When work works better, life works better.
My Executive Coaching and HR Consulting practice blends the personal and the professional. Drawing from my multicultural upbringing in a large family, 20+ years in HR leadership, a career working with founders and creatives, and current academic studies in mental health counseling at Northwestern, I help leaders navigate the intersection of personal growth, team culture, and organizational health.
You’re Doing It: Stages of Becoming
By Britta Larsen
How do we become who we are? What forces—family, school, friendships, love, work, identity, and loss—shape our development and sense of self? You’re Doing It: Stages of Becoming is a deeply personal exploration of this question, merging memoir with psychoeducation. Inspired by my graduate studies in mental health counseling (Class of ’25), my favorite course, Human Growth & Development, and my quest to understand my habits, addictions, coping and defense mechanisms, and purpose, each chapter explores a stage of life through Erik Erikson’s psychosocial development theory, woven into my own life story.
Memoir + Psychoeducation
Book Launch | March 2026
We received a lot of attention as our family grew — we were both admired and glared at as we navigated a world that struggled to understand how we came together as a family.
A Family of Many Colors
The Boston Globe - June 4, 1981
“In their courting days, they baby-sat together. Four years later, when they still hadn’t conceived a child, they adopted a 3-week-old black American boy… His adoption was followed by a mixed-race American boy… and well before the much publicized Vietnam baby lifting - a half Vietnamese and half black American boy.
Only then did they start having babies — three girls — and in between births, they adopted three more, a Cambodian baby girl… a Vietnamese girl… and El Salvadorian boy with polio. To say Pam and Rikk Larsen love children is an understatement.”
They Built An American Family
Parade Magazine - May 12, 1996
“Please don’t make us sound perfect,” Pam Larsen asked when I arrived at her home in Cambridge, Mass. “That just distances us from other people and makes them think that they can’t do what we’ve done. We have problems just like any family, but we hope our story will make other people want to do what we did.”
What Pam and her husband, Rikk, did over the last 26 years is simple enough: They built a family. It’s a large family granted, but their spacious home is big enough to handle 10 children. Four by birth, and six adopted from the orphanages of Vietnam, the killing fields of Cambodia, the battlefields of El Salvador and the troubled cities of America.
They started thinking of adoption in 1969… “Why not adopt kids who need homes the most?”
“I don’t think our kids had any conception that our family was any different from anyone else’s,” Pam said. “Although I’ll never forget the day Tage was playing with the kids in a family down the street that had three little redheaded children. He came home and told me ‘Mom, this is the strangest family. They all look alike.” I’m glad we were able to give our kids a diverse family.
Britta’s Salary Story on Refinery 29!
In Refinary 29 Salary Stories, women with long-term career experience open up about the most intimate details of their jobs: compensation. It’s an honest look at how real people navigate the complicated world of negotiating, raises, promotions, and job loss, with the hope it will give young women more insight into how to advocate for themselves — and maybe take a few risks along the way.
“Because of the last few years, I’ve seen an increase in mental health challenges with employees and how much that has affected them at work, so this year, I was inspired to go back to grad school and study mental health counseling in order to understand better with the lens of what that means for people at work.”—Britta Larsen, VP of people operations and culture at Bespoke Post