Do not let fear be your travel agent, but let faith be your tour guide.
— WKC
This past year I have been in a chapter of my growth journey like none other. The amount of courage required, and the depth of fear underneath it, has been staggering and sometimes depleting.
There is a proverb that says, “Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy.” (Proverbs 14:10)
As much as we share this world together and are deeply social beings, our perceptual reality is ours alone. Sometimes I want to scream, Do you not see the cost of my choosing courage? But the truth is, as much as we may want to, we cannot truly share each other’s internal realities.
The best we can do is stand witness for one another.
To cheer each other on.
To honor the courage we see in each other’s lives.
As I have been in an intentional pursuit of how to live my life to its fullest, several foundational beliefs have shaped how I show up in the world.
Fundamentally, our lives, our decisions and our leadership are shaped by three things:
The commitments we make.
The lies we believe.
And the strangers we meet.
Our lives, and our leadership, are defined by relationships. Primarily our relationship with ourselves, then with others, and ultimately with life itself.
And when I step back and look at what we are really trying to solve, it goes all the way back to sixth grade in Mrs. Baronowski’s class:
Who.
What.
When.
Where.
Why.
And how.
Those questions don’t change. What changes is how we answer them in different seasons of life, with different levels of maturity and clarity.
This week I had an important conversation with Madeline, my integrator. We are extremely different in how we operate, but we share the same core values, and I am deeply grateful for the gift of her.
The conversation was simple but important.
I need more accountability around sharing my voice.
For several years now it has been stop and go. The amount of deeply rooted trauma between my voice and the world has been an interesting problem to solve. But the opportunity in front of me right now is consistency.
And more specifically, consistency in sharing my internal voice.
You see, I didn’t come to leadership through tactics or through being exceptional at execution. I came to leadership through prioritizing the work of keeping my heart soft.
Which meant focusing on internal transformation that then expressed itself externally.
I prioritized building a life well lived from the heart, and from that place I made my business decisions.
I prioritized healing.
I prioritized incorporating my own quiet desperation as part of the path toward living life fully.
I prioritized healing my relationship with death so that I could truly live.
One of the prayers I prayed in my early twenties was simple but radical:
Whatever I fear, let it come upon me so that fear would no longer have a hold on my heart.
Fear, after all, is twisted faith.
And if I was going to live my life to its fullest, then courage had to become the framework—not fear.
Great in theory.
Painful in practice.
Especially in the short term.
Fear screams. Loudly. Often in ways that feel unnecessary and exhausting.
But in the long arc of life, courage is worth the cost.
The truth is we all have a relationship with pain. The real question is: how do we steward it?
For much of my life I carried the illusion that if you prioritized the heart and tried to do good in the world, life should somehow be pain-free. That illusion eventually collapses.
Because the truth is we are stewarding both life and death from the moment we are conceived.
The real question is whether we will be intentional about it or drift through life prioritizing denial.
So in this season, I am embracing a different level of courage.
I am committing to sharing, as authentically as I can, my journey of heart transformation as the foundation of transformational leadership.
It scares me.
Part of me would much rather lean into the strategic, external applications of leadership. Those are easier to talk about.
But real change starts from the inside out.
Change starts with me.
Change starts with how we steward our own hearts.
Because when we heal our relationship with ourselves, we begin to heal our relationships with others.
And when we heal our relationships with others, we begin to heal our relationship with the world.
Carpe Diem.