Wrkwell Celebrates 1 Year 🥳

Anastazia’s Reflection

10 years together

read this post on LinkedIn here

A Letter To Myself, August 2016

Dear Anastazia,

Tomorrow, on your first day at your new job, you’re going to meet someone who will change your life. I don’t have to tell you how to find them, or give you a hint about what they might be wearing. In a ballroom filled with 200 of your new colleagues, you won’t be able to miss her. She’ll be sparkling just like you.

I know how much you like surprises, so I won’t shortcut the suspense, but here’s a heads up.

This is your second “real” job out of grad school. You pivoted out of education, just to pivot back in — a real Jonah and the whale situation — but it won’t take long for you to start wondering about expansion. Mostly, you will wonder if you have what it takes — if you're self-directed and inventive enough to sustain yourself, if there's life beyond clocking in/out.

You’ll stare at the possible futures; they’ve taken the shape of a mountain. You’ll gaze at the peak and study your map, but you won’t step onto the trail that leads to the top. Too risky.

Until.

When you meet her tomorrow, you’ll be face to face with someone else who wants to make the climb. Like you, her backpack is filled with the necessities: ingenuity, creativity, eccentricity. Like you, she’s been dreaming of the peak. Like you, she has everything she needs but there’s still something she wants: a partner for the climb.

Now don’t get ahead of yourself. You won’t start climbing right away. She’s an unlikely collaborator; you are younger, Black, and less rehearsed. There will be flubs and half-starts. You will literally miss the bus. She will be tentatively curious about you. You will both wonder how committed the other is to DEI and if it means as much to them as it does to you.

You’ll find your answer at 3:00am in a Google Doc the night before the “February PD Day” (words that will make sense soon). Resolving comments and making last-minute edits on the script will feel like looking in a mirror. You’ll both come away thinking, “this matters to her, she understands the stakes, this is someone I can rely on.” Don’t rush this; everything that led to this moment will serve as foundation later.

Before you can build too much momentum off of that mirror moment, a new virus will start making headlines on the West Coast and everything will change. You’ll live through your third societal shift (after 9/11 and the Great Recession). Your general impatience and newfound understanding of the brevity of life will yell with one voice, CLIMB.

But this time, when you gaze at the peak and study your map, you’ll sense her looking over your shoulder. Trust: she remembered to bring whatever you forgot to pack, she’ll speak up when we’re headed the wrong way. Peace: you won’t let each other fall, or give up, or overexert. And ten years from now, when you sit down to write this letter to the past, you won’t believe the view.

Get some sleep tonight. The rest of your life begins tomorrow.

A

Michaela Ablon, XMA, ACC + Wrkwell

Michaela’s Reflection

1 year of Wrkwell Co.

read this post on LinkedIn here

Happy 1st, Anastazia Neely + Wrkwell!🥂

In a recent post I wrote that careers are episodic, unforeseeable stories. Case in point: the story of how Anastazia and I became Wrkwell — it began in 2016 with a 'meet cute.'

I was presenting accreditation data (exciting stuff!) to a room of two hundred when an unfamiliar voice raised a question with such clarity that everyone — me especially — wanted to know who was speaking. It was Anastazia's first day at our org, and she had the room at attention. It was a year of firsts: the year I finished my Master's in Change at Columbia, the year I was promoted into senior leadership, the year my life started taking on a life of its own.

We were not obvious casting. The best buddy movies never start with an obvious duo — scene after scene, challenge after challenge, the players become a true team. In the org where we met, we designed learning and development work for rooms where stakes were high and participants were often reluctant and skeptical. But the most wonderful things tended to happen in those rooms. We produced work that disarmed and engaged, got measurable results, and — most importantly to our story — found that our differences stopped being a curiosity to participants and became proof of concept. Anastazia and I figured out how to work well together BECAUSE of our differences, and how to set clients up to do the same.

What people can't see at first glance: we're both Columbia grads, both daughters of military officers (Air Force and Army). As free-spirited as we are, there's a shared undercurrent of honor and discipline beneath everything we built from our differences. That's the lightning in a bottle.

Then, just as things were in flow, I had to go and capsize the boat. (I know, new metaphor midstream.) I quit the job and swam out on my own into new waters, which had always been my aim. What I didn’t expect: Anastazia, too, had been eyeing the water — she went out on her own a year after I did. Two people who’d built something seaworthy together decided, independently, to jump ship — and found each other again, venturing the same direction. We’ve each since built successful solo ventures we remain committed to, AND, in 2025, launched Wrkwell.co, our niche coaching, training + consulting firm, helping people + organizations work better, human >to< human.

It's been so gratifying to bottle the lightning and develop our IP. Our branded soft skills and team-building methodology is evidence-based and fire-tested — the result of ten years training, coaching, and consulting across organizations, as both internal and external practitioners — and, most importantly, genuinely entertaining.

Curious what our work looks like in full? Sign up for our newsletter, join the next Wrkwell Buzz in October, or grab a 20-minute hello — all thru our website.

In June 2025 we went 50/50 and put an LLC on it. Anastazia Neely – here's to the next wave! 🥂⚡️🌊