Some people guide others through transition because they studied it.
I do it because I lived it.
For 26 years I held leadership roles in education, administrative appointments that compounded over time into an identity I didn't fully realize I'd built. I was good at it. I found meaning in it. And then I chose to step back.
I told myself and others it was intentional. A return to faculty. A recalibration. And in the practical sense, it was. But standing at the beginning of a sabbatical with the calendar suddenly empty and the emails suddenly optional, I discovered that I had been carrying something heavier than I knew.
Heaviness. A strange disorientation I hadn't expected. A sense of loss so disproportionate to the circumstances that I didn't know what to do with it. I felt like I was giving up on a dream and I couldn't even name what the dream had been.
I found the Camino through a film, although not the one most people expect. It was lighthearted and not meant to be profound. But something in its premise – the particular disappointment associated with a professional setback, the idea that a walk across Portugal and Spain might be the right response to a detour in one's professional journey – struck me as exactly right. I didn’t understand why. I booked the trip before I could think too carefully about it.
I walked the Camino Portugués from Porto, Portugal to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela carrying questions I'd been too busy to ask for years. About what I'd actually wanted. About what I'd traded for the career. About what enough looked like by my own standards.
What the Camino gave me was not answers. It gave me the right questions, asked in the right order, with enough silence around them to actually hear what came back. I came home with different priorities. A new community. A closer relationship with the people I care about. I found the meaning and purpose I had been seeking for years without knowing what to call it.
I built Ultreia because I know there are others standing at the same threshold I stood at. I built it because the Camino changed something for me and set me on a new path that nothing in a conference room or a typical coaching session had been able to touch. And I built it because I believe that kind of passage shouldn't have to be made alone.
– Rob Sanders, Founder/Pilgrimage Coach
Background
Rob spent nearly four decades as a teacher, librarian, faculty member, instructional designer, and administrator before becoming a guide and coach. These roles share a common discipline: active listening, asking the question that opens rather than closes, and creating the conditions in which people discover things for themselves. His graduate training in Paideia and Socratic Questioning gave that instinct a rigorous methodology. His years as a program director, chair, dean, and associate provost gave him thousands of hours of high-stakes advising conversations with professionals navigating exactly the kind of crossroads Ultreia is built for.
He has led groups to Bolivia, Mexico, Austria, Puerto Rico, New York City, and the Outer Banks, and has traveled to more than 25 countries. He knows what it means to coach a group far from home.
Before guiding anyone else through this passage, he navigated his own. He did not design the Ultreia curriculum from theory. He lived it first.
Beyond the work
Rob lives in Lewisburg, West Virginia with his wife Amy, who serves as Ultreia's operations director, and their dog Tiki. These days he's rediscovering the things that make a life feel like his own: books stacked two deep on the nightstand, a camera he actually remembers to bring on hikes, a passport getting some use again, barbecue smoke drifting over a Saturday afternoon, and drumming loud enough that the neighbors probably notice. He and Amy are building a life in a small town, showing up for old friends and new ones, saying yes to the dinner invitation instead of the deadline.
He approaches this work with the same character he has brought to every role: with curiosity, without pretense, and with the quiet conviction that most of us know more about what we need than we give ourselves credit for. He also knows, firsthand, what it feels like to reach the top of one mountain and realize there's another one worth climbing.