One Conversation, Ten Years: An Origins Story

(Yes, the Origins origin story) 

There’s a movie from the late ’90s, Sliding Doors, that I think about a lot. It follows the dramatically different paths Gwyneth Paltrow’s character’s life takes after one simple moment where she either catches a train or misses it. The idea that these small moments and choices can send us down completely different paths has stayed with me for years.

I think about that in relation to how Origins co-founder Andi Fetzner and I met. In 2016, I was standing in the registration line at the ACEs conference hosted by the Center for Youth Wellness. I remember making a conscious choice to override my introverted tendencies (that are heightened when I am in crowds), remind myself I was there to make connections, and strike up a conversation with the person behind me in line.

At the time, I was working in healthcare and strategic planning and had stumbled into the trauma-informed movement as part of my own personal and professional journey. It changed how I saw my own life and work, and I knew I wanted to build something around it: a training organization focused on spreading resilience-building practices. But I didn’t want to do it alone.

Turns out, Andi, a psychologist whose own work had been transformed by this approach had been thinking about the same thing and was also looking for a collaborator. 

Ten years later, Andi (who, ironically, identifies as an extrovert) and I have turned that conversation into a decade of work helping leaders and teams build resilience together through Origins Training & Consulting. In 2025, we expanded and launched the Resilience Learning Community.

As we approach Origins’ ten-year anniversary, and having just passed the Resilience Learning Community’s first year milestone, we’re reflecting on lessons learned and where we’ve been. Some of what we’ve learned surprised us.

We started this work thinking the nitty gritty mattered most — how trauma impacts our neurobiology, what exactly happens in the nervous system under stress. Of course, the science still matters. But what we’ve learned, over and over, is that what matters most is connection. How we relate to each other. How we build meaningful relationships in our workplaces and our communities. Meaningful change happens in relationship. Like in a conference registration line.

We’ve learned a lot in ten years. We’ve built curriculums, partnered with incredible organizations and facilitators, trained hundreds of leaders and teams, and made our fair share of mistakes along the way.

We’ve also been watching what’s happening across the resilience-building movement: a growing hunger for community and collaboration, and a pushback against the old instinct to compete for scarce resources instead of building together. Abundance over scarcity. Collaboration over competition. We are stronger when we do this work together. No one should have to do this work alone — not in a registration line in 2016, and not now.

Based on what we’ve learned and what we’re seeing, we’ve been building the next chapter or Origins. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll share more about what that looks like, and the lessons that got us here.

Stay tuned.