When Cynthia Campbell left her C-suite role to start her own company, she didn’t just change jobs. She changed how she lived. “I gave myself margin,” she told Sarah Snell Cooke during their conversation on The Credit Union Connection. “I finally put something in my life I never had before—time to play.”
It’s a small statement that carries real weight. After years spent chasing goals and managing teams, Cynthia decided to slow down and make room for creativity. What she discovered reshaped how she thinks about leadership, communication, and connection. The interview that follows explores how play can unlock authenticity and help people lead with more trust and humanity.
As founder of Soul Path Leadership, Cynthia brings her insights to life. Through stand-up comedy, storytelling, and improv, she has found that play is not about performance but presence. “It’s not about being funny,” she said. “It’s about being human.”
That idea challenges how most workplaces operate. In a culture where employees fear failure or judgment, improv encourages curiosity and collaboration. It invites people to say “yes, and” instead of “no, but.” It reminds leaders that innovation grows from trust, not control.
Her message feels especially relevant today. As organizations face constant change, Cynthia shows that play helps people adapt and stay connected. When teams laugh together, barriers fall. When they feel safe to try and fail, creativity thrives.
By the end of the conversation, her message lands clearly. Play is not the opposite of work. It is what brings work to life.
NOTE: The below AI-generated transcript to the video might not be 100% right, but are any of us really?
Sarah Cooke
Hello and welcome everybody. I am, of course, Sarah Snell Cooke, your host here at The Credit Union Connection. I’m here today with Cynthia Campbell, welcome, hello. And Cynthia is a common face among the credit union movement, but she has recently started her own company, Soul Path Leadership, which I’ve invited her to talk a little bit about that and what where her journey is in doing the business.
Cynthia Campbell
Thank you so much, Sarah for having me, and hello credit union land. I certainly hope you haven’t forgotten me. I’m still here and still working with several credit unions and leagues on some projects, in addition to that, working on some nonprofit stuff. But what I would really like to talk about today is what happens when I gave myself a little bit of margin in my life. As you know, I went from being a C suite employee at a large nonprofit, and now I’m running my own business, and in there I made sure that I put in my life something I never really had, and that’s time to play. And I just was a hard drive in Virgo, first born OCD, type A, all the things, right? So I didn’t leave myself any space. I didn’t leave myself not my employer. Me my responsibility. I didn’t leave it, and in my new venture, I decided I’m going to do both. I’m going to work hard and play hard. So that’s what I’ve been doing. And love to talk about either one, but I’m more interested in play.
Sarah Cooke
Yes, love the work, hard, play, hard ethic. So yeah, tell us a little bit about how you came to this work and play. I mean, you said you did it, but how did you decide that this is something you really wanted in your life, right?
Cynthia Campbell
Well, you know, I’m 56 this year, I just turned 56 and once I turned 50, so six years ago, I put some things on a bucket list. One of them was writing a book. One of them was doing stand up comedy, and then there’s other things. But when I was getting set to turn 56 I was like, There’s way too many of these things that have been on this list for six years now, and I felt like I didn’t want to have another year of shame. So I was like, Okay, what am I going to do about it on there too? Was like, get all my 401, K’s in one place, you know, and things like that, right? So I did that because financial stuff’s easier. But then I also sent in a formal book proposal, something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time, you know, an 80 some page to a real publisher on a real book. So I’m waiting on that. Fingers crossed end of October on that and then just started playing a lot with the spoken word, doing story slams. I finally did my first comedic stand up set, a five minute set, and I won my first time I won $50 so my friends were lying when they said I was funny, I guess. But I’m having fun with those sorts of things, and in in playing with all these different things that I never had time with, I’m learning a lot about myself. I’m learning how I deal with failure. Because, you know you don’t always win, your jokes fail, your stories fall flat, your pitches to new clients don’t get picked up. I’m learning a lot about communication and having the margin to do those things. Sarah, I didn’t have that before, so I’m learning a lot, and been writing a lot about that process.
Sarah Cooke
Mm hmm. And so tell us a little bit about your book. I’m curious about that just real quick.
Cynthia Campbell
So my every time I talk about my like, growing up years and such, people are like, You should write a book about that or whatever. And I’m like, well, it just seems so self indulgent to just write a book about that stuff, like unless you’re famous and have done something wrong, who cares but, and I’m neither. I mean, I mean, I’m sure I’ve done a few things wrong, but nobody still cares. But so in and of itself, a memoir from somebody some but nobody knows, doesn’t seem like it’s going to sell. Right? So what do you do with that? What do I do with all these years of things that happen, trauma and the work of the trauma, to get that trauma alchemized into something else? How do I talk about it in a way that might be helpful? And there is a book format out there. I’m sure you’re an editor you, you know, but like, where you kind of take a memoir to a method. Memoir to method is what it’s called, and that’s kind of what I did. I spent a little bit of time outlining four main areas of my life where I noticed that traumas happened and when they went unhealed, it had these effects in the workplace in particular. Particular because I’ve been in HR, I’ve seen unhealed trauma in the workplace. I could tell you all about it, but up close and personal, I’ve brought my own to the workplace, and in dealing with that and working through that, I start there, but then from there, very short amount of time in memoir, because that’s not really what’s interesting. That’s setting a stage, then moving into a method, the aligned method, how to go ahead and lead from that, knowing that people come to work messy and that we are messy leaders, and that what do we do with all this? That there’s a method to go about leading in this way and versus maybe the old way of the leader knows everything. Autocratic, do what I say. You know, hierarchical, talk to your boss like, yeah, that’s not that’s dead. It should be yes.
Sarah Cooke
So it’s so interesting how you tie that back to business. Because we do. We do tend to forget that human beings show up at work every day. It’s not just your employees. They’re not just tools that you get to hammer or whatever you know, and it’s so important in business and leadership. So like, how did you make that connection? And then how do you work with your clients to do that, to achieve that?
Cynthia Campbell
I think that I had to, you know, people who have known me for a long time know that I don’t think I learned anything easy. Sarah, I think that it takes up you hitting my head on the wall kind of things to figure it out where, like, I’m trucking along and I just kind of, like, hit a wall, like the same relationship wall, whether it’s this kind of relationship, that kind, or this kind, right, kind of the same wall, or whatever, and needing to just say, okay, the common denominator is me. What is it about, you know, this that I could be doing differently. And then I started looking into things like, it’s called non violent communication, but it’s kind of a misnomer. It’s really, you know, just nobody likes the word violent in that name, let me just say, but it’s more about collaborative communication and understanding that everybody’s communicating from their needs, including me. And if we could look at each other as human beings with needs, we would go a lot further in how we’re working with each other. And I know it seems basic, right? But when you’re in a heated moment, or you have a lot at stake, or you have an agenda, or blah, blah, blah, all that gets clouded, and it’s just really helping people, you know and myself, peel back these layers to say, You know what? Let’s just look at the root. What do I really need? What do I want here? Why am I bristling? A lot of times conflict I see is just a want to connect, that’s a deep one.
Sarah Cooke
And when you’re especially like in a situation where you’re trying to prove yourself, and you know to your boss, or to yourself, whatever, and you have this great idea, and you’re like, so excited about it, and the boss is like, Oh, hell no. You know, turning it’s not no doesn’t mean no necessarily, right? And just maybe mean just in triangle is improvisational situation, because we’ll talk about that later too.
Cynthia Campbell
Yeah. You know, like, what you say, like, you have this great idea, but your boss says, No, you know, when I’m on an improv stage and I we’re starting a scene, I may come in with a great idea, and I put that out there, and there are scene partners who are just like, nope. And they it’s like, oh gosh, you just feel like the rugs take it out from under you, because that’s not, yes, that’s not. And you feel unsupported, right? And so then what do you do? How do you play with a difficult partner on an improv stage, there’s strategies, just like there are in life, right? Yeah. So yeah, that difficult boss, when you get shut down with an answer, right? You’re like, okay, not now, maybe not, not this idea, not this execution, right? So then you back up, and then you see, what are they doing, and how could you yes and your idea into theirs like they’re already doing something. And if your idea truly has legs, then you know, see how you might integrate it instead of just push it as a control improv, you can’t have control in improv because there is no script, so you have to give and take in real time. And so that has a lot of business implications, right? If we could get it, get it, if we could trust, if we could trust that there’s give and take, right? Give and take. Sometimes we don’t feel like there is, there’s not a high and by. Environment of trust, and so.
Sarah Cooke
So, like, how do you bring that into the workplace? If you’re doing, like, a workshop or something like that, how do you bring that into the into one of your sessions? Right?
Cynthia Campbell
So, you know, bringing improv into the workplace is an interesting thing, because people immediately think, oh my gosh, I’m not an extrovert. I can’t do improv, and I get why they would think that, right? You know? Because it seems like such an introverted thing to do. But when you really look at it, improving is not about performance at all. It’s just about being present. You enter the stage, you look, observe your partner, you’re actively listening, you’re making an offer. There’s nothing to perform, you’re responding. And you know, it’s not about being funny, it’s about being human. It just so happens being humans freaking hilarious. And so then it just becomes this natural thing. And so I think a lot to that in business is about having the psychological safety to just show up, just show up without being performative, to just be present, to bring our ideas without worrying about, is it going to make me look stupid, or all this stuff you have to on the improv stage. You have to leave that to the side, right? And in business, what if we were able to leave that to the side, and we didn’t have to worry about any of that? We just could be present. We didn’t have to worry about performative or any of that innovation would go so sky high, sky high, because people would feel free when I’m on the improv stage, I’m free. Oh, sky’s the limit. Who knows what’s happening next? A little scary, but it’s certainly a more interesting life than the mundane of oh, this again, definitely, and that’s how training feels.
Sarah Cooke
Sorry, yeah, and that’s a lot of get what you get in the business world too, because there is a way we have done things, and credit unions in particular, love you guys. There tends to be a way things have been done. And as a not only do we have a problem with getting younger people in our doors as members, but also as employees and keeping them there. You see so many, I mean, just observation, I have no data on this, going out and doing their own thing on the side to, you know, to serve credits because they want to work with credit unions, but they want to do what they want to do. And it’s not necessarily in a way that is, oh, I just know everything better than you. But you know there are blockages within corporate America, if you want to call it, that, some credit unions certainly are more corporate America than others.
Cynthia Campbell
And so the future of work is different than the way credit unions might. Some credit unions might be employing right now, because credit unions and banks, right? They’re financial institutions. They’re definitely on the conservative side. They’re definitely on the hierarchical side. They’re regulatory, you know, they’re all for all the right reasons. They are these, these ways, right? And they are going to have to keep employing people in the future, and those people don’t like the way that feels. So what are we going to do about it? Work’s going to have to feel different. And that’s another win for bringing play into work, because it gives us innovation. It makes it interesting for the people who might be younger than the people deciding on the training to enjoy the training of, oh, I’m bringing my host out. This is fun. This is active that I’m laughing at work. I feel more trust with these people. This is so interesting, you know, versus, here is your BSA training. Read this for 45 minutes and take a test like we’ve got that is that we’ve got to do better. Yes, we always have to do BSA. I’m not picking on that. I was making a point, but we can do better with the training. I think of all the YP stuff out there, you know, I’ll be your crotchety Gen X for a minute in my day, we didn’t have yp, right? And so now that we do have, yp, you know, I’m 56 I don’t remember it if it was there. I think I was right on the cusp of all that starting. But we have it. So let’s give them real tools and real training to explore their whole selves and to really understand more than just banking, because then they’ll do better job at banking, to.
Sarah Cooke
As well as just serving the members, you know, if, if they’re improving on a certain life situation, for example, and being able to build more empathy for the people that they’re serving.
Cynthia Campbell
For sure, I mean, improving is life. When you think about it like, think, I’m not a parent, but I hear, you know, no one gets a guidebook. To parenting, or no one gets a guidebook when they get cancer or when their mate leaves them unexpectedly, or any of those things. And so we’re all improving our way through life anyway. So deep down, we know like how to do it, but somehow we get into an institutional structure and we pretend like we don’t know anything. What are the rules? How do I do it? And we take our that, that part of us off, that we think that work shouldn’t have any play, that it is just opposite. Play is opposite of work. Everything has to be polarized in our country, right? You work or you play, damn it.
Sarah Cooke
Politics.
Cynthia Campbell
We work or we play. But no What if work was play too?
Sarah Cooke
I really like the tie in there, too. And how does that help develop modern leadership?
Cynthia Campbell
I think that right now, without being political, as you just instructed me, and I’m not political TV, but, you know, I think that what it does is that play, in general, improvement specifically makes us happy, not happy uncomfortable, at least if not happy with uncertainty. And in this world, it is uncertain. We do not know. Like I’m on the board of a couple nonprofits lost this profit, you know, this funding yesterday. We have to hurry up and figure out how we’re going to keep that program alive without this funding, because this world is changing every day, and nonprofits lose this or that, and you know, so you have to stay nimble. And I think playing helps us stay nimble, whatever the play is, you know, dancing keeps us in our body and realizes it’s more than just our brain. It’s our it’s our whole body reacting to life and feeling our way through life, all these things out there, these polarities, the it’s this or that, if you feel this way, whatever, all of that laughter and play can undo that. We cannot hold tension when we’re laughing, right? We laugh, we let it all go. And what if we could laugh with the people we work with in a fun way that makes them feel like they she had my back. That was really fun. Maybe I can’t trust her, you know? And then we start playing together. And, I mean, there’s a reason companies used to have bowling leagues and softball teams and stuff, right? And golf and stuff. And so this is just another outlet, maybe for those creative types that are not jocks, you know, or maybe it’s just a way to bring that out. But anyway, it’s fun to play with it, and it’s helping me a lot just kind of get down to, like, peeling the onion layers back, like, what’s my initial reaction? What? What is it? Do you know? And improv really helps with that, and helps you identify the emotion in the room. And so that’s helpful in business, too.
Sarah Cooke
Oh, yeah, definitely reading a room. Individual, very helpful. And we were so terrible. I was reading some research about that the other day. We were so terrible at it. I think I’m pretty good. But then I started reading this. I’m like, but it is very important to be able to observe, you know, and feel the temperature of the room, so that if you want to bring up an idea, or if you want to quash an idea, you know, you’re out how to, how to approach it a little better, for sure, and by doing things like improv. And I think we missed that connection early on. Your leadership coaching is like, is includes improv.
Cynthia Campbell
It does include, I mean, it’s included it for me, and it’s something that, like, it’s not part of every, you know, engagement that I do, for sure. I do strategic nonprofit. We don’t do improv there, right? But, and I do, like a lot of conference speaking that has nothing to do with that, but because I do conference speaking still, you know, as conference speakers are thinking about the future, I want them to think about it as a session, like, specifically, a pre conference session, where we can play for a few hours together understand what play, why play is important, what improv is, and specifically, improv didn’t get its start in theater. Improv got its start in social work in Chicago from a woman named Viola Sperlin, who used it to help children communicate things like trauma and other things happening socially. And so I think it’s interesting that it could come full circle and still have socio impacts into the workplace of psychological trust in particular. So it definitely has scientific roots. And I’d like to see a precon session where we have a few hours together, we can establish what it is, and then we can just play and have a lot of fun, and then have some takeaways to bring it back to your team. What would that look like? What do meetings feel like if we started with a little bit of energy release through like improv gaming and just tried something?
Sarah Cooke
New, yeah, turning on the creativity, the creative side too, which is so important in business, and people don’t recognize the creatives as the artists, the painters, the draw, you know? And it’s not necessarily creative strategically with a business. And so, like, if you’re, if you’re talking to an executive, and you want them to take on this type of training for themselves, or for the, you know, the entire executive team, and they’re a little hesitant, because they’re like, What is this woo hoo stuff? How do you overcome that kind of objection?
Cynthia Campbell
Yeah, I would say maybe come at it from the opposite point of view of, hey, you know, do you have a staff that might have some silos? Are they having trouble collaborating? Are they not listening to each other? Great, this has been going on. What have you tried? Oh, for the last 789, 1020, years, we’ve done these things, but still we have these silos, like, is enough. Enough is like, do How? How can we just shake and rattle and try something else, like a we need to go a different direction, because it the problems that have existed have existed for a while, and the traditional training is not working. So that alone, number one, just try something else, even if it’s not this for the love of God, try something else. And why this? People need to play right now. They’re freaking stressed out. They don’t have time to play. They’re going from work to this, to that, to that, to that, even their play is scheduled one hour at the gym, that, that, that, that, right? So like, can we insert play in the workplace, just to help our people have a little fun in this very, very, very difficult environment that we have been in. Number two, number three. Introverts hate this idea. I will probably never get hired by an introvert, right? But it’s, I can’t say this enough. It’s not about that, because in my improv classes. I have in there plenty of introverts that are learning with me. They’re taking the class so they can be better public speakers. They’re taking it so they can be better at Dungeons and Dragons, like I don’t play that game, but apparently there’s storytelling and whatnot. And so they’re taking they’re very introvertstroverted D and D people. Y’all who are taking this to be better at that and so again, maybe take the edge off of it’s not about performance. It’s about presence. All you have to do is literally be present, listen, observe, watch and respond. It’s not about being funny. It’s about being human. It’s about connecting. And every leader knows their team does better when you’re connected. And so like, yeah, just give it a try. It might not be comfortable, but the talking head training that you have that is comfortable isn’t working right.
Sarah Cooke
100% agree. So we are at time, actually a little bit over time. I always allow my guests to leave the credit audience with a final thought. What have you got to leave our audience with?
Cynthia Campbell
Play, more play, more unstructured. Play, unscheduled, play, just play. Laugh, run like a kid. Giggle, lay down. Look at the sky. I don’t know. Get out of your head, and you’ll find that the business answers come when you get out of your head and give yourself play margin.
Sarah Cooke
Thank you. Thank you. That was awesome. Appreciate it.
Cynthia Campbell
Thank you Sarah, thank you. Bye.