Unthethered: Leading beyond the Margins

A leadership community where you can just breathe and grow with values-centered queer leaders.

 Is This You?

  • You’re a queer professional navigating spaces not built for you—exhausted by minimizing, isolation, and invisibility
    You feel the weight of being “the only one,” constantly translating your experience just to be heard.

  • You’re ambitious, purpose-driven, and powerful—but you want to grow while honoring your values.

  • You want to lead in a way that protects your humanity and nourishes your community
    You’re looking for a space and community where your leadership is held with truth, dignity, and care

Most leadership programs teach you how to succeed in broken systems—but not how to stay whole while doing it. They ignore the emotional toll of oppression.

This is a space for safety. For breath. For ease.
 Tending to our wounds and our grief while becoming and reclaiming power.
You don’t need to perform here. You just get to BE and to become.

You’ll join a 3-month guided journey to tap into your leadership power and explore how your lived experiences shape your impact at work plus an online circle of queer leaders that you can lean on. This community is yours to keep.

The Journey

Untethered unfolds over six bi-weekly sessions, each one building on the last to bring you closer to yourself, your truth, and your power.

By the end of this program, you will…

  • Develop a deeper understanding of your values, strengths, and leadership style so you can show up with authenticity and presence—even in high-pressure or non-inclusive environments.
  • Strengthen how you communicate, influence, and lead across teams and stakeholders by creating a leadership presence that reflects your voice, values, and vision.
  • Design a clear, aligned plan for your next steps—one that supports growth while honoring you, and the kind of leader you want to become

Session 2 Re-rooting

Inner Clarity & Power
This session is about uncovering and recognizing the power within you—beneath the systems, the conditioning, the survival strategies. We’ll explore how your leadership instincts were formed, where your strength has been hiding in plain sight, and re-root in your power.

Session 1 Re-membering

Identity as Wholeness
In this opening session, we begin with you. We’ll explore what it means to come home to yourself, especially when your identity has been fragmented and marginalized— naming what shaped us both personally and systemically. Through storytelling, reflection, and gentle guidance, we’ll reconnect with the parts of you that were silenced, hidden, or cut off—and begin to weave them back into your leadership.

Session 4 Reclaiming

Strategic Presence and Voice activation

This session is about moving from internal clarity to external impact. We’ll explore how to reclaim spaces both personally and professionally, and reclaim your voice through deep alignment, strategic visibility, courageous communication, and values–driven impact.

Session 6 Reigniting

Embodiment & Becoming
We close the journey with integration, celebration, and fire. You’ll reflect on how you’ve shifted, name what you’re stepping into, and the possibilities you can continue to explore. Create practices and a plan as you continue leading beyond the margins.

Session 3 Re-defining

Re-defining leadership
This session is where you begin to shape your leadership identity into something visible, intentional, and unapologetically yours. You’ll explore what leadership means for you—not based on what systems demand, but on what your values, power, and presence call forth. Creating your leadership signature—a grounded expression of who you are, how you lead, and what people experience when they’re in your presence.

Session 5 Reconnecting

Community & Collective Power
No more leading in isolation. In this session, we’ll explore how to lead in connection with others—how to ask for support, co-create change, and be held in return. You’ll map out your ecosystem of care and discover the power of leading in community.

Christine Cariño they/them

MEET YOUR COACH


Hi friend, I’m Christine. 

I’m the Founder of Conscious Thrive, where I support individuals and organizations in building cultures rooted in equity, dignity, and liberation. With over a decade of experience across talent recruitment, leadership development, training, and cultural transformation, I bring both strategy and soul to my work.

I'm not here to tell you how to lead like someone else—I’m here to support you in remembering how to lead as you.

As a queer, nonbinary, Filipino immigrant, I’ve spent my life navigating spaces that weren’t built for me—and learning how to show up anyway, with truth and integrity. My leadership has been shaped by contradiction, grief, resilience, and deep love for our people. I know what it means to lead while surviving. I also know what it feels like to finally lead from wholeness.

This is deeply personal to me. I know what it’s like to shrink, to over-function, to disappear, to be alone. And I know the joy and freedom of reclaiming your power and how much it's needed—especially now, in a world where safety isn’t guaranteed for so many of us.

I’ve been in leadership spaces that didn’t understand—or even recognize—the intersectional realities I carry. I’ve had to fight to be heard, to be safe, to belong. That’s why I created Untethered leadership, a space that honors the multiplicity of who you are.

This is not a destination—it’s a journey of becoming.

My last name means love or dear in Spanish—and I carry that as a commitment: to lead with love, to coach with care, and to build spaces where we are held in our full humanity.

It will be an honor to be a witness to your brilliance and be a part of your journey.

What you’ll get…

  • ✺

     6 Bi-Weekly Live Sessions

    (90–120 minutes each)

    Facilitated via Zoom in a supportive, intimate group setting. Each session is a mix of reflection, strategy, coaching, and community building.

  • ✺

    On-Demand Session Replays

    Can’t make it live? Every session will be recorded and available to watch on your own time, with notes and prompts included.

  • ✺

    Self-Paced Integration Practices

    Between sessions, you’ll receive gentle, grounding tools like journal prompts, templates, or embodied exercises to deepen your learning.

  • ✺

     A Private Community Space

    A private online space where you can share reflections, wins, questions, and support each other in real time.

  • ✺

    A Values-Aligned Leadership Strategy

    By the end of the program, you’ll walk away with a leadership strategy rooted in your truth, your strengths, and your vision—not someone else’s definition of success.

  • ✺

     Optional 1:1 Coaching Support

    Available as an add-on if you want more personalized guidance or support in applying what you learn to your work, career, or current challenges.

✺ Frequently asked questions ✺

  • In this space, I use “queer” as an umbrella term to include people who identify as LGBTQ+, including but not limited to lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, transgender, nonbinary, gender-expansive, and gender nonconforming folks.

    If you don’t use the word “queer” for yourself but are part of the LGBTQ+ community, you are still fully welcome here. This space honors a wide spectrum of identities and expressions, and we strive to create language and practices that are expansive, not limiting.

  • Untethered leadership is open to all queer people, but it is explicitly centered on the experiences, wisdom, and liberatory leadership of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color.

    This means our conversations, language, and community care practices center the intersectional realities of BI/POC queer folks navigating systems not built for us.

    If you are queer and not a person of color, you are welcome to join with the understanding that this is a BI/POC-centered space—and that your participation is grounded in respect, humility, and a commitment to learning without centering yourself.

  • You do not need a title to be a leader. This program centers the kind of leadership that comes from presence, purpose, and power—not just positional authority. If you’re holding space, making change, or showing up for others in your life or work, you’re already leading.

  • The program meets bi-weekly for six live sessions (90–120 minutes each). In between sessions, you’ll receive optional reflection prompts and light activities to deepen your learning. We intentionally designed this to be spacious and manageable alongside your full life.

  • We understand life happens. Unfortunately sessions will not be recorded to maintain safety and confidentiality for the community. You will have access to the slide deck, resources and tools discussed during the sessions as well as the cohort space to stay engaged.

  • It’s a leadership accelerator—with the depth of coaching, the structure of a learning experience, and the support of a community. You’ll have space for reflection, skill-building, and strategic planning in a group setting.

  • Yes—and we highly encourage it! Many workplaces have professional development budgets or learning stipends that can be applied toward programs like Untethered. This offering builds critical skills in leadership, communication, strategy, and equity—all of which directly support your growth and impact in the workplace.

    Feel free to request resources to support you.

  • Yes! We offer a limited number of scholarships to make Untethered more accessible to queer folks—especially Black, Indigenous, and People of Color—who are navigating financial barriers.

    📝 You can apply for a scholarship here.

What people say…

  • Christine is an amazing, talented coach. Christine was able to help me obtain stretched goals in a short period of time. One of her most valuable skills is the ability to ask questions that prompt an awareness of previously unknown blindspots. These new insights along with Christine's coaching enabled me to be more effective in both my personal and professional life. Christine is truly a wonderful, empathetic coach and leader

    Chrissoula M. - VP, at Financial Institution.

  • I came to Christine to work on self-empowerment as I navigated a tough working environment with my supervisor who was undermining my power and ability to thrive. I was given the tools to recognize the power that lies within. We each have the capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn to strive towards our highest light, and when people or programs such as this take a tailored approach to help you carve a new way of thinking about yourself, you realize that it is not so much about molding yourself to mimic your greatest idols, but acknowledging that audacity to be is not earned from someone except defeating our self-doubt. I have grown in confidence and in humility, but also in patience to allow myself to tilt my crown higher towards all my greatest ambitions. All in all, this is an invaluable program that changed my life.

    Vanessa M. Nonprofit leader

  • Before working with Christine I knew I needed to improve certain areas of my life but didn't know how to start and more importantly what areas to improve. Christine definitely helped me figure out the right path. I'm thankful as this has helped me, not just professionally but also personally. Showing up true to who I am and being able to feel comfortable with myself around others. Through her coaching, I was able to communicate my commitments to my manager, be honest, show my values more than me just saying ‘’No I don’t want to do this for you’’ but with a deeper level of thinking and confidence.

    Saira O - CSR Manager