#LinkedOut: When Ideas Make You Unqualified for Jobs
High-Skilled & Weirdly Unhirable
Ashley and I started THRIVE Leadership & Team Consulting in late 2022.
We wanted to create a company that combined our movement-based workshops and unconventional approach to leadership and team development to help leaders stay grounded while doing hard work. Over Christmas break, we shaped the model. By January 1st, we had three clients including a major institution in Boise, ID.
THRIVE is how we’re imagining the next chapter: leadership work rooted in movement, reflection, and real community. We’re growing it slowly and intentionally because building a business takes time.
And while we believe deeply in what we’re created, I am still looking for steady work as we build. (Hence... this whole newsletter!)
So yes, we’re taking on new clients, partnerships, and projects. And yes, I am also open to gigs, jobs, contracts, and conversations that pay the bills while we keep building the thing we believe in.
By early 2023, we’d hit the ground running with facilitating workshops locally and nationally, while doing all the things small business owners do to get known. We started asking some mentors how to grow locally, and an idea came up: build a cohort of leaders here at home. Nothing fancy…just a listserv, maybe some in-person meetups. A local THRIVE community.
So we set up meetings.
One day, we met with a leader at a major arts venue in town. I’d performed there. We had good rapport. We gave him the rundown: what THRIVE is, what we were doing, where it was going.
He twisted his face and then gently smiled and said:
“Oh. I didn’t realize you were already working with organizations.
Honestly, when you emailed me, I thought... here we go, yet another idea Dominic is starting!”
And I smiled back.
But you know those moments where someone says something so casually that it takes a second to register, and then hits you in the chest?
Yeah.
It wasn’t cruel. But it felt familiar.
That feeling of being seen as “too much.”
Of having ideas misread as distractions.
Of “starting things” being interpreted as not “finishing things.” And ideas coming out from “left-field”.
And so I started wondering feverishly for more than a year:
Am I doing too much?
Am I just making noise?
Am I chasing momentum that never actually lands?
Am I flaky?
Is this how a lot of people see me in our sector?
Since 2020 (at this point it’d been three years), I’d left a dance company. Co-founded the Akron Black Artist Guild. Built a multi-year podcast + dance theater project with national recognition. Developed a touring show. Created site-specific performances in churches and national parks. Project managed for two large arts-and-environment orgs in town. (And I know I’m forgetting stuff.)
All with no large institutional support…just me, my wife, and community partners.
Sure, I wear a lot of hats as an artist and arts administrator.
But doesn’t that just sound like… what an Executive Director does?
And that’s not even counting the admin behind all of that.
Budgets. Timelines. Hiring. Writing. Producing. Fundraising. Reporting. Comms. Impact.
Then I remembered the Boston Activation Project I did with the Conservancy for Cuyahoga Valley National Park.
They were in a bind:
$200K+ in pre-pandemic grant money that needed to be spent by September (it was February)
No plan. No team. No idea how to talk to artists or structure the program.
They said: “We need this built. Fast.”
I said: “Okay.”
Six months later:
A 100-ft mural in a national park parking lot (which is unheard of in this country. I got to show Deb Haaland, the United States Secretary of the Interior the mural! )
Live dance performance
Projection mapping
Weaving workshops
A curated artist cohort
A process that held both creative vision and project management
Deep community engagement throughout
That didn’t happen because I just had ideas.
It happened because I know how to build.
People like me, creative workers, producers, artist-leaders, we sit on the outskirts of the market.
From a distance, people think we’ve just been "doing stuff" for years.
Like we're chasing shiny things. Dancing through the lilies. Throwing art into the wind and hoping it sticks.
What folks don’t always see are the chops.
The admin.
The team-building.
The fundraising.
The strategic vision.
The internal infrastructure it takes to turn an idea into impact.
I don’t need three stakeholder meetings, two advisory panels, and a board retreat to get something off the ground. I can listen to a community and deliver a prototype in the same quarter they asked for it…if that’s what is needed.
That’s not flaky. That’s responsive. That’s relevant. That’s now.
And yes, I get that I don’t run a big institution. Flexibility is easier to come by when you’re not steering a cruise ship. Big systems take longer to turn.
But the people closest to the waves feel them first.
And while the cruise ship is still debating which direction to go, I’m already in motion.
So maybe I AM always doing something new.
Maybe my mind DOES move like the wind.
Maybe I’m NOT built to sit through the five-year plan, but it’s because I’m already building what's next.
I’ve learned I’m not scattered. I’m adaptable. I’m rooted. I’m trained. I’m present.
And I’m not ashamed of that.
So…
This one’s for:
The creatives who’ve built more projects than they’ve had titles for.
The ones who move fast because their communities can’t wait.
The folks who’ve turned pivots into prototypes and still get asked if they’re “starting something new.”
And finally, the ones who never needed a strategic plan to make real change.
-Dom
This Week’s Pitch
P.S. Curious about the leadership work I do outside the theater?
I co-lead THRIVE Leadership & Team Consulting, where we help leaders and teams reimagine professional development.
We design experiences that go beyond the PowerPoint—blending movement, reflection, and real conversation to build trust, connection, and clarity in how teams work together.
If your org is looking for something deeper than a retreat or one-off training—we’d love to talk.
See You Next Week!
Thanks for reading #LinkedOut—a weekly, slightly chaotic, sometimes-too-real reflection on looking for work, staying creative, and navigating the in-between with some humor and clarity.
Every week’s entry drops Thursday at 12 noon.
Until then, keep building. Keep breathing. Keep being weirdly unhirable in all the best ways.