Life’s hardest moments are initiations—into adulthood, leadership, and our true selves.
Hi, I’m Ashlea.
I created The Threshold Project so that we can learn to recognize life’s thresholds as initiatory experiences and build the necessary support structures to experience them that way.
For two decades, I worked at the intersection of human behavior, organizational change, and creative leadership — as Executive Design Director at IDEO, and as a trusted advisor to leaders at well-known global brands. From the outside, I guided countless organizations through their biggest change moments.
Then, in 2017, during the birth of my son, I crossed the threshold between life and death — inverting my relationship to change. What I had once understood as a process to move people through, I came to understand as an initiation that moves us.
That experience catalyzed The Threshold Project — my work to reframe how we orient to and experience life's thresholds, as humans and as leaders.
Work With Me
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A keynote on the leadership the era requires, drawn from the listening project and from the seven skills threshold crossings teach. For leadership conferences, corporate events, executive education programs, and senior leadership retreats.
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Leadership Lessons We Have Earned. Leaders practice sharing their own threshold stories, witness others, and surface the leadership skills they did not know they had been cultivating. A group practice in recognition.
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Reflecting on Your Crossings. A working session with the Oracle of the Threshold — eight archetypes of crossing — used to understand what you have lived through, what you are in now, and what may be ahead, individually and collectively.
I speak and teach about threshold integration — the development modern leadership has known about for decades but never figured out how to cultivate.
Thresholds as Initiations
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"I've got a really big transformation to drive, and because of what I've been through, I'm doing it with a completely different mindset and energy than I would have ten years ago when I was erratically trying to juggle hundreds of plates."
— Heloise
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"So much of leadership is about adopting best practices as opposed to being the best practice. Telling stories about things that have happened to you, things you have seen, things you believe — that is very powerful for leadership."
— Paul
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"The skills we need to lead through collapse are the skills that threshold crossers have. They have lived through fragmentation, collapse, and rebuilding."
— Jamie
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"I was taken down to zero. Everyone knew that I was a failure. This forced me to focus on internal learning to create value where nothing existed before."
— Ramchand
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"There is an implicit language of people who have been through suffering and know how to be with it. They know how to show up in any crisis."
— Nadia
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"This is what ripens you as a human. This is what will allow you to find your path and lead us into the new future. In our culture, we don't have a lot of guides for major initiations but when you find one it's life changing."
— Becca
About The Threshold Project
The Threshold Project is an open listening initiative and emergent design practice. It translates patterns across hundreds of threshold stories into language, tools, and practices for the leaders this era requires.
Modern culture treats thresholds as experiences to minimize, work around, or quickly get past. The Threshold Project makes a different case: thresholds are essential initiatory experiences. With space, language, and support, people emerge with the depth, connection, and clarity our world needs now.
Tools
A small set of resources for the crossings you are in.
A four-part architecture for the threshold experience — The Threshold, The Departure, The Unknown, The Integration. Each part teaches its own skills; together they form a curriculum for moving through change with awareness.
The Universal Map of Transformation
Threshold Crossings
A guided audio practice to explore past and future thresholds. Free with email.
Eight archetypes of crossing. A reflection practice for orienting to the structure and experience of your own crossings. Each archetype offers a question to sit with.
The Oracle of the Threshold
My ongoing exploration of the threshold experience — essays, story syntheses, and the questions threshold work keeps surfacing.
The Darkness Chronicles
Share Your Story
The listening project continues.
In 2025, I set a goal to listen to one hundred Stories of Transformation. Since then, I have witnessed stories from people of all walks of life, all over the world, ages 25 to 89 — stories of cancer treatment, addiction recovery, betrayal, job loss, coming out, losing a loved one, end of life decisions, loss of identity. Participants are witnessed in their own story, and their story feeds into a greater understanding of this universal human experience.
For my last thirty conversations, I am particularly interested in hearing stories from senior leaders whose threshold has shaped how they lead — but all stories are welcome.