adults reading alongside them.

ts: Your work teaches people how to stop abandoning themselves in order to fit in. For someone struggling between self-acceptance and belonging, what do you want them to know?

SW: First, I'd want them to know they already belong. Then I'd ask their permission to hug them through the ether.

And then I'd invite them to take a big breath, with the intention of finally letting the levity of accepting that they already belong as they are land in their bones, expand through their molecules, and settle into the soul of their spirit, bringing with it the nectar they always imagined belonging would. Relief. Release. Relationship with what's real as valid and valuable.

The Universe granted you belonging and access to participate in life. Of everything that could have been, wasn't, won't be, or no longer is...you are.

To me, that's an invitation to take your life seriously. As a gift. As an opportunity to be fully alive inside of your nature, while noticing how you choose to relate to that agreement through the way you lead, participate, and meet what's around you.

Maybe that's what I'd most want someone to know. Not simply that they belong. But that belonging is alive. And, like every form of aliveness, it carries inherent dignity and integrity simply by virtue of its nature. Its being is its value. Its existence is its validity.

ts: Every person we interview answers this same question last – Mile 18 is generally considered to be one of the hardest miles in a marathon. You’re hitting a wall. You’re forced to dig deep. What’s mile 18 in your line of work, or at a point in your career, and what do you tell yourself when you find yourself in the middle of a mile 18?

SW: Mile 18 is when I've meticulously planned out the process, but neglected to acknowledge it not going my way. It's melting down in the meticulous. The clean, precise process I've so carefully designed to meet a target suddenly collides with reality doing something I didn't anticipate.

I take it as a personal aside when I miss something. Ironically, it's also one of my greatest leadership qualities. I've been called "a dog with a bone" more times than I can count. People say dogs evolved from wolves. My husband says I have the spirit of a wolf. I think I'll go with Wolf with a Bone from now on.

Maybe that's how I dress up the archetypes of my failures so I don't have to keep hating them. Because that's what can meet me at Mile 18. Contempt. Crisis. Catastrophizing.

That's what meticulousness can bring.That's what obsessive precision can bring. And so far in life, it's worked out pretty well for me. It helped me write this book. So I try to keep that in perspective whenever someone asks about my process or my artistry.

It isn't neat. That's for sure. It isn't melodic. It isn't genre-specific. It's more like… Put up some boundaries and guardrails. It can be perceived as toxic. It wouldn't be the first time I've been called intimidating. Or manic.

I'm an athlete. I think I'll just leave that there. Either you understand it or you don't.

My love is intense. Deep. Deeply revealing. Honest. That's what my creative process looks like, too. It isn't neat. But it also isn't a mess. Figure it out. Relate to it however you will. Love it or hate it. I get it. Sometimes even I’m indifferent…  But I figure… why should how I feel about my work be any different than how I feel about the mile markers I've encountered throughout my life?

Everything is what it is... until it isn't. That's how I relate to life. I say it a lot, because people will say and do things a lot that they deeply find belonging in. Not casually. Clearly. I've devoted my life to learning how to hold boundaries inside the complexities of relationship because I know how wild it can be just trying to relate to myself while existing inside an existence, inside of another existence. It's all wonderfully trippy. And I take that very seriously.

I'm serious about the mystery. I'm serious about the fluid relationships I have with being boundaried. I'm serious about the standards I choose to lead myself with through all of its frictions. 

To me, they're different frequencies of friction to be in relationship with. I'm the atmosphere within which I experience them and relate to them. And I'm not even a constant in relationship to myself… its just not the agreement I operate with.

I guess this is just a long way of saying... I meet myself inside of how I respond to it. All of it. Love. Creativity. Mile 18 moments. Deciding whether I want to go to yoga that day. Goal setting. Conviction. Creativity. Perspective. Permission. Connection. So what do I tell myself when I find myself wherever I am inside one of those moments? Feel it. All of it. Because I can hold it. And I can hold me in it. I didn't always believe that. I do now. At least... I do today.