Welcome back to Little Leadership Lessons, my newsletter highlighting short but powerful insights to help you lead with confidence and create lasting results. These lessons come directly from my research, interviews, and coaching work with six- and seven-figure creator-founders.
I don’t know about you, but for me April was a long and challenging month. This is normal in the flow of my life throughout the year. Some months feel smooth and easy, some feel the opposite.
The key for me is to remember that both exist — and will always exist. Never get too high, never get too low. Trust the process to unfold as it is meant to.
Let’s get to it.
A Beautiful Photo of Nature
And to accompany this unfurling oak, I have another original poem for you. Read Questions from a Walk here or enjoy a few lines below:
What stories would these trees tell about me?
What questions would they ask about me as I grow, passing by through my own seasons?
What is the story this walk has written?
Who will I become along these miles?
Little Leadership Lesson: You are More Than Your Hurt
These heavy feelings are but a short note in the history of your life. it is easy to forget the depth of your power when everything feels rough.
[…]
you are more than what hurts. old habits do not define you. you are a hero who is ready to emerge.
– yung pueblo in the way forward
My Take on You and Your Hurt
I don’t typically run around referencing my mission in life and work… but it’s relevant here: To help kind and talented people acknowledge and integrate their past pain so they can reach their potential and use it to make the world a better place.
Sometimes when I share this in a private conversation, a friend will ask: why the pain part?
The first and most obvious reason is because of how much pain I experienced in my early life and all of the ways I saw it influence my own path.
But as my coaching work has expanded over the past several years, I have seen that pain is the constant across every single client. And in the things that hurt we often find a few things:
- What matters to us most
- Who matters to us most
- How we respond to certain triggers and events in life
- The root of why we learned to behave that way
Coaching at its most simplistic is a three-step process:
- See the pattern
- Create space before you act
- Choose a new pattern
This isn’t all of course, but it is a substantial portion of what I do. And until the pain we’ve experienced gets acknowledged, it shows up in everything we do and we have very little awareness of the impact.
It can feel like suffering to confront the old pain and the resulting patterns of our lives. But the only alternative is worse: redirecting that pain onto others around us (or repressing to create more pain within ourselves).
I know because I’ve seen it in my own life and I see it show up for nearly every client I work with.
There is nothing wrong with having been hurt. But you are not your hurt.
You are a hero waiting to emerge.
Questions to Apply This to Your Life
- How does your old hurt show up in your work?
- If you knew you could heal, what might become possible?
- Who is the hero within you waiting to emerge?
As always, I’m grateful for you. Thanks for being here.
Much love and respect,
