Hi, I'm Shauna.
I’m the founder of Presence Without Permission. I help people prepare for consequential conversations so they can navigate them with greater intention and presence.
For more than two decades, I worked inside complex organizations where I learned how to manage competing interests, negotiate, work through conflict, and have difficult conversations. Years later, when my husband was diagnosed with cancer, I found myself relying on those same skills in an entirely different kind of room.
That experience became the foundation for Presence Without Permission.
My Story
For more than two decades, I worked in learning and development, instructional design, and human performance, consulting with and for Fortune 500 companies. The work itself was about helping people and organizations perform better, but doing it well required something else too: managing stakeholders, navigating competing priorities, negotiating, working through conflict, and having difficult conversations with people who did not always agree with me.
Those skills became second nature over time. I did not think of them as a framework or even as something particularly unusual. They were simply part of how I learned to get things done.
Then my husband was diagnosed with cancer.
Suddenly I was using those same skills in a completely different environment. I was preparing for appointments, asking questions, challenging assumptions, listening carefully to what was being said and what was not, managing disagreement, and choosing my words deliberately in conversations where the consequences felt much bigger than anything I had encountered at work.
The setting had changed, the underlying skills had not.
That realization became the foundation for Presence Without Permission.
I began to see how often people enter consequential conversations knowing something matters but without having had the opportunity to prepare for how they want to participate in it. And when the conversation begins, pressure, uncertainty, emotion, hierarchy, or simply the weight of the moment can make it harder to stay present.
Presence Without Permission grew out of the belief that this can be learned.
Preparation helps you get clear before you cross the threshold. Presence is how you navigate the conversation once you are in it: how you listen, the questions you ask, the words you choose, and how you respond as it unfolds.
That is the work I do now: helping people prepare with intention so they are better equipped to navigate consequential conversations with presence.
Prepare with intention. Navigate with presence.
Let's Connect
Interested in working together, inviting me to speak, or connecting professionally? I’d be glad to hear from you.”
