Palesttra: From Potential to Performance

Most professional development starts
once the goal is already defined

But careers no longer move along a single, predictable track

Two professionals in conversation at a networking event

Institutional priorities shift. Technology reshapes the work. New roles emerge before there is a clear playbook for how to grow into them

The path a mentor took, a manager modeled, or an organization once expected can offer context, but not always direction

For high-achieving professionals, the challenge is not a lack of ability. It is choosing the right direction inside a landscape that keeps changing

This is where Palesttra begins

Possibility becomes a milestone.
The milestone becomes forward motion

Palesttra helps professionals step back from the day-to-day, clarify what comes next, and build a path that connects where they are now with where they want to go

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Goal discovery

We begin by looking beyond the immediate role, task, or expectation to clarify the professional milestone taking shape, and what it would mean to move toward it with intention

Meaningful challenge

We surface the assumptions, barriers, constraints, and competing priorities that can shape progress, then work through them with honesty, support, and practical focus

Intentional growth

From there, insight becomes action: what to focus on, what to leverage, and how to use current roles, responsibilities, relationships, and opportunities as fuel for the path forward

Palesttra participants leave with more than
a plan. They leave with clarity.

A defined professional goal

Not a vague aspiration, but a specific, honest picture of what success looks like at five, ten, or fifteen years out

A structured path forward

Milestones, priorities, and a strategy for leveraging where you are now: your role, responsibilities, relationships, and opportunities. All of it put to work getting where you're going

Stronger confidence and sharper focus

The kind that comes from doing the deeper work: naming what you want, understanding why it matters, and seeing what may be getting in the way

Momentum

Because the best outcome is not the plan itself. It is leaving ready to execute it

The proof is in
the people we work with

Palesttra's principals bring deep, hands-on experience guiding nearly 1,000 professionals at institutions where excellence is the baseline

Professionals come to Palesttra at different stages, with different goals, and with different versions of the same question: what comes next, and how do I get there?

I finally built a destination, not just the next rung.

I came in wanting a sharper strategy for partnership. That was the presenting problem. What Barb and Rena established fairly quickly—and I say ‘established,’ because it felt considerably more like being deposed than being coached—was that I had never once articulated what I wanted the next twenty years to look like. I had only ever articulated the next rung. I'm very good at rungs. It's what I've been rewarded for since I was nineteen. So we built an actual destination and reasoned backward to the present, which is how I would approach any other problem and had somehow never applied to my own life. I'm still at the firm. I'm here on purpose now, which is a different experience than that sounds.

Partner, Corporate/M&A Law

In nineteen years of medicine, no one had ever asked me what I wanted.

Here's what I've said to every colleague who has asked me about this. In nineteen years of medicine, no one had ever asked me what I wanted. Plenty of people asked whether I'd take the fellowship, chair the committee, cover the extra clinic. And I said yes every time, because that's the reflex training selects for. Barb and Rena asked a different question and then sat there while I failed to answer it. Which was uncomfortable. I'm not accustomed to not having the answer. That's not a criticism of my chair, by the way. It isn't his job to ask me that. It just means nobody was.

Dean of Faculty Development, Academic Medical Center

I arrived with a mood. I left with a claim specific enough to test.

Rena asks the same question five or six ways, and each time your answer comes out slightly less rehearsed than the last, until eventually you say something you had not planned to say and you both stop, because that's the variable you'd been controlling for without knowing it. I recognize the method. It's what I do to my own graduate students when their conclusions are too tidy. It is markedly less pleasant from this side of it. I arrived able to say only that I wanted ‘something beyond the lab,’ which is not a hypothesis, it's a mood. I left with a claim specific enough to test. I've since said it out loud to my department chair, my wife, and a program officer, in that order.

Principal Investigator, Orthopedics

I have sat through a great deal of executive coaching. Most of it flattered me. This didn't.

Let me set expectations: this is not encouragement. They ask the questions you've been strategically avoiding. They write down your answers. They produce them when you have conveniently moved on. I have sat through a great deal of executive coaching. Most of it flattered me. This didn't. It's the only professional relationship I have in which I am reliably the least prepared person in the room.

Managing Director, Commercial Real Estate

The aspiration became a project plan. I applied at forty-four.

I want to be precise about the credit, because the decision was mine and I'd rather not give it away. I applied to a doctoral program at forty-four, while running a division of sixty. I'd been circling the idea for, I want to say five years, though my wife puts it closer to nine. What Barb did was decline to let the idea stay abstract. Every time I raised it, she came back with something specific and mildly irritating. Which program. Which term. What are you prepared to stop doing to make room for it. And somewhere in there the aspiration turned into a project plan, and I don't know how to not execute a project plan. That may be a character flaw. In this instance it worked in my favor.

Division Chair, Radiology

I hadn't had someone develop me in a decade. I didn't realize how much I needed it.

“Why would a dean need this?” That was my first reaction, and I'll admit some of it was ego, developing other people is what I do for a living. But developing other people is not at all the same as having someone do it for you, and I hadn't had that in a decade. Barb and Rena were the first people in years who weren't managing up to me or asking me for something. They asked what I wanted, and then made me defend the answer. I recommend them to my department chairs now, which is not something I do lightly.

Dean of Engineering

Our high-potential people could tell immediately this was built around them, not around our org chart.

We have been running leadership development for eleven years, and I would characterize most of it as competent and forgettable. The difference with Palesttra is that they engage our high-potential people as individuals with their own ambitions, rather than as candidates for roles we have already drawn on a chart. That distinction sounds academic. It is not. The people we are trying to keep are physicians, scientists and attorneys who have never once had difficulty getting hired, and they can tell inside of a session whether a program was designed around their development or around our staffing needs. The pipeline we have now is credible to them because it was built out of what they actually intend to do. I would rather have that than a tidier chart.

Chief Administrative Officer, Hospital

Two years in, we have retained every participant.

Two years in, we have retained every participant. That's the number I care about, because the people we lose are never the average performers, they're the ones with three other offers and a clear-eyed sense of their own market value. We had already tried a fast-track. We had tried a management curriculum. Neither moved retention, and in hindsight neither one addressed the actual reason people were leaving, which was not compensation and it was not workload. It was that they couldn't see where any of it was going for them personally. What Palesttra runs is less a program than a clarifying exercise. People finish it knowing where they're headed. As it happens, people who know where they're headed are markedly less inclined to go looking elsewhere.

Hiring Manager, Hospital

A professional smiling during a working session

Ready to clarify what's next?

Palesttra works with professionals pursuing a meaningful next milestone, and with organizations investing in the growth of high-potential talent

For professionals

Bring the question, goal, or inflection point you are navigating next

For organizations

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Most professional development starts once the goal is already defined

Possibility becomes a milestone. The milestone becomes forward motion