Life as a Vampire

October 14th, 2025 by Kelly Kienzle

Possible Vampire House (view in browser to see this cool photo)

Have you ever considered becoming a vampire?  Probably not.  But have you ever considered doing something that you’ve never done before?  Quite likely.

Making an informed decision of whether to become a vampire is a paradox: To make this decision, you need to understand what life as a vampire would be like.  But to understand that life, you would need to become a vampire, after which you would no longer be able to compare it to being a human (because now you’re a vampire).  So, you remain stuck not knowing and wary about making the leap into vampire-hood.

Stuck in a Dead End

We all face vampire-becoming decisions every day.  Here’s an example:

I recently was working with a leader who was deeply curious, frequently asking her staff for input, and gathering a multitude of options as she considered her next leadership decision.

Yet, she never adopted any of those suggestions and recommendations from her staff.  She always used her own ideas.  And now her staff was demoralized and reluctant to engage with her.  How curious!  What caused her to seek input, yet then steadfastly stick with her own plans?

As we dove further into the question, we realized she feared the unknown.  Because she could not imagine the outcome of other’s suggestions (as she had never experienced them before), she thought it unwise to travel that path.  She did not want to relinquish the familiarity of her own ideas.

In other words, she did not want to become a vampire because she did not know what it was like to be a vampire.  She could not bring herself to make what she saw as an uninformed decision.  She could not imagine the outcome, so she steered away from it, again and again.

Imagining a New Way of Being

So how did she pull out of this input-seeking-then-rejecting loop?  How did she rebuild trust in her team and herself?

She took baby vampire steps.  She started adopting small, safe-to-fail (in her opinion) suggestions from her staff.  To deepen her leadership development, she challenged herself to overcome what she learned to see as insufficient imagination.  And she bravely watched the recommended ideas of her staff yield positive, innovative results.

We can always imagine a different outcome.  We can always imagine being a slightly different person or leader.  This leader enjoyed imagining different outcomes, as suggested by her colleagues.  However, the challenge is to expand and fortify our imagination such that we can actually take steps towards a new, as-yet-unknown future.

So, in the spirit of the upcoming holiday and for the sake of deepening trust and innovation, imagine becoming a vampire.  It may open up a whole new way of living for you.

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