Your Partner in Both
Heart & Structure
Leaders often know more than they realize. Yet competing priorities, complex relationships, and daily demands can make it difficult to see the path forward clearly at times. A trusted partner can help uncover patterns, bring perspective, and identify practical next steps.
Twin Foals partners with leaders to create clarity, strengthen alignment, and integrate heart and structure. Together we translate values into action and vision into meaningful results, building healthier organizations and stronger leaders.
Our work begins with understanding before moving to answers. We listen carefully to what is happening, ask questions that surface what may be difficult to see from inside the situation, and consider the people, relationships, culture, systems, and competing demands surrounding it. We do not look at the leader in isolation; we look at the leader, the organization, and the larger context together.
From there, reflection is paired with action. We identify what matters most, test assumptions, consider consequences, and translate insight into practical next steps. Whether the focus is a difficult decision, a relationship, organizational culture, or the future you are trying to build, the work stays grounded in your values, your context, and the realities of leadership.
Why Twin Foals
Horses have long demonstrated leadership to me in quiet ways. Within a herd, the most forceful horse is not necessarily the one others trust and choose to follow. Leadership can emerge through steadiness, awareness, experience, and attention to the well-being of the herd. It may also be shared, with different horses contributing what is needed at different moments.
Horses are highly sensitive to shifts in energy and behavior. They communicate without words, work to maintain clear boundaries, care for one another, and help keep the peace within the herd. They have much to teach us about trust, relationship, responsibility, and influence. These are among the reasons I volunteer with horses—and why they became central to the name Twin Foals.
Twin foals add another layer of meaning. Healthy twin births in horses are rare, and caring well for them requires attention to the needs of both foals and the mare. No one part of the whole can be considered in isolation.
Leadership carries a similar complexity. Leaders are often responsible for realities that may appear to pull in different directions: heart and structure, compassion and accountability, people and mission, present needs and future possibilities. The task is not simply to choose one and abandon the other. It is to understand what each requires, how they affect one another, and what will allow both to develop.
To me, Twin Foals represents two important realities developing together. The name reflects a way of understanding leadership grounded in awareness, relationship, boundaries, trust, and partnership. It also reflects a central Twin Foals belief: leadership requires both heart and structure—attention to the human realities of leadership and to the organizational conditions that shape what is possible.
Meet
Dr. Michele Johnston
Founder, Leadership Partner & Coach
The work of leadership carries both visible responsibility and less visible weight. Leaders are often called to hold competing needs, make decisions without complete certainty, and remain grounded while considering the people, mission, culture, and organization entrusted to their care. When leadership feels most demanding, this is where a thoughtful partnership can make a meaningful difference. This is exactly why I created Twin Foals.
I bring more than thirty years of professional experience spanning executive nonprofit leadership, organizational and leadership development, applied research, social work education, and work within mission-driven organizations. My doctoral studies at the University of Southern California provided a foundation in organizational social work, shaping how I understand people and organizations—not in isolation, but in relationship with the systems, cultures, relationships, experiences, and environments that influence them. I have also earned professional coaching certifications through ICF-accredited coaching education programs.
As Founder, Leadership Partner & Coach at Twin Foals, I work with people navigating challenge, transition, growth, complex decisions, and questions about what comes next. Some of that work is distinctly about leadership—leading people, navigating organizational culture, carrying responsibility, or making sense of a changing role. Other conversations reach beyond leadership into identity, purpose, communication, patterns, possibilities, and personal or professional change.
My approach is grounded in partnership rather than prescription. We begin by understanding before moving to answers, looking beyond the immediate issue to the relationships, patterns, competing needs, values, culture, and organizational realities surrounding it. Together, we create the space and perspective needed to see more clearly, consider meaningful possibilities, and determine what the next step requires.
Alongside my work with Twin Foals, I help prepare future generations of social workers by teaching at both the graduate and undergraduate levels as an adjunct professor at Brescia University. I also write Notes from the Trail, reflections on leadership, growth, purpose, and the experiences that shape us as leaders and as people.
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