What’s a piece of advice you wish someone had given you 20 years ago?
Mine would be this: Don’t make important choices when you are gripped by fear and get curious enough to recognize when fear is actually the thing driving you.
Twenty years ago, I probably would have told you I was fearless. In fact, I think most people who knew me would have described me that way too. I was willing to take risks. I worked incredibly hard. I pushed through obstacles. I reinvented myself when necessary. I didn’t wait around for someone to rescue me, and I certainly wasn’t going to let failure stop me.
Fearless, right? Not exactly. Over the last 20 years, largely through the school of hard knocks, I’ve come to understand that one of the patterns responsible for some of my greatest successes (and some of my greatest failures) was fear.
Not the kind of fear I could easily recognize or name. This was deeper. Hidden. Repressed. An undercurrent that had been running through me for most of my life. I knew I never wanted to fail. What I didn’t understand was what failure represented to me. Somewhere deep inside was a terror of losing everything, being trapped, living in poverty, struggling to survive, being incapable of protecting myself, and ultimately having no one to rely on but me.
I didn’t know that. More accurately, I didn’t know that I didn’t know. That distinction matters. Some of our most powerful patterns are the ones we cannot see because they have been with us for so long that they don’t feel like patterns. They feel like who we are.
In my work in executive leadership coaching, I spend a lot of time around highly driven, Type A leaders. These are people who know how to accomplish things. They take responsibility. They solve problems. They push through. They work harder when something isn’t working. They carry tremendous loads and often take pride in their ability to keep going when everyone else has had enough.
From the outside, that can look like extraordinary confidence, discipline, ambition, and resilience. And sometimes it is. But sometimes there is something else underneath all that drive.
What are you afraid might happen if you stop? That’s a very different question. I didn’t fully understand my own answer until I spent 12 days in the jungle participating in an indigenous ceremonial experience that included ayahuasca.
One night, lying on a mat in the darkness of the maloca, I came face-to-face with an image of a terrified little girl running for her life from everything she believed could hurt her. At the same time, I became intensely aware of what was happening in my body. My arms and legs felt flooded with energy. Everything was activated. My entire body felt prepared to run, fight, hide, protect.
And then I had a realization that stopped me in my tracks: This is how I have felt my entire life. My body had always been tense, terse, and tight. Ease wasn’t something I experienced often. Not in my stomach. Not in my extremities. If I’m being truthful, not even deep in my soul.
What I experienced that night gave me a new lens through which to understand something I had been working on for decades. I could see the relationship between the little girl who learned to be prepared for what might happen next and the adult woman who became exceptionally good at working, producing, achieving, controlling what she could control, and making sure she could always take care of herself.
The pattern made sense. That doesn’t mean I haven’t had a wonderful life. I have. I’ve experienced success, love, adventure, friendship, meaningful work, tremendous learning, and opportunities I am deeply grateful for.
The amount of effort and energy I have expended over the years simply to feel okay has also been enormous. The personal development. The coaching. The reading. The courses. The meditation. The spiritual work. The behavioral work. The calming techniques. The constant learning and searching for greater understanding. I was trying, in so many different ways, to find some semblance of ease.
Eventually, I had to acknowledge something I had spent a long time outrunning: growing up as the child of an addict, in a household where there was chaos, confusion, unpredictability, and a lot of masking what was actually happening, had an impact on me.
Of course it did. The experiences we have early in life can influence what we learn to expect from the world and the patterns we develop to navigate it. Those patterns can become incredibly useful. They can make us resourceful, independent, observant, responsible, ambitious, and resilient. They can also follow us into rooms where we no longer need them.
That is where this becomes a leadership conversation. Through years of executive leadership coaching, I’ve learned to become curious about what sits underneath the behaviors we so quickly label as leadership strengths or weaknesses. The leader who needs to control everything. The executive who can’t delegate. The person who works until midnight every night. The founder who cannot tolerate uncertainty. The leader who needs to win every argument. The person who feels responsible for everyone and everything.
We can coach the behavior. But there is often enormous value in becoming curious about the pattern underneath it. What is that behavior doing for you? What does it protect you from? What do you believe would happen if you stopped doing it?
For a high achiever, those can be uncomfortable questions. Because the same pattern that is now exhausting you may also be the pattern you credit with making you successful. That was certainly true for me. Fear gave me fuel. It made me work. It made me prepare. It made me resourceful. It helped me create a life in which I would never have to experience many of the things I was terrified of experiencing.
So why would I want to give that up? Because eventually the pattern that protects you can also imprison you. If some part of you believes you are only safe when you are producing, you will always find something else to produce. If you believe you can only depend on yourself, you will struggle to trust and delegate. If slowing down feels dangerous, you can build an entire life around never stopping.
And you may call it ambition. That’s why awareness is so powerful. I’m not interested in making our past wrong. I don’t think the answer is to look backward and blame our childhood, our parents, or everything that happened to us for who we are today. For me, the value of looking backward is understanding what I learned so I can consciously choose whether those lessons still belong in the future I am creating.
That distinction has been transformational for me personally and has deeply informed how I approach executive leadership coaching. Trauma and difficult experiences can inform behavior, but they do not have to dictate our future. We can become curious about our patterns without judging them. We can appreciate how they once protected or propelled us while also recognizing when they are now costing us happiness, health, connection, joy, fulfillment, or the ability to lead the way we want to lead.
I consider myself incredibly fortunate. I have been a student of personal transformation for more than 25 years, and throughout that time I’ve had access to extraordinary spiritual, ontological, neurobiological, behavioral, and coaching teachers. It often feels like the right teacher, course, book, coach, or adventure appeared precisely when I needed it.
But I still had to choose. I had to choose to walk toward something I didn’t understand. I had to choose to look at things I would rather not see. I had to choose curiosity over certainty and, increasingly, to move toward the future I wanted rather than unconsciously allowing my past to predict it.
That is the advice I wish someone had given me 20 years ago. When fear has you in its grip, get curious before you choose. Ask yourself what is actually happening. What are you afraid of? Is the threat in front of you, or is an old pattern interpreting the present through something that happened long ago? Is the choice you are about to make moving you toward the life you want or simply moving you away from something you fear?
And if you are a high-performing leader who is taxed out, maxed out, constantly pushing, constantly producing, and wondering why success still doesn’t feel quite the way you thought it would, perhaps there is another question worth asking:
What pattern is pushing you and what are you afraid might happen if you stopped?
You may discover that some of the qualities responsible for your success are genuinely strengths. You may also discover that a few of them have been working overtime trying to protect you from something that is no longer happening. That is where the work gets interesting.
For me, executive leadership coaching is not simply about becoming more productive, influential, strategic, or effective. It is about developing enough awareness to recognize what is actually driving you so you have greater freedom to choose how you want to lead. You are not required to keep recreating your past simply because the patterns you learned there once helped you survive it. You can honor what got you here without asking it to take you everywhere you want to go. You can choose to move toward your future rather than spending your life running from your past.
If you are ready to get curious about the patterns driving your leadership and consciously choose what you want to carry forward, check out Evolve the Leader Within. This is a 14 week seminar series designed specifically to uncover your patterns and elevate your leadership capabilities and ability to choose your next steps.
