Co-Active Leadership: A Conversation with Edwin Vega

This is a conversation from our podcast Let’s Get Real.

Nina: Edwin, I'm so glad you're here. There's so much common ground in how we approach leadership development, but your background is genuinely unlike anyone else I know. Let's start there — how did you get into coaching? And I want to make sure people know you're a Grammy Award–winning opera singer.

Edwin: I am! It's funny — people sometimes say Emmy, or Oscar. Those are also great awards, just not mine.

My first professional life was as an opera singer. In 2015 I retired from performing, and then in 2020 a recording I'd made years earlier was officially released and won a Grammy. It was wild. It felt like a kind of honoring, a look back at something I'd put down.

But the reason I left opera was that I wasn't feeling fulfilled. You sing a four-hour performance, finish at midnight, and the energy keeps you up until four or five in the morning — and the audience just leaves. I wanted to actually talk with them. I wanted to feel the direct impact. A mentee introduced me to someone who was a coach, and through a series of serendipitous connections, I got handed the book Proactive Coaching, signed up for everything CTI had to offer, and it's been a great ride since.

Nina: I love that. And even though my path was completely different, the part I identify with most is that feeling of wanting connection — real contact with people — and realizing that a certain format just wasn't giving you that.

Edwin: Exactly. And I think music impacts people in ways they don't always consciously register — you come back to it a year later, years later. But I wanted something more visceral. It's funny now that the person who introduced me to that coach doesn't even remember him. He's like, "I don't know that guy." And I'm like, what are you talking about? I really do believe these hinge moments are the way life pushes us in interesting directions.

Nina: What do you still carry from your opera training into the room — the facilitation room, the coaching room?

Edwin: The obvious thing: I use it as bait. I'll introduce myself and people immediately say, "Oh, you have to sing for us." I tell them: make it to the end of day two, participate fully, and then I'll sing. It becomes a little reward.

But more seriously — I had some imposter syndrome early on, not being sure I had the right to coach executives in roles I hadn't held myself. And then I thought: I performed in front of three thousand people. I woke up some mornings with my throat not feeling right, my nerves off, and I had to navigate all of that in real time while making it look seamless for the audience. That's exactly what leaders do. They're navigating vulnerability, risk, and visibility all at once.

And then there was the discomfort of learning to sing in Russian, Czech, Polish — languages very far from my mother tongue of Spanish, on top of Italian, French, and German. I got comfortable with being uncomfortable. I found a lot of parallels between that world and executive coaching: learning to find your footing in unfamiliar terrain, doing your best work anyway, and bringing something distinctive because of where you came from.

Nina: I think that's true whether you're managing a team of eight or leading an all-hands for two thousand people. Executive presence always feels like this vague, amorphous thing to measure toward — and what you're describing is something much more concrete. Your body is your instrument. You become genuinely self-aware in a physical way.

Edwin: Yes. And once I made that connection, the dots just kept joining up. I think creativity — which is really at the heart of the Co-Active approach — felt like a natural playground for me. It didn't feel like such a different world.

Nina: Tell me a bit more about your work with leaders and teams. You mentioned tech and pharma — what are you discovering in that work, and how does your own identity influence the way you show up?

Edwin: I'm in spaces that no one in my family has navigated. My parents were born and raised in Puerto Rico. I'm first-generation US mainland, first in my family to go to college — which I did three times over. So I'm always aware that I'm in unfamiliar waters, and I've had to figure out how to assume belonging — to feel like I have a right to be in the rooms I'm in.

I think that lived experience shapes how I enter a room. People may feel that their opposing or contrarian perspectives are welcome — that they don't have to sit quietly for two hours before they're allowed to speak. There's something in how I show up that I hope widens the aperture a bit, so people feel they can dive in sooner.

Nina: Representation matters. Not as the main reason you're there, but as something real that people feel almost immediately.

Edwin: And I'm also aware that I have aspects of dominant identity — I have white skin, which comes with privileges I acknowledge. So I try to hold all of that with care, being deliberate about how I account for the power I carry so that everyone genuinely feels they can bring their whole selves.

Nina: What's exciting you most in your work right now?

Edwin: One-to-two day team retreats. Getting a team out of their usual environment and into a space where they can just be human with each other — which sounds almost silly until you watch it actually happen. The story-sharing. The moments when people who've worked together for twenty years discover something deeply personal about each other they never knew. Once that humanity comes through, there's suddenly so much more possibility.

A lot of my retreat work lately has been around trust-building and conflict — not brawl conflict, but the everyday kind. People are nervous to ask someone to clarify what they meant. People are nervous to say what did you mean by that? And yet that hesitation is costing teams enormously. When I can help them get more comfortable with it in one day — more humanistic, more curious, better listeners — I think the work is done. The dividends come after I'm gone.

Nina: There's something real about removing people from their usual environment. Getting outside, or at least somewhere new.

Edwin: It does. One group I worked with used a rented office space — not exactly inspiring on the surface — but I brought streamers, put some music on, tried my best to make it feel different. And something still shifted. Then you take it to a beautiful natural setting, away from city noise, and the potential multiplies.

Which brings me to the Co-Active Leadership Program at the Co-Active Training Institute, where you and I both teach.

Nina: And you and I have both been through it ourselves. To say it's life-changing doesn't feel like hyperbole. When people ask how I do what I do in the room, I trace it back to that program — what it drew out of me, what it named. Let's talk about what I think is one of the things that makes the program distinctive. It's a combination of outdoor experiential work, improv, play — and then sitting in a circle with people, sharing stories, learning about yourself in relationship.

Edwin: And the between-retreat work. Between the second and third retreats, you're doing a project in the world with a cohort member. I've seen someone run a workshop where participants wrote their limiting beliefs on toilets and then sledgehammered them. Someone in my cohort did a dance-movement workshop for parents of disabled children. These aren't just nice exercises — they're people being invited to ask: what's a bigger project I'm moving toward? Where do I want to put my leadership in service of something?

You may not finish that project by the time the retreats end. But can you get your whole self aligned with it? That's the question I care about most.

Nina: I want to shift into something that feels important for both of us: inclusion, equity, belonging in organizations. What are you experiencing right now?

Edwin: On the hopeful end of the spectrum — and it is a spectrum — I'm seeing a real coalescing. DEI and belonging aren't feeling like a separate thing anymore. In the best conversations I'm part of, there's a sense of wholeness from the beginning. When we're talking about one particular group, there's still a felt sense of I'm in this too — how do I want to contribute? Sometimes the contribution is being quiet and learning. Sometimes it's connecting others to support. That feels like real progress.

On the other end, I'm seeing a concerning pullback. Some organizations and bodies that are supposed to represent the field — I'm thinking of SHRM, which dropped equity from its focus — are treating DEI as something that didn't work and can be set aside. That stings. It isn't that there was one target and we missed it. It's that we haven't finished the work.

You mentioned polarities. I think that's exactly right: how do we hold the tension between these two movements — keep taking a stand, keep being inclusive, and find common ground that brings people along?

Nina: The labels don't always help. And what I keep coming back to is that coaching keeps training us in curiosity — which keeps building the neural pathways for exactly this. I don't come by curiosity naturally, I'll be honest. But I'm grateful that the practice keeps asking it of me.

Edwin: I feel that. And I'll geek out on the Enneagram for a second — I'm a social Four, which means I have this heightened attention to what's happening in the group, not just the individual in front of me. My spidey sense is always tracking: did that land right? What does this group need? And what I've learned is that my job isn't to rescue anyone. It's to ask: is this the kind of atmosphere I want for this team or this space? That question keeps me honest.

Nina: I had a group coaching engagement at a company where the first session was on DEI. I thought, this should be the last session, not the first. And sure enough, a couple of people pushed back right away — "we're already inclusive, why are we here?" Instead of pressing them on it, I stepped back and let them ventilate. I made it clear I wasn't making them wrong. The energy just flattened out — and then we could actually start having real conversations. That group was solid for the next three months.

Edwin: That's exactly right. DEI conversations can carry so much intensity — and sometimes that intensity is a signal that people need to feel included before they can hear anything. Even dissent belongs in the room. The more that can be included, the more leverage we actually get. Though I want to be clear: I'm a protector against harm. That's the line. But within that, how do we create from conflict rather than shutting it down?

Nina: And sometimes people need to hear what's working before they can open to what's still possible. It's not about saying something is broken. It's asking: we're at a seven. What would a ten look like?

Edwin: Exactly. And I want to add something I've been noticing in my one-on-one coaching of BIPOC leaders: they're bringing in the same universal issues — imposter syndrome, the inner critic, questions of values and vision. Less often are their sessions dominated by experiences of harm or exclusion in their organization. That's anecdotal, and I hold it carefully — but it feels like a shift. Like some of the larger efforts actually moved something.

Nina: I appreciate you naming that. And I want to hold it alongside something I hear from some of the Black women I've had the privilege of coaching, which is: we've been navigating this our whole lives. Just because white people woke up to it doesn't mean it's new. There's generosity and grace involved in meeting people where they are in their awareness while not pausing your own life to wait for them to catch up.

Edwin: Yes. And I think about the Co-Active Training Institute's work on this. For 25-plus years, this methodology has changed lives. Now we're bringing in language that matches today's conversations — in our Balance course, there are now discussions of unconscious bias as it affects coaching practice. Not a full module, not trying to train people with a DEI lens specifically, but signaling that this belongs in the room. People are responding to it. It feels like it keeps moving in the right direction.

Nina: One thing you touched on earlier was the power of setting context and asking permission before bringing something new into the room. You did that with the tapping exercise. Can you say more?

Edwin: I was working with eight leaders on Zoom who had been through three reorganizations in eighteen months. I could feel the emotion in the room. I'm trained in Emotional Freedom Technique — tapping — and I thought: I think we need to do this. And I was genuinely nervous about it. I said, "Do you trust me?" They said yes. "You can keep your cameras on or turn them off — but we're going to do something to help you self-regulate. Just follow me." And I started.

What it reminded me is that people want to be human at work. When that's more present — when people feel connected to each other and to why they're there — they stay longer, they're more committed. And I'm now less afraid to offer something unexpected, as long as I'm clear about why.

Nina: And the way you set that up is exactly the lesson for leaders too. If a leader wants to do a relationship check-in at the start of a team meeting — even just one minute per person — they're much more likely to land it if they say, "I want to try something different, and here's why." That's what you did.

Edwin: I just came back from a retreat with a nonprofit in Boston. The CEO participated — didn't just send the team. Afterward, they wanted to keep the spirit alive, so I joined their first team meeting back, led a quick debrief, ran an icebreaker, and said, "Now who's doing this next week?" We rotated it. I gave feedback. And now they're doing it on their own — which they'd never done before.

Ten minutes of connection. People sometimes underestimate what it can shift. As professionals in this space, I think we have to keep offering it, keep playing with it, and not assume people will say no.

Nina: Edwin, I could keep going for another hour. But I want to end on something — you mentioned the difference between optimism and hope. Say more about that.

Edwin: I recently heard it put this way: optimism means you actually believe you have a part in creating the future you want. It's internal. Hope can feel a little more distant — like something outside yourself that you're waiting on.

I like optimism. Even if I contribute my one percent, over time that matters.