Burke Miller

On the personal side…

If we work together, you’ll be sharing a lot about yourself. Perhaps then it’s only fair that I share a bit about my own personal journey.

Throughout my life, I have been immensely blessed with opportunities to explore and excel, and will be forever grateful for that. In my teens, college years, and into my twenties I was your classic student/athlete (competitive swimming and water polo were my things), along with a bit of an unconventional adventurer. I spent a semester traveling around the globe—mostly visiting underdeveloped countries in Africa and Asia—which completely took me out of my sheltered myopic perception of the world into a much bigger sense of things. At age 22 I took a summer off to bicycle across the United States, from California to Maine. At 24 and 26, I got married and had a son (I think those qualify as big adventures).

I did not start my career in the corporate world, but in education. In my twenties, I worked as an environmental educator. After training to be a naturalist, I convinced the University of Iowa to hire me to develop an environmental education program for local schools and build a rehabilitation center for injured birds of prey.

In my thirties, I moved to Boulder, Colorado, became the first Communications Director for the American Solar Energy Society, created the curriculum for and completed a Masters Degree in Environmental Philosophy (yes—actually a field of study), became a wilderness “vision quest” guide, built a passive solar home in the mountains outside of Boulder, and got divorced. Whew – it was a big decade.

As I entered my forties, I made the transition from the environmental field to leadership development. While it might sound like a strange transition, it made all the sense in the world to me. I had come to believe that the attitudes necessary for living honorably and sustainably on the planet are the same ones required to live in respect and integrity with one another—and that these ways of being are exactly what leadership is about. So I dedicated myself to exploring, living, and teaching a way of leadership that is anchored in a bigger context of living nobly and effectively purposeful lives, and to working with leaders willing and ready to explore that way of leading from the inside-out.

That’s when I got quite clear about my purpose in life, which is “to awaken and activate our authentic power and sacred responsibility for our world.”

The year I turned 50, I met Sandra Visser. We married and began a fabulous life together. After five years of living and working from our beautiful mountain retreat outside of Boulder, we sold our home, let go of almost all our consulting work, and went on sabbatical. We began in Peru, where we discovered that, among many other things, the calling for me to write could not be ignored. So we came back to the US, I wrote, we explored options for our next phase, and then eventually settled back in Boulder. We’ve been living a life full of beauty and gratitude in our new location in the mountains ever since. If you choose to work with me, it’s likely we’ll work from the serenity of our five acres of rock outcroppings, pine forest, fox lairs, and mountain views.

I published A Sacred Trust in the spring of 2019. It was a labor of love, taking four years to write, and containing about fifty years of discoveries about life and leadership.

Besides my work, which I absolutely love, I do fun stuff with my wife and son, enjoy good food, wine, and friends, ski as often as possible, hike in the mountains on the weekends, and swim outdoors year round.