What helps people create enough space to live, lead, and create more intentionally?
For nearly two decades, Kandice Cole has been exploring that question.
It has taken her from elementary school classrooms to executive leadership, from nonprofit boardrooms to retreat spaces, and from facilitating leadership conversations to writing about rest, creativity, and intentional living. While her roles have evolved, her work has remained centered on one belief: meaningful change begins when we create space.
Today, Kandice is the founder of K. Cole Company, where she helps leaders create space for rest, reflection, and creativity. She designs experiences that invite leaders to slow down, gain clarity, spark new ideas, and take intentional action. She believes sustainable leadership doesn’t come from doing more. It begins by making space.
A former elementary school teacher, Kandice earned both her B.A. in Psychology and M.A. in Teaching from the University of Chicago before building a consulting practice that has supported organizations including Narrative 4, BUILD Initiative, the University of Chicago, Code for America, Grant Thornton LLP, and leadership teams across the nonprofit and social impact sectors. She later served as Executive Director of Narrative 4, leading the global organization through a season of growth and transition before returning to K. Cole Company with renewed clarity about her life’s work. Today, through K. Cole Company, she brings together nearly two decades of experience to help leaders create space for rest, reflection, and creativity.
Throughout her own leadership journey, Kandice experienced the cost of constant striving and exhaustion. Rather than simply changing careers, she began reimagining what leadership could look like when rest was treated as a catalyst rather than a reward. That experience shaped the philosophy that now guides her work: Rest creates space. Space creates clarity. Clarity fuels creativity. Creativity leads to intentional action.
Whether through keynote talks, facilitated conversations, retreats, writing, or consulting, Kandice creates opportunities for leaders to reconnect with themselves, their purpose, and one another.
Kandice is the author of The Joyful Woman’s Guide to Self Care and writes on Substack, where she explores rest, leadership, creativity, and living with intention. She lives in South Africa with her husband and their two children.
kandicecole.com 