About Heather McDaniel
I see what’s not there.
The decision that didn’t get made. The conversation that happened in the hallway but never in the room. The dynamic that everyone feels but nobody names. The thread of meaning running through a piece of writing that the writer hasn’t consciously placed there yet. I’ve spent most of my life learning to see the space between the space, the invisible connections that shape how people relate, decide, create, and move together, often without anyone being fully aware of them.
That’s what runs through everything I do, whether I’m working with a leadership team on why their decisions keep stalling, guiding a small group of women through a week of writing in Florence, or walking the sacred sites of Tuscany with people who have come looking for something they can’t quite name. The container changes. The quality of attention doesn’t.
How I got here…
For twenty years I worked in strategic communication and marketing. I have a Master’s degree in how we send messages and a background in political science that taught me how systems of power actually move. I was good at it. I was also increasingly aware that most communication strategy is a sophisticated way of papering over fractured trust and extracting everything possible from everyone involved.
We’ve been taught that if we find the right words we can get a little more: more sales, more votes, more compliance, more performance. But communication is the symptom. Trust is the root. And I realized that the most interesting question wasn’t how to make the message land better, but what was broken underneath that made the message necessary in the first place.
So I shifted. From messaging to structure. From surface to foundation. From how we say things to why the conditions for honest communication had stopped existing in the first place.
My thinking draws on some unlikely sources: quantum physics, Renaissance polymaths, medieval mystics. Not because I’m trying to be interesting, but because the best frameworks for understanding human systems rarely come from business literature. What those sources share is an attention to the space between the space, the invisible architecture that determines what a system can hold, what can emerge inside it, and whether it sustains the people working within it.
I think about human systems the way architects think about buildings. Not just what’s visible, but what the structure makes possible. Not just what’s there, but what the design allows to happen. I’ve come to understand my role, whether in a leadership team or a retreat in Florence, as that of a container. I don’t fill the space. I shape it so that what needs to emerge can.
The work…
This shows up in three places.
With leadership teams, I work at the structural level, finding and repairing what’s actually causing the dysfunction rather than treating the symptoms everyone can see. This usually means looking at why trust is breaking down structurally, how the team is losing its footing during transition, and whether the leadership system is extracting more than it’s giving back. I work with international and remote organizations of 50 to 300 people, often navigating something in transition, and often finding that what looked like a communication problem was always something structural underneath.
In Florence, I lead small contemplative retreats for people who have come looking for something the rest of their life hasn’t been able to give them. The Da Vinci retreat is for anyone who wants to learn to see again. The St. Francis retreat is for anyone who needs to slow all the way down and remember their own wholeness. The writer’s retreat, still taking shape, is for women who write because they have to and need a room full of people who understand what that means.
And I write. Letters from the Joyful Rebellion, twice weekly on Substack, about staying yourself in a world that would prefer you didn’t, and how that quiet act of resistance connects to the larger systems we live and work inside. Writing is not separate from the rest of this work. It’s where the rest of it comes from.
Who I am underneath all of that
I’m American, living in Valencia, Spain, with Italian citizenship through ancestry, my family’s roots are in Calabria, the southernmost reach of the peninsula, as far from Florence as Italy gets. Which means my connection to Italy is real and complicated in equal measure. The Italy I’m drawn to, Renaissance Florence, Franciscan Umbria, the contemplative tradition, is not the Italy I came from. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to feel genuinely called to a place that isn’t quite your origin, to belong to something ancestrally while finding your way toward it on your own terms. That gap, between the roots you have and the ones you’re growing toward, turns out to be a remarkably generative place to work from.
I’m a queer Christian who has spent years learning to encounter the sacred when traditional institutions don’t always leave a seat at the table. My relationship with God is currently complicated, which feels more honest than the alternative. I keep showing up anyway, at the page and in the work, which I suppose is its own form of faith.
I’m a writer before I’m anything else. Everything I do begins with the word, with the attempt to find language precise enough to hold what’s actually true. That’s what I bring to a leadership team and to a retreat in Florence and to a blank page at six in the morning: the conviction that finding the right words for something is never just an aesthetic exercise. It’s how we find out what we actually think.
