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“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.” Psalm 51:1 (NIV)

David spent months leading while hiding, appearing strong, rendering judgment, and doing the job, while a hidden reality quietly ate away at him underneath. It took Nathan to give him room to finally see what he couldn’t see on his own. In the Film Room, that same pattern showed up in my own story with Payte and Sue. The two people who loved me enough not to look away, until the night I finally stopped managing the struggles that I didn’t want people to know.

The insight underneath both stories: confession isn’t information, but it’s agreement. It’s the moment you stop defending the version of yourself you’ve been protecting and let God and the people He’s placed around you to help you discover what’s actually there.

That’s the work in front of you this week. Not performance, not more knowledge, but an honest look into the internal struggle that is holding you back.

Reflect

Sit with these reflections before you move on. Don’t rush past the one that you identify with the most:

1. Where in my life am I still leading, functioning, and performing; while something underneath quietly threatens to cave my life in?

2. What’s the difference between knowing something is wrong and treating it like it’s real; and knowing something is wrong and pretending like it doesn’t exist?

3. Who plays the role Nathan played for David (or Payte and Sue played for Ryan)? Who are the people that love me enough not to participate in an illusion? If no one comes to mind, sit with that honestly.

4. When I’m confronted with something that’s off about my character, is my first instinct to explain, or to examine myself?

5. What would it cost me to stop managing my image with the people closest to me? What might letting go be worth?

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This is the story of mine. What it cost me to keep hiding, what it took to finally stop, and what it’s taught me about building a life and a leadership, where truth doesn’t have to be managed.

The Story

For months, Payte and I met every week at a local Starbucks.

I would show up in my sales suit. Payte would show up in gym clothes. That was fitting, because the gym was where we met. I noticed him one day wearing NFL player-only gear, and if you’ve played in the league, you recognize the stuff that normally doesn’t make its way onto the racks at a sporting goods store. I figured he had played, so I walked across the gym and gave him an awkward version of an insider check.

That conversation became a friendship. And that friendship became one of the relationships God would eventually use to redirect my life.

I had recently started attending church again. I was carrying a Bible my former teammate Kevin Mawae had given me, and I was genuinely hungry for the Word. I wanted to understand Scripture. I wanted to know what Jesus called “the truth”.

The problem was, I knew how to learn truth without living truth. I knew how to acquire biblical knowledge while hiding parts of my life that contradicted everything I was reading.

Payte and I would sit together, read Scripture, pray, and sometimes even worship together. Looking back, I can see that he was gently trying to lead me toward the kind of vulnerability that defines our friendship today. But I wasn’t ready. The Word convicted me, but conviction had not yet become confession, so I settled for compromise.

I was fighting an internal battle with sexual integrity. I was hiding adultery. My marriage was unraveling. My family was feeling the consequences of choices I didn’t want to fully acknowledge. And somehow, I kept going.

That is one of the frightening things about living disconnected from reality: eventually, you can become so committed to the version of your life you’re trying to protect that you begin believing it yourself. I wasn’t simply lying to other people. I had learned how to lie to myself.

But Payte knew something wasn’t right. And if Payte wasn’t completely sure how broken things had become, his wife, Sue, knew.

There comes a point when you can’t keep convincing people you’re standing on a mountaintop while you’re actually walking through a valley with a shovel in your hands, digging your own grave. Eventually, I dug mine deep enough that there was nowhere left to hide.

I hit rock bottom.

There are parts of that night I still carry with reverence, because I know how differently the story could have ended. Physically, I was standing in my closet. Spiritually and emotionally, I had reached the bottom of the hole I had been digging for years. I had a gun in my hand.

There wasn’t another layer of image left to protect: no NFL résumé, sales success, religious language, no explanation, no argument; no way to make what was happening look better than it was. Just me, the truth about my life, and God.

I prayed to be rescued. And God met me there.

When I walked out of that closet, one of the first people I called was Payte. Soon afterward, I sat down with him and Sue and finally started telling the truth. All of it. The sexual brokenness, the adultery, all the secrets. The condition of my marriage. My fear that divorce was coming.

For so long, I had been managing what people were allowed to know about me. Now I was sitting across from two people who already knew something was wrong, and I finally stopped managing the story.

Then Sue said something I have carried with me for years:

“Ryan, we knew. But we were waiting on God to tell you.”

That sentence changed something in me.

The Problem

Sue wasn’t saying they had been waiting for God to inform me that adultery was wrong. I knew it was wrong. I didn’t need more information.

I needed reality. There is a difference.

This is the problem underneath the problem for so many leaders: we mistake information for transformation. I had spent enough time around Scripture to recognize sinful behavior. What I had not been willing to do was allow the truth to penetrate the identity I was desperately trying to protect.

Leadership doesn’t remove that vulnerability; it can actually deepen it. Influence gives you a greater ability to control what people are allowed to see. The more capable you are, the more convincingly you can perform stability while something underneath it is quietly caving in. You learn to hold the microphone in one hand and hide the wound with the other, and after enough time, you stop noticing you’re doing it.

That’s the trap. Not that leaders fail, but everyone fails. The trap is building enough skill at managing your image that failure never has to become visible, even to you.

The Biblical Insight

In that sense, Payte and Sue gave me something Nathan gave David.

They gave me room to finally see.

Nathan didn’t merely tell David that adultery and murder were wrong. David already knew the law. Nathan helped David confront a reality he had somehow become capable of avoiding while continuing to function as king. And when reality finally broke through, David stopped defending himself.

“I have sinned against the Lord.”

That moment wasn’t the end of David’s consequences. Truth rarely erases consequences. But it was the end of pretending. And in many ways, that was the beginning of something new for me too.

Underneath David’s ability to finally say those words was something deeper than moral courage. David had a history with God. He knew God’s character. He knew His mercy. He knew that his life ultimately belonged to Someone larger than himself.

Psalm 51 begins there:

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love.”

David didn’t appeal to his résumé. He didn’t remind God that he had killed Goliath. He didn’t point toward his leadership accomplishments. He didn’t explain the pressure of being king.

He appealed to the character of God.

According to Your unfailing love.

That is what makes honesty possible.

The Coaching Insight

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Scripture

“Have mercy on me, O God, according to your unfailing love; according to your great compassion blot out my transgressions.” — Psalm 51:1 (NIV)

Reflection

One of the greatest tests of leadership isn’t whether you can handle success, it’s whether you can handle the truth.

King David, one of Scripture’s most revered leaders, a man who led a nation and was known for his devotion to God, had an affair with Bathsheba, the wife of one his most loyal soldiers. When she got pregnant, he covered it up. When the cover-up failed, he had her husband Uriah killed in battle.

Here’s what should stop every leader cold: David didn’t step down, he didn’t come clean, but he kept leading. He continued to make decisions, appearing in public, rendering judgment on other people’s lives, all while burying this moral failure underneath. Externally, he was still the king. Internally, he was a captive to something sinister in his own soul.

For close to a year, no one confronted him. Then God sent the prophet Nathan.

Nathan didn’t walk in swinging accusations. He told David a story about a rich man who had everything but still stole the one thing a poor man loved. David was furious, and demanded the man be punished. That’s when Nathan said it straight: you’re the man.

Nathan wasn’t just exposing what David did. He was exposing what David couldn’t see. David could spot injustice instantly in someone else’s story, because he was blind to it in his own. His image had become worth more to him than the truth, and that trade had started warping his grip on reality itself.

That is one of leadership’s greatest dangers.

When leaders need to be right more than they need to be honest, the people around them slowly stop telling them the truth. Team members begin asking, “What can we safely tell the boss?” instead of, “What is actually true?” Fear replaces honesty, image replaces integrity, and reality quietly disappears.

But David’s greatest leadership moment wasn’t winning a battle or building a kingdom. It was a handful of words: “I have sinned.” No defense, no spin, just the truth, that was finally spoken out loud.

Right after that conversation with Nathan, David wrote a prayer that is preserved in the Bible as Psalm 51, and it’s still read today by people trying to come clean about their own failures. It isn’t the prayer of a broken man trying to earn his way back. It reads more like the prayer of someone who already knows he’s loved, and because of that, can finally afford to stop hiding.

That’s the part worth sitting with: only someone who knows they are deeply loved can afford to tell the truth about themselves.

Emotionally mature leaders no longer need to win every conversation, defend every decision, or appear endlessly competent. Their sense of worth isn’t riding on looking impressive, it’s already settled somewhere deeper. That security creates something rare: the freedom to admit you were wrong, receive correction, and stay teachable instead of defensive.

Ironically, leaders become most trustworthy the moment they stop protecting their image and start protecting reality.

Connection

In the past, my first instinct when I was confronted was usually to explain before I confess. I want people to understand my reasons before they see my mistakes. But I learned about an invitation to something deeper. I have learned to let go of my need to be right so I can actually grow.

The healthiest leaders aren’t the ones who never fail. They’re the ones who never stop letting the truth catch up to them.

Bottom Line

The strongest leaders aren’t the ones who protect their image, they’re the ones secure enough in being loved to face reality without fear.

Soul Work

Reflection Questions

1. Where am I defending myself instead of examining myself?

2. Who has permission to tell me the truth; even when it’s difficult to hear?

3. Have I created a culture where people manage my emotions, or one where they can honestly pursue reality together?

Leadership Question

“Who must I become so that I no longer need reality to protect my ego?”

Prayer

God, thank You that Your love is bigger than my failures and Your mercy is stronger than my pride. Give me the humility to welcome the truth instead of running from it, the courage to admit when I’m wrong quickly, and the security of knowing my worth was never up for debate to begin with. Form me into a leader who can face reality, because I trust Your grace to meet me there.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

If this devotional encouraged you, subscribe for more reflections on leadership, spiritual formation, identity, purpose, and emotional health.

If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use the link below to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions with me, Ryan Young.

Coming next in The Film Room: We’ll go deeper into what happens when a leader’s need to be right outlives their ability to be honest and how to rebuild a culture where truth doesn’t have to be managed.

Send me your prayer request HERE alone.

I want to be honest with you about something before we start.

I didn’t develop these reps from a whiteboard. I developed them from a closet.

Everything in the Film Room Vol. 4 this week; the gap between the highlight reel and the hidden life, the addiction I was managing in secret, the moment I stood with a gun in my hand and prayed the most desperate prayer of my life that wasn’t a case study. That was my story. And the practices you’re about to work through are the ones that, over time, helped me close the distance between the man I was performing as and the man God wanting to form me to be.

I’m not handing you a framework that worked for someone else.

I’m handing you the one that helped save my life.

So if you came into this week looking for a quick leadership tip, I want to gently push back. These reps are designed to go where most leadership content won’t; into the rooms you’ve locked from the inside. That kind of work requires more than skimming. It requires you to actually stop, sit with the questions, and do the reps.

I’m doing them with you. And I’m praying for the son/daugther on the other side of this page.

Let’s get to work.

“It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery.”

— Galatians 5:1 NIV

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In this week’s Huddle, we talked about leaders who get so good at helping everyone else through pressure that they lose the ability to process their own. This is what that gap looked like for me in my leadership journey.

What you’re about to read isn’t a case study about somebody else’s leadership; this is my story. If you’ve ever built a life that looked strong from the outside while something entirely different was happening underneath, I want you to see exactly how far that gap can stretch, and exactly what’s waiting on the other side of naming the pressure you’re living with.

Pull up a chair. I’m glad you’re going deeper with me.

My Story

High-Performing Leaders Carry Two Lives

There’s the life people see: the production, the title, the results, the reputation. And there’s the life happening beneath the surface, the dark side of leadership: the coping mechanisms you manage in private, the marriage that’s slowly falling apart, the shame you’ve buried so deep it’s become a part of who you are.

I was a master at the separation.

On the field, I was locked in: professional and technician. I prepared, I performed, and I produced. That identity; the one who holds the line, had been with me since the first time I buried my pain and turned it into fuel on a football field.

But off the field, I was feeding something I couldn’t control; my addiction. The infidelity that came with it was dismantling everything I had built. My marriage, my integrity, and eventually my career. The distractions off the field became injuries on the field, and five seasons in, I was done.

I just didn’t know yet how close to done I really was.

Rock Bottom Has a Floor

Within three years of retirement, I had walked through everything the statistics promise NFL players will face: financial problems, divorce, and depression. I had checked every box.

And I hated the person I had become.

I want to be careful here, because what I’m about to describe isn’t a metaphor. This is my story.

A note before you keep reading: what follows describes a specific moment involving suicidal thoughts. If you’re in a similar place right now, please pause and reach out to get help by calling or texting 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline). You don’t have to carry this alone.

One afternoon, I picked up my kids from school and we returned home. They went to their room. I went to mine. It had been a long day inside a long week where every wall was closing in at once. The divorce, the failing business, and the addiction I kept returning to, never once changed the circumstances, only numbed the pain long enough to make my self loathing worse.

I had had enough. I went to my closet. I picked up my handgun.

And I stood there… ready to end it.

Then through the closet wall, I heard my children laughing and playing.

And as I stopped to listen to them, I thought, “I can’t leave them this way.” Then a thought broke through, one I couldn’t explain other than as a supernatural breakthrough. That thought asked the question:

What about God?

I almost laughed at it. God? I had made a mess of everything. I had no business asking God for anything. The shame of what I had done, what I had become, was so thick I could barely speak the words.

But I was desperate. So I prayed the most honest prayer I had ever prayed:

“God, if You’re real and Your love is real, I need You to come take this from me. Because if You don’t, You know that I will.”

And in that closet, I believe God met me in that space.

I can’t give you the theological precision for what happened in that moment. What I can tell you is that I felt a presence, as if God had come into that moment, and He wrapped His arms around me in that closet. I felt affirmation that I belonged to Him, as a son longs to be accepted by his father. And for the first time in a long time, I felt something I had never felt before in my adult life. Freedom.

I put the gun down and I walked out of the closet.

And I began the longest, hardest, most necessary journey of my life. I surrendered my way of living and made the decision to accept new life with God, through Jesus Christ.

The Problem

What the Locker Room Doesn’t Teach You

Here’s what I’ve come to understand about that season of my life, and about the leaders I now walk alongside: we are trained to carry our burdens and never to surrender.

The world rewards the leader who absorbs pressure. The one who doesn’t show pain. The one who plays through injury, holds their emotions, keeps their face neutral when the coach tears them apart on film. Toughness? That’s just the capacity to hold more.

And as leaders, if we’re not careful, we take that formation with us everywhere we go.

Into our marriages, where we absorb conflict without ever naming what we’re actually feeling. Into our families, where we provide without ever being truly present. Into our faith, where we serve and lead and show up on Sunday while locking God out of the rooms where the real war is being fought.

Peter Scazzero names this pattern with surgical precision in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. He calls it the gap between spiritual activity and spiritual transformation. As a ministry leader, I can see the potential of being incredibly busy for God: leading, serving, and building, while my interior life is in complete disrepair. The activity becomes the cover, and our performance becomes the shield.

And you don’t have to sit in a pew for this to be your story. Strip the spiritual language off and the exact same gap shows up in any boardroom, locker room, or startup office. The executive who works ninety-hour weeks while their marriage quietly dies in the next room. The coach who wins championships while their own kids grow up barely knowing them. The entrepreneur who mistakes revenue for identity and can’t sit still long enough to ask why the winning never feels like enough. Whether you call it “spiritual activity” or just “staying busy,” the mechanism is identical: production becomes the cover story, and the interior life goes unexamined because nobody is asking about it… including you.

I know that leader. That leader was me.

What Scazzero calls emotional immaturity isn’t weakness. It’s armor. It’s what happens when a person learns early that the only safe way to exist is to manage the external while starving the internal, because leadership rewards the external: results, output, and performance. And the internal: the fear, the shame, the coping mechanisms, or the emotional fatigue? That gets filed away; managed or buried.

Until it isn’t.

Biblical Insight

The Yoke You Were Never Meant to Pull Alone

Jesus said something in Matthew 11 that I used to read past.

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest” — Matthew 11:28

I used to read that as an invitation for people who were weak, and couldn’t handle the load. What I understand now is that Jesus wasn’t describing a category of people. He was describing all of us. Being weary and burdened isn’t a leadership condition. It’s a human one. Leadership just makes it harder to identify and admit.

The yoke He offers isn’t lighter in the sense that it asks less of you. It’s lighter in the sense that you’re no longer pulling it alone. And there’s a lead ox in that yoke who actually knows the terrain.

What I had never understood before that closet, is what most high-performing leaders never understand until something forces them to their knees: is that surrender is not the opposite of strength.

Surrender is the beginning of it.

Scazzero describes the soul that has been genuinely touched by God’s love as a soul that can finally be still; not because it has nothing left to fight for, but because it has finally found someone worthy of trusting with the fight. That kind of stillness isn’t passivity… it’s peace. And peace, in someone who has been carrying what I was carrying, is the one thing performance was never going to give me: the freedom to stop being a slave to its outcomes.

From Slave to Son

I didn’t walk out of that closet as a finished person.

The next season, the one that began the moment I put that gun down, was not easy. Confession and repentance never are. The slow, grinding work of letting God into the locked rooms of your life is not a highlight reel moment. It’s a daily practice that sometimes feels like failure and sometimes feels like grace, and as the days go by, it all begins to feel like love.

As I confessed the sin I had hidden: the addiction, the infidelity, and the performance-driven identity that had shaped my whole life; I began to experience what John 8 describes as freedom. Not the freedom of someone who finally got their act together. The freedom of a son who had spent years desperate for his Father’s love and affirmation, and who finally discovered that healing was never waiting on the other side of fixing his failures and his flaws. It was already there, inside belonging to a family that keeps you even while you’re still a mess.

“If the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” — John 8:36

That word Son; is the one I want you to sit with, because in the language of Scripture it carries something bigger than gender. Paul makes the same point to the Galatians using a different word: no longer a slave, but a child; and not a child, but an heir (Galatians 4:7). Whether the text says son, daughter, or child, the status underneath is identical: family, belonging, permanent, and an unearned inheritance.

Because Jesus isn’t just offering freedom from sin in that passage. He’s offering a relational identity. A slave has no permanent place in the family. But a child belongs to it forever. Not because of performance. Not because of how little they’ve messed up. Because of Whose they are.

The Spiritual Journey that Scazzero traces through Scripture, is the movement from slavery to freedom; and from orphan spirit to beloved child, and it doesn’t begin with getting your life together. And it doesn’t have to begin with a person on their knees, in a closet, with nothing left to offer. You can discover that life today; God is ready to receive you now.

Coaching Insight

If you lead anything: a team, a company, a church, a family, you might have some version of my closet. It may not involve a weapon. It may look like a spreadsheet you check obsessively at 2 a.m., a substance, a scroll habit, a second phone, a slow withdrawal from your spouse that you’ve explained away as “a busy season.”

The mechanism is the same one Scazzero describes: activity substituting for transformation. You can be leading with excellence and dying quietly at the same time. Nobody will stop you, because your production doesn’t slow down. That’s what makes it dangerous. The very thing that makes you effective is the thing that lets you hide.

Here’s the coaching reframe: what looks like strength; our ability to hold it together, to never let them see you sweat, to keep performing regardless of what’s underneath, is sometimes just a well-managed collapse. And what looks like weakness: naming the addiction, admitting the marriage is in trouble, or saying “I am not okay” out loud to another human being, is very often the strongest act of actual leadership we can take. .

Surrender isn’t the end of your leadership. For a lot of leaders, it’s the beginning of the only leadership that will last.

Practical Application

You don’t need to have a closet moment to start this work. You just need to stop waiting for one.

Name it. Write down, in one sentence, the thing you are currently managing instead of surrendering. Be specific. “I have a temper I never let anyone see” is more useful than “I struggle with anger.”

Tell one person. Not everyone. One. A pastor, a counselor, a coach, a trusted friend who has earned the right to hear it. Confession loses its power when it stays private, and it loses its danger when it’s no longer a secret.

Bring it to God before you bring it to your calendar. Before the next hard conversation, the next board meeting, the next Sunday; spend five honest minutes telling God what you’re actually carrying, not what you’re managing.

Ask for help before the wall forces you to. Schedule an hour with a counselor, a coach, or a pastor. Chosen surrender instead of forced surrender.

Sit with these questions this week:

1. What am I currently performing my way through instead of processing?

2. Who would be the “one person” I could actually tell the truth to?

3. What has my production been covering for?

4. Do I believe surrender is weakness, or have I just never seen it modeled as strength?

5. If Jesus said “Come” to me today, exactly as I am, what would I need to bring with me?

Coaching Invitation

You may not be standing in a closet with a gun.

But I suspect you are carrying something.

Something you have not named out loud to another person. Something you manage around, functioned enough to keep hidden, and disciplined enough to keep from spilling over; but that is quietly costing you more than you’re willing to admit.

The leadership culture we operate in will reward you for carrying it. It will mistake your silence for strength. It will promote your performance and never ask about your pain.

Jesus will not do that.

He will look at everything you are managing, everything you are hiding, everything you have decided He couldn’t possibly love; and He will say the same thing He said to every broken person in the Gospels:

Come to Me.

Not: clean yourself up and then come. Not: figure out how to carry this better. Just: Come.

That is the invitation of Vol. 4. If The Huddle asked whether you’re anchored to the One who has overcome the world, this is what it looks like when a leader finally stops managing the fall and lets God catch them.

I’m praying that somewhere between these lines, you find the courage to accept it.

This is why iCoachCharacter exists. Not to hand you another leadership framework to perform, but to walk with you in the actual room where the fall happened, and the room where the rebuilding has to happen too. Whether that’s through a devotional that catches you before the wall, a Film Room piece that names what you’ve been managing, or a direct conversation with me about the specific thing you’re carrying, you don’t have to figure this out by watching from a distance. Vol. 4 was never meant to be just content. It was an invitation to stop performing your way through the pressure and start letting someone into it.

Send me your prayer request HERE🙏🏾

This Film Room, like every Film Room, is included in your subscription. If you haven’t scheduled a COACHING SESSION with me yet, you can do that here.

You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

Scripture

“I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” — John 16:33

Reflection

One of the things I love about leadership is solving problems under pressure. That’s the calling. You spend your life helping people navigate conflict, adversity, chaos, pressure, and responsibility in real time. Every hard conversation, adjustment, meeting, decision, and critical moment requires clarity, composure, and the ability to move toward solutions.

Great leaders don’t panic when problems show up; they show up prepared for them. You’ve trained for this. You’ve built the instincts, the frameworks, the calm-under-fire reflexes that let you walk into chaos and start making sense of it for everyone else in the room.

But I want to ask you something deeper: How are you doing at finding solutions in your own life?

Not just professionally, but in your soul, your relationships, your leadership, your personal development, and the quiet places nobody sees. Because sometimes we become so skilled at helping everyone else navigate pressure that we slowly lose the ability to process our own.

You can become solution-focused publicly while becoming emotionally exhausted privately. You can walk a staff member through a crisis on Tuesday and have nothing left for your own soul by Friday. And over time, carrying everyone else without being carried by God will wear a person down. It doesn’t happen all at once. It happens in the small, unnoticed erosion of a leader who never learned how to receive what they’re so used to giving.

Peter Scazzero, calls this the iceberg. Above the waterline is what everyone can see; your composure, your competence, your ability to walk into a room and lead it. Below the waterline is everything nobody sees: the grief you haven’t processed, the anger you’ve learned to manage instead of name, the fear quietly driving half your decisions, the patterns from your family of origin still shaping how you lead today. A leader can spend a lifetime maintaining what’s above the waterline while the mass underneath goes completely unexamined.

That’s the heart of what it means to be emotionally healthy and spiritually mature, as the two are inseparable. You cannot be spiritually mature while remaining emotionally immature. Skill under pressure is not the same thing as wholeness. You can be excellent above the waterline and still be starving beneath it.

Jesus never promised us a life without problems. He promised peace in the middle of them. Read that again, because it’s easy to skim past. He didn’t say, “I have removed the world’s trouble.” He said, “In this world you will have trouble.” The trouble stays. What changes is what’s underneath you while you carry it.

This matters because the greatest threat to our lives is not the presence of problems, but it’s trying to face them disconnected from the true source of wisdom, peace, and hope. Our ability to stay grounded, disciplined, and solution-oriented has to flow from somewhere deeper than personality, gifting, experience, or performance. Those things will get you far. They will not get you there all the way.

Jesus is not simply a spiritual assistant to leadership, brought in when the natural resources run dry. He is the foundation underneath it. Not a resource you tap when your own strength fails, but He wants to be the ground you stand on every day you lead.

Connection

In my life and leadership, I was trained to walk toward pressure, not away from it. And for a long time, I wore that as identity. If I could hold it together for the locker room, that meant I was strong. That meant I was doing what a leader does.

What I didn’t see was how quietly I was running on empty. I could sit across from someone in crisis and offer them peace I wasn’t actually experiencing myself. I could talk about resilience of self; while quietly struggling with my own composure to get me through the week. Nobody could tell, because I was good on the field and appeared that I was holding it all together off. That’s the trap. You can be excellent at helping others and still be spiritually and emotionally malnourished underneath it.

It took a hard season, facing my disappointment, and an honest conversations with God for me to understand that being a solution for others was never meant to replace being shepherded myself. This is called “the Wall”: a crisis God allows, not to punish you, but to stop you long enough to reach the parts of you that busyness had let you avoid. I had to learn how to bring my own pressure to Jesus instead of just managing it well enough.

I’ve come to believe it’s one of the most important things a leader will ever learn: we were never meant to be the foundation. We were meant to stand on One.

Bottom Line

The goal isn’t just becoming a better problem solver in the world; it’s becoming a person anchored to the One who has overcome the world.

Soul Work

This exercise is shaped by the framework in Peter Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. Long before Scazzero borrowed the line, John Calvin wrote that almost all our wisdom consists of two things: knowing God, and knowing ourselves. You won’t grow in one without growing in the other.

Reflection Questions

Where in my life am I currently solution-focused publicly, but emotionally exhausted privately?

Who or what am I depending on to give me peace under pressure?

When was the last time I let someone else carry something for me, instead of just carrying it myself?

If peace turns out to be a person, not just a practice; am I willing to find out who?

Leadership Question

Am I becoming so skilled at helping others process pressure that I’ve lost the ability to process my own?

Prayer

Father, thank You for the responsibility and influence You’ve entrusted to leaders. Strengthen us not only in what we do, but in who we are becoming.

Give us peace where there is pressure, wisdom where there is tension, and remind us that we were never meant to carry life alone. Meet us in the places we’ve gotten too good at hiding the exhaustion we’ve learned to mask, the pressure we’ve learned to perform through.

Teach us to bring You our own hearts as honestly as we help others bring You theirs. Let us be leaders who are not just solution-focused, but soul-anchored.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Call to Action

Send me your prayer request HERE. 🙏🏾

If this devotional encouraged you, subscribe for weekly reflections on leadership, spiritual formation, identity, purpose, and emotional health.

Next in The Film Room, “The Pressure No One Saw”: I open up about the closet, the door, and the lowest point of my life, and share what it actually took to stop carrying my burdens alone.

If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use this LINK to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions with me, Ryan Young.

You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

And then a teammate left a Bible on my stool. Not a program. Not a curriculum. Just a man who had been genuinely formed by God, caring for another man’s soul. Simple. Personal. Real.

What undid me wasn’t what Kevin said. It was who he already was before he said it. He was the first living example I had ever encountered of a leader whose inner life was the actual source of his outer leadership, and not a supplement to it. Not a spiritual hobby on the side, but the source formed on the inside.

That’s what this Rep is about. Not information about Spirit-formed leadership. The practice of beginning to build it into your actual life, in your actual leadership, starting this week.

Coach’s Clipboard

Here’s the tension we’re working with: flesh can build things that look successful. Flesh cannot produce life. If you’ve been leading, parenting, ministering, or competing on proven methods and personal effort, with no real dependence on God underneath; you’re not broken. You’re just running the same self-sustaining system Nicodemus ran. It can produce results. But it will cost you more than it gives, and it will eventually run out.

This week we name the soul-wearying systems we’ve been carrying; and begin the practice of surrendering them to the soul-sustaining ways of Jesus Christ.

1 · READ

Read John 3:1–8 slowly. Three times through.

Now there was a Pharisee, a man named Nicodemus who was a member of the Jewish ruling council. He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.” Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless they are born again.” “How can someone be born when they are old?” Nicodemus asked. “Surely they cannot enter a second time into their mother’s womb to be born!” Jesus answered, “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit. You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
— John 3:1–8 (NIV)

First read: Just receive the words. No analysis. No application. Just let them land.

Second read: Where do you see yourself in Nicodemus: credentialed, competent, and still quietly missing something you can’t produce on your own?

Third read: Sit with verse 8. The wind blows where it pleases. You can’t control it. You can only position yourself to be moved by it.

Close with this prayer prompt, written or spoken quietly: God, what are You trying to show me about what I’ve been building, and what do You want to give life to?

2 · REFLECT

1. Where have I built something that looks successful but, underneath, I know I’m running out of the energy my own effort can sustain?

2. What’s one area of my leadership where I’ve confused external results with caring for the deeper needs of my own soul?

3. Who has God placed in my path; like Kevin in mine, that I’ve been too busy or too guarded to actually receive from?

4. Where am I currently leading by formula in a way that’s quietly costing me more than I’ve been willing to admit?

The Leadership Question Beneath the Question: “Am I leading from a soul that’s been fed by God, or from a performance that I believe will satisfy my soul with the approval of man?”

3 · REP | The Surrender Audit

Get a sheet of paper or open your notes app. Create two lists.

List 1 | “Things I’m Leading by Formula”
Name 3–5 specific areas where you’re currently operating on proven methods, personal talent, or sheer willpower, with no real spiritual dependence underneath. Don’t answer generally. The program. The role. The relationship. The season. Name it.

List 2 | “Things I Need to Surrender to the Spirit”
For each item on List 1, write one honest sentence: what would it look like to stop manufacturing this and start asking God to give it life? Not abandon it. Not quit. Just release the grip.

Close with this prayer: God, I can’t produce what only You can give. I surrender _______ to You today.

4 · RELATE

This week, have an honest conversation with a spouse, friend, mentor, or trusted colleague. Ask them one question:

“Where have you noticed me leading from control instead of surrender?”

Then do the hardest part of the whole rep: listen. Don’t defend. Don’t explain. Don’t reframe it. Just receive what they give you.

That is the rep.

5 · RESPOND | The Daily Examen

Rather than measuring your performance this week, we’re going to practice something different; a contemplative prayer exercise rooted in Ignatian spirituality and developed further by Peter Scazzero in Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. It’s called the Daily Examen. It takes five minutes.

Sit quietly. Breathe. Then move through these five movements slowly:

Presence: Begin by acknowledging that God is with you right now. Not grading you. Not waiting for you to perform. Simply present. Rest in that for a moment.

Gratitude: Ask, What am I genuinely grateful for today? Not the polished answer. The real one. Name one specific thing.

Review: Walk back through your day slowly, as if watching film. Where did you feel most alive? Where did you feel most depleted? Where were you leading from your soul; and where were you running on formula?

Honesty: Where did flesh lead today? Where did you manufacture, control, or perform something that only God can give life to? Name it without condemnation. Confession isn’t punishment. It’s returning to the Source.

Surrender: Close with one honest sentence to God. Not a speech. Not a polished prayer. Just the truest thing you can say right now about what you need from Him tomorrow.

Practice this for five consecutive days this week. Not as a performance metric, but as a return. The goal isn’t to score higher. The goal is to show up.

Formation Phrase: Surrender → Receive → Reproduce

Call To Action

Thank you for going deep in The Locker Room this week. If something in this volume: the Huddle, the Film Room, or this Rep; named something real in your leadership journey, share it with someone who needs to hear it. The leaders around you are carrying more than they’re showing.

Schedule a FREE 30-Min Coaching Session with me, Ryan Young.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

You’re not alone in the hidden battle.

This is The Film Room, the place where we go deeper than the scoreboard. Longer reads. Harder questions. The kind of leadership development that happens when you’re finally willing to look at what’s underneath.

If you’re ready to go there, I’m glad you’re in the room.

The Story

In my first NFL season with the New York Jets, I lined up and lockered next to Kevin Mawae; a future Hall of Famer who lived his Christian faith without apology at the top of his game. I didn’t know what to do with that. I was intrigued, and honestly a little suspicious. One day, quietly struggling in my marriage, I pulled him aside and asked for advice. He said he’d pray about it and get back to me. My unspiritual mind thought, well, I guess he just wrote me off.

The next morning, I found a brand-new Bible on my locker stool. Inside, Kevin had written out his answer to my question, included Scripture, and signed it with love. I’d grown up in church, and no one had ever given me a Bible. I didn’t know it could be personal. I didn’t know it could be alive.

That was the first seed of more to come.

But to understand why a Bible on a locker stool stopped me cold, why a simple act of personal faith from a teammate hit me the way it did, you have to understand where I came from. And more specifically, what I had never actually been given, despite growing up in the one place I should have received it most.

Kevin’s gesture wasn’t complicated. It wasn’t a theological argument or a polished ministry moment. It was just a man who had been genuinely formed by God, caring for another man’s soul. Simple. Personal. Real.

And I had never seen that up close.

Not because I hadn’t been around faith. I had been immersed in it my entire youth. But there is a difference, a profound one, between being immersed in religious activity and being formed by genuine spiritual pursuit. I didn’t have language for that difference when I was standing at my locker staring at that Bible. I just knew that whatever Kevin had, I hadn’t been given it. And whatever was underneath his leadership, I hadn’t been taught to build it.

To understand why, you have to go back further than the NFL.

The Problem

I didn’t learn that my value was tied to what I could deliver in the locker room. I learned it in church.

I was raised in the rhythm of religious activity: Monday night meetings, Wednesday choir rehearsal, and long Sunday services. When my dad was ordained a reverend, that rhythm only got louder. But presence in a spiritual process is not the same as the pursuit of God. What I absorbed wasn’t a hunger for the Spirit. It was a template for performance.

That template followed me into one of the most formative relationships of my leadership life. My time under Coach Bill Snyder at Kansas State. Coach Snyder is one of the greatest leaders in the history of college athletics. He didn’t just build a program; he built people. He gave us a leadership tool belt and filled it with real tools: discipline, accountability, preparation, and a standard of excellence I carry to this day.

And while I know Coach Snyder was a man of faith, the development we received reflected spiritual principles without spiritual practices. The framework pointed toward character formation without pointing us toward the Source of it. And if I’m being honest, it wasn’t just that the opportunities were absent. There were men around me; our strength coach Rod Cole, our chaplain Jeff Smith, who were offering something deeper. I just wasn’t ready to receive it. I was too busy producing to recognize what I actually needed.

I was building something that looked like a life. Succeeding in my own strength. Climbing. Performing. Delivering. So I made a slow, silent trade: I let go of the Source and held on to the results.

I didn’t walk away from God dramatically. No declaration, no crisis of faith I could point to. It was the way a fire goes out when no one tends it.

What I didn’t understand then was that my soul was still hungry. Outward success can never feed an inward need.

This is the issue underneath almost every leadership struggle I’ve experienced personally and helped others work through: we trust what we can produce more than we trust the One who gives us the capacity to produce it. Proven methods feel safer than spiritual dependence. Success in athletics, the marketplace, or in ministry; becomes a substitute for the real thing. Leadership itself becomes a coping mechanism that lets us avoid our own need for transformation.

That’s not a character flaw unique to me. It’s the default setting of flesh. Flesh is resourceful. It can build programs, platforms, and performances that look genuinely impressive. What flesh cannot do, no matter how disciplined, talented, or well-intentioned; is produce spiritual life. It can only reproduce more of itself.

And the most influential leaders I know have learned this: whole leaders don’t choose between flesh and spirit. They understand that human effort and spiritual formation were never meant to compete. But they also know which one has to come first.

The Biblical Insight

Nicodemus would have made sense in any locker room I’ve ever been in.

He was credentialed, respected, and accomplished. A Pharisee. A member of the ruling council. A man who had climbed every rung the religious world offered and arrived at the top. And yet something drove him to Jesus in the middle of the night; quietly, privately, and with questions his public résumé couldn’t resolve.

I understand that impulse more than I’d like to admit.

Jesus doesn’t affirm his credentials. He doesn’t celebrate the climb. He goes straight to the thing underneath it: “Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” Nicodemus does exactly what high-capacity performers do when confronted with something they can’t produce; he tries to turn it into a problem he can solve. How can a grown man enter his mother’s womb a second time? He’s looking for the method. The system. The steps. Because that’s the only framework he’s ever been given.

And Jesus won’t give him one.

“Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” — John 3:6

This is not a rebuke of human effort. Discipline, preparation, or systems; those are real and necessary. But Jesus is drawing a line that leadership culture almost never draws: there is a category of life that flesh simply cannot produce, no matter how refined or well-intentioned it becomes. Flesh can build. Flesh can perform. Flesh can even inspire. But flesh cannot give birth to spirit.

Then comes the line that I think is the real diagnostic for leaders:

“The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” — John 3:8

You cannot control the wind. You cannot manufacture it, schedule it, or build a strategy around it. The most we can do is position ourselves to be moved by it.

That’s a fundamentally different posture than the one most leaders are formed in. We are trained to produce outcomes, manage variables, and deliver results. The Spirit operates entirely outside those categories. Which means that at some point, every leader who wants to build something that actually lasts has to face a question that flesh cannot answer and performance cannot avoid: Am I producing this or is God giving it life?

Nicodemus came to Jesus as an expert. Jesus invited him to become a dependent. That invitation is the same one every high-capacity leader eventually receives. Not as a demotion, but as the only door that leads somewhere real.

Position is something flesh can achieve. Life is something only the Spirit can give.

The Coaching Insight

So when I got to the NFL and lined up next to Kevin Mawae, I genuinely didn’t know what to do with what I was seeing.

Kevin wasn’t performing his faith. He was living it; and there’s a difference you can feel even when you can’t name it. Here was a man at the absolute top of his profession. A future Hall of Famer. One of the most dominant offensive linemen in the league. He had every credential the world of football could offer. By every external measure, Kevin had already won.

And yet the thing that defined his presence in that locker room wasn’t his production. It was his soul.

He wasn’t using his platform to perform. He was using his life to point. He brought his faith into the locker room not as a brand or a badge, but as the actual source of how he operated. The way he treated people. The way he handled pressure. The way he showed up when the cameras weren’t on. There was a consistency to Kevin I had never encountered in a high-capacity leader; a man who had achieved everything the game could give him, and who clearly wasn’t running on it.

That disarmed me.

I had been formed in environments that gave me spiritual language without spiritual substance. I knew how to sound like a person of faith. Kevin knew how to be one. I had a template for performance. Kevin had a foundation for living. And watching him lead from that foundation at the highest level of professional football began to expose something in me I hadn’t had words for yet. The gap between what I was building on the outside and what was actually happening on the inside.

The Bible on my stool only meant something because the man who left it there had already shown me, over the course of a season, what it looked like to lead from a soul that was actually being formed by God. His words had weight because his life had roots.

That’s the thing about Spirit-formed leadership. You can’t manufacture it. You can’t perform it. People feel the difference, even when they can’t explain what they’re feeling. Kevin didn’t plant that first seed because he had the right answer. He planted it because he was the living proof that the answer was real.

Practical Application

Most leaders reading this aren’t opposed to spiritual development. They’ve just never been given a reason to prioritize it that made sense in the context of their actual leadership life. These four practices aren’t church disciplines dressed up as leadership tools. They’re honest diagnostics; the kind that work whether you’ve been following Jesus for twenty years or you’re just beginning to ask whether there’s something underneath the success you’ve been building.

1. Audit what you’re actually running on.
Every leader is running on something. Talent. Systems. Reputation. Relationships. Sheer will. None of those things are wrong, but none of them are unlimited. The most important leadership question isn’t what is working, but what happens when it stops? Take an honest inventory this week. What are you depending on to produce results? And if that thing were removed tomorrow, what would be left underneath it? That’s where your real foundation or the absence of one shows up.

2. Notice where the fire has gone out.
You don’t have to be religious to recognize this: there is an inner life, and it requires attention. Every leader I’ve ever coached who was burning out, checked out, or quietly falling apart had one thing in common; they had stopped tending something on the inside while pouring everything into what was visible on the outside. You don’t have to call it a spiritual practice. Call it margin. Call it reflection. Call it whatever language fits your world right now. But find it and protect it. The fire doesn’t go out all at once. It goes out when no one tends it.

3. Pay attention to who God or life has already placed around you.
Kevin Mawae wasn’t a program or a conference or a curriculum. He was a person living from somewhere different than what I had been taught; and proximity to that changed me before I even had language for what I was seeing. Most of us have someone like that in our circle right now. A person whose steadiness under pressure you can’t fully explain. A leader whose life seems to carry something your résumé doesn’t. Someone who leads from the inside out in a way that quietly exposes the gap in how you’ve been leading. Who is that person for you? Are you paying close enough attention to receive what they carry?

4. Ask the question that performance can’t answer.
Sit quietly for five minutes and ask yourself one question: What did I try to produce or control this week that I couldn’t actually give life to on my own? You don’t have to fix the answer. You don’t have to pray about it yet; though that’s available to you. Just name it. Honest awareness is always the first movement toward something better. Leaders who are willing to ask hard questions about what’s underneath their leadership are exactly the kind of leaders the people around them have been waiting for.

Coaching Invitation

If this piece named something in you; the gap between how your leadership looks and what’s actually happening in your soul. That gap is exactly where formation begins. You don’t have to close it alone.

iCoachCharacter coaching sessions exist for this moment. Not as an upsell. As a next step. A conversation with a coach who has lived this tension from a church pew to a locker room to ministry and leadership development; and who knows firsthand what it costs to lead from empty, and what becomes possible when you don’t.

If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use this link to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions.

You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

Scripture

“Very truly I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit. Flesh gives birth to flesh, but the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” — John 3:5–6 NIV

Reflection

Human effort is a real and necessary tool in leadership. Discipline, skill, systems are not the enemy. But human effort alone, can make a leader look successful while being spiritually empty underneath. Spiritless leadership isn’t usually dramatic or obvious. It’s just leaders who’ve never learned to value caring for their own soul; and because of that, will never fully understand the value of caring for the souls of the people they’re leading.

That’s what Jesus is getting at in John 3, in a conversation with a man we know as Nicodemus. “Flesh gives birth to flesh.” Nicodemus was a religious leader, a Pharisee, a member of the ruling council. He had the production down. He knew the law, the rituals, the language of righteousness. And Jesus tells him plainly: none of that produces what only the Spirit can produce.

I grew up in church. Monday night meetings. Wednesday choir rehearsal. What seemed like all-day Sunday service; the kind where you need a hydration break just to make it to the altar call. When my dad was ordained a reverend, that rhythm only got louder.

Here’s what no one warned me about: being physically present and active in a spiritual process doesn’t satisfy the soul’s deeper hunger for genuine pursuit. I knew how to look the part. I was good at the presentation of righteousness. But underneath the production, there was no real soul work happening, no honest wrestling, and no genuine search. Just performance.

That’s the trap for high-capacity people. We’re good at building things that look successful. Programs. Performances. Organizations. Even ministries. Flesh can build impressive things; it just can’t build eternal ones. Flesh can only reproduce more flesh.

I carried that pattern straight out of the sanctuary and into the locker room. My value got tied to what I could deliver. As my athletic career climbed: captain at Kansas State, university ambassador, eventually the NFL; my need for God quietly faded. I wasn’t producing soul-level sustainability. I was just producing more temporary human success. And when you’re succeeding in your own strength, it’s easy to make a slow, silent trade: let go of the Source and hold on to the results.

I didn’t walk away from God dramatically. There was no declaration. It was the way a fire goes out when nobody tends it.

What I didn’t understand then is that outward success can never feed an inward hunger. My soul was still thirsty, no matter how high I climbed.

Jesus, who defines leadership from the inside out, isn’t handing Nicodemus a better strategy. He’s telling him that only the Spirit can give birth to spirit; which means we have to attend to the care of our own soul, and as leaders, to the souls of the people entrusted to us. This isn’t a leadership tactic. It’s operating according to God’s design.

Connection

I think about how many leaders I’ve coached who are living this story right now. Fully immersed in the activity of leadership, faith, or ministry, and still privately starving. Not because they’re lazy or fake. Because they learned, like I did, that production earns approval and vulnerability doesn’t.

Here’s what I want you to hear: the fact that you’re still searching means that something in you recognizes the gap between what you’re building and what your soul actually needs. That’s not a sign of weakness, but the Spirit doing exactly what flesh never could. That’s God refusing to let you settle for a version of success that leaves you empty.

Soul care isn’t a retreat from leadership. It’s the foundation of it. The leader who tends to his own soul becomes the leader others can actually trust; not because they performs better, but because they lead from somewhere real. They’re not managing an image. They’re operating out of an identity that’s been formed by something deeper than results.

That’s the kind of leader the people around you are waiting for. Not the polished version. The formed one.

Bottom Line

The leader who neglects his own soul will eventually have nothing real left to give, because you cannot lead people somewhere you’ve never been willing to go yourself.

Soul Work

Reflection Questions:

1. What would it look like to bring God my honest wrestling instead of my polished performance?

2. Where am I currently “succeeding” in a way that’s quietly starving my soul?

3. What’s one area where I’ve been present in spiritual activity but absent in actual pursuit of God?

4. What would it look like this week to tend the fire instead of just performing the role?

Leadership Question:

“Am I leading from a soul that’s been fed by God, or from a performance that I believe will satisfy my soul with the approval of man?”

Prayer

Father, I confess how easy it is to build a life that looks like faithfulness without ever actually pursuing You. Forgive me for the seasons I let performance replace pursuit. Seasons where I showed up to the activity but never showed up to You.

I don’t want to keep leading from empty. I don’t want to keep producing things that look successful but carry no real life underneath them. Teach me to tend my own soul the way a good leader tends the people entrusted to him; with honesty, with patience, and with genuine care.

Birth something in me that flesh could never produce. Let my leadership flow from a soul that has actually been formed by You; not one still trying to prove something to You.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Next time in the Film Room, I'm taking you inside a moment that changed my life. A brand-new Bible sitting on my locker stool in the New York Jets facility, left there by a future Hall of Famer who led from somewhere I had never been taught to build from. We're going to look at what Spirit-formed leadership actually looks like at the top of a profession, why Nicodemus is a relatable leader in the New Testament, and the question every high-capacity leader eventually has to answer: Am I producing this, or is God giving it life?

If this devotional encouraged you, subscribe for weekly reflections on leadership, spiritual formation, identity, purpose, and emotional health.

If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use this link to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions with Ryan Young.

You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

Walking the PATH

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” - Psalm 119:105, NIV

Dreams are easy to hold when the path is clear. This week’s Formation Reps are for the leaders who are somewhere in the middle of their journey; called but not yet arrived, faithful but wondering what the detour means. Work through the PATH framework below. Don’t rush it. Let each step do its work.

The PATH Framework

P — Pause and name the season honestly.

Don’t call a detour a failure. Don’t let disappointment become shame. Get precise about what you’re actually experiencing. Pull out a journal and write three sentences: what you lost, what you still believe, and what emotion is most present right now. Naming is the beginning of healing. Vague grief is harder to carry than named grief. (Use this emotional wheel to help you find the words.)

A — Ask what God is forming, not just where He is leading.

Shift the primary question. Stop asking: “When does this path arrive at the dream?” Start asking: “Who am I becoming on it?” Every season of friction is also a season of formation. Look back at the last chapter of your journey; the season that felt like a detour, and write down three things you could not have learned anywhere else. That list is not filler. That list is architecture.

T — Trust the lamp, not the GPS.

A GPS gives you the whole route. A lamp gives you the next step. God operates more like a lamp. This week, identify one specific next faithful step in front of you; not the whole plan, just the next step. Write it down. Pray over it. Take it. The road doesn’t need to make sense from here. It needs to be walked from here.

H — Hold the dream open-handed.

Open-handed doesn’t mean letting go. It means releasing your grip enough to allow God to adjust your grasp. Closed hands can’t receive anything new. This week, take the dream you’ve been carrying and physically hold your hands open in prayer. Name the dream out loud to God. Tell Him you want it. Tell Him you trust Him with it. Surrender is not subtraction. It’s the posture that makes the dream safe to steward.

Bottom Line

The goal isn’t to arrive faster. The goal is to be formed deeper.

Soul Work

Reflection Questions

Is there a dream you’ve been carrying that feels like it’s on a detour? What story have you been telling yourself about what the detour means?

Where in your journey have you confused disappointment with failure; and how did that confusion shape your next move?

When you pursue a calling, are you more focused on arriving or on being formed through the process? How do you know which one is actually driving you?

What has God been building in you during the seasons that felt too small for the dream? What would you have missed if the shortcut had worked?

What does contentment look like in your current season; not resignation, but genuine peace in the present while still leaning toward the dream?

Leadership Question

Am I measuring this season by how close it gets me to the destination, or by who I’m becoming inside of it?

This Week’s Practice

Dream Inventory

Set aside 20 minutes this week. Write down the dream you believe God gave you. Underneath it, list every season of the journey so far. Including the ones that felt like detours. Next to each season, write one thing God formed in you there that could not have come from anywhere else. Read the whole list back. Ask God to show you how the road you’ve already walked has been preparing you for the road ahead.

Lamp Prayer

Each morning this week, before you check your phone, sit in silence for five minutes. Pray only Psalm 119:105. Don’t ask for more road. Ask for the light for today’s step. Close by holding your hands open and naming the one next faithful step you identified in the PATH framework. Then go take it.

Prayer

Father, here’s what I know after all of it. The NFL career, the unraveling, the surrender, the seminary, the middle school gyms, the arena league, the church, the hospital rooms, Oklahoma, and home again: You do not waste seasons. Not one. Every place I’ve been that felt too small for the dream I carry was actually part of how You were sizing me up for it.

Teach me to walk the PATH this week. Help me name the season honestly instead of rushing past it. Show me what You’re forming in me instead of letting me obsess over where I’m headed. Give me eyes to trust the lamp instead of demanding the whole map. And where I’ve been gripping this dream with closed hands, teach me to hold it open; trusting You with it instead of trying to control it.

The morning sun is still rising on my path. Don’t let me quit at dawn.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

Thanks for joining us in the Locker Room. iCoachCharacter is a community built for leaders who are serious about growing, not just in skill, but in soul. Every time we open Formation Reps, we’ll give you a practical, sequenced way to live out what God is forming in you.

Invite a coach, an athlete, a pastor, a teammate, or anyone in your life who leads and needs a safe place to grow. The Locker Room is open. Come as you are. Leave more whole than you arrived. If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use the link below to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions with me, Ryan Young.

You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

This is The Film Room, where we go deeper than the scoreboard. Longer reads. Harder questions. The kind of leadership development that happens when you’re finally willing to look at what’s underneath.

If you’re ready to go there, I’m glad you’re in the room.

Proverbs 3:5–6 | “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding.”

The Story

I thought, for sure this is God taking me back to the NFL.

Looking back, I can see why. Football had been the organizing force of my life from the time I started playing in high school. It was where I discovered my gifts. Where I found significance. Where I experienced success. And eventually, where I experienced loss.

The strange thing about my story is that I didn’t lose football because football failed me. I lost football because I was failing everywhere else. My life off the field looked nothing like my life on it. The things I was hiding away from the locker room were quietly tearing apart the man inside it.

Functionality is not sustainable when dysfunction sits at the center of your life.

You can perform for a season. You can achieve for a season. You can impress people for a season. But eventually, whatever is broken beneath the surface demands attention.

When football ended, I experienced something deeper than career loss. I lost the life I had built around myself. And in God’s mercy, that loss became an invitation.

I surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. As I joined Him in His death and burial, something happened that I could never have produced through performance, discipline, or self-improvement. The old Ryan died. And in Christ, I was raised to new life.

What surprised me wasn’t simply that God made me new. What surprised me was that even in my rejection of Him, He kept the door open. Not because I’d earned it back. Because His love for me had never actually left, and the forgiveness we have in Jesus Christ meant He was still willing to let me discover who He’d created me to be.

Read more

Hello, I’m Ryan Young. Former NFL athlete. Pastor. Leadership mentor. Head Coach of iCoachCharacter. And honestly, I’m a guy who spent too many years living and leading from the outside in, instead of the inside out. iCoachCharacter exists because I believe the world needs leaders who are whole; and not just winning. Leaders who are emotionally honest, spiritually formed, and relationally healthy. Leaders who know who they are before they know what they do. This is The Huddle. Every time we gather here, I’ll bring you a devotional rooted in Scripture and connected to the real challenges of leadership. Whether you’re coaching a team, running a company, raising kids, pastoring a church, or just trying to figure out who you are in a challenging season of life; the Huddle is for you. This is a locker room. Not a highlight reel. A safe place, where we go deep. I’m glad you’re in the room.

“Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.” - Psalm 119:105, NIV

Reflection

There’s a reason God gave us a lamp instead of a map.

A map tells you everything up front; every turn, every milestone, every estimated arrival. A lamp gives you enough light for the step you’re on. That’s it. Just enough for right now.

I used to find that frustrating. I’m a planner. I’m a former offensive lineman, I wanted to see the whole formation before the snap. I wanted to know where the blitz was coming from, where the double team was going, what the protection scheme was best for every moment, before the moment would come.

God, give me the full film. Let me study it before I step out there.

But that’s not how He operates. God is a loving Father who knows that revelation without formation can become a burden instead of a blessing.

Because if He showed us the whole road, we’d spend all our energy trying to manage it instead of walking it. We’d skip classes in college, because they don’t look like the NFL. We’d overlook the obscure coaching assignment because it doesn’t look like the platform. We’d rush through the hidden years, because they don’t look like the dream. Looking back, some of the roads that felt furthest from the dream were actually the roads leading directly to it.

Proverbs 4:18 says the path of the righteous is like the morning sun; it gets brighter as it goes. Not all at once. Incrementally. Which means where you are right now, however small it feels, however far from the dream, it is part of the brightness. The light is already on you. The path is already illuminated. You just can’t see the end from where you’re standing.

That’s not a design flaw. That’s the design.

Jesus said it plainly: “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.” (John 8:12, NIV). The promise isn’t that you’ll see the whole path. The promise is that you won’t walk it in darkness. He goes ahead. You follow. One step at a time, in the light He provides.

Here’s what I’ve learned the hard way: high-capacity leaders are often the worst at this. We’re wired to strategize, forecast, and optimize. We run scenarios. We build contingency plans. There’s nothing wrong with that, because wisdom plans ahead. But there’s a difference between wise planning and control-driven planning. One holds the future with open hands. The other grips it white-knuckled and calls it faith.

When the path reroutes, and it will reroute, the temptation is to interpret the detour as a disqualification. If God was really in this, it wouldn’t be this hard. If I was on the right road, I wouldn’t keep hitting dead ends. But some of the most important formation in your life is happening on roads that don’t look like the destination.

The lamp isn’t failing you. You’re being led.

Connection

I’ve been on roads that didn’t make sense. Seasons where the assignment didn’t point to the dream. Moments where I was coaching others toward breakthroughs I had yet experienced myself. And I spent more energy than I care to admit trying to force clarity that God hadn’t given me, pulling on doors He hadn’t opened, and frustrated by silence I hadn’t learned to trust yet.

What I didn’t understand then was that God wasn’t withholding the map to be cruel. He was protecting me from myself. Because if I’m honest, every time I’ve had a map, I’ve been tempted to trust the map more than the Guide.

That’s why Proverbs 3:5–6 is so challenging:

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding...”

The temptation isn’t simply to understand the future. The temptation is to place our confidence in our understanding of the future rather than in God Himself.

A map gives us the illusion of control. A lamp invites us into trust.

The seasons that felt like detours were the seasons that did the deepest work. The years in rooms that didn’t look like destiny were the years He was building character I couldn’t manufacture on my own. The road didn’t look right. But the lamp never went out.

What dream are you carrying that feels like it’s on a detour right now? What season are you in that doesn’t look like the destination you envisioned? Maybe today the invitation isn’t to figure out the rest of the road. Maybe it’s just to trust the lamp and take the next step.

The road gets brighter. Keep walking.

Bottom Line

The goal isn’t to see farther. The goal is to trust deeper.

Soul Work

Reflection Questions

1. Where in your life are you trying to demand a map when God has given you a lamp? What does that tell you about what you’re really trusting?

2. Is there a “detour” season in your past that you now recognize as formation? What did God do in you during that time that He couldn’t have done if the road had been straight?

3. What does your anxiety about the future reveal about what you believe about God?

4. Are you moving in obedience to the light you have, or are you waiting for light you wish you had?

5. What would it look like this week to take one faithful step in the direction God has already illuminated; even if you can’t see what’s beyond it?

The dream may feel delayed. The path may not make sense. But if the lamp is still shining, God isn’t finished leading.

Leadership Question

What am I avoiding in the name of “waiting for clarity” that is actually rooted in fear of the unknown?

Prayer

Father, I confess that I want to see more road than You’ve given me. I want to know how this ends before I take the next step. I want the map, and You keep handing me a lamp; and somewhere in my impatience, I’ve started to mistake that for silence.

Teach me to trust the lamp. Help me stop measuring my progress by how far I am from the destination, and start recognizing Your presence in the step I’m on right now. Where I’ve been gripping the future out of fear, help me open my hands. Where I’ve been reading the detour as disqualification, remind me that some of my most important formation happened on roads I didn’t choose.

I surrender the timeline. I surrender the map. Give me the light of life and the courage to follow You into whatever comes next.

You are the light of the world. And that means I will never walk in darkness. I’m holding onto that today.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

You’re Invited Into the Locker Room. iCoachCharacter is a community built for leaders who are serious about growing; not just in skill, but in soul. Every time we open The Huddle, we’ll dig into Scripture together, wrestle with honest questions, and do the kind of formation work that actually changes how you lead, love, and live. If this resonated with you, subscribe so you don’t miss the next one.

Next in The Film Room, we’ll explore why high-capacity leaders often struggle to trust God in seasons that don’t match their expectations, and how disappointment can become one of God’s greatest tools for formation.

Invite a coach, an athlete, a pastor, a teammate; anyone in your life who leads and needs a safe place to grow. The Locker Room is open. Come as you are. Leave more whole than you arrived. If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use the link below to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions with Ryan Young. You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

Read · Reflect · Rep · Relate · Respond · 10–15 minutes

Listen

Hello, I’m Ryan Young.

Former NFL athlete. Pastor. Leadership mentor. Head Coach of iCoachCharacter.

This is Formation Reps; where what we read becomes what we practice.

Knowing the truth and living from it are two different things. That gap is where most leaders get stuck. These Reps are how we close it: one honest question, one practice, one conversation at a time.

This isn’t a checklist. Think of it as practice reps for your soul.

Take your time. Let the silence do some of the work.

I’m glad you’re in the room.

Film Room Connection

In Volume 1 of the Film Room, we explored a difficult reality:

Many leaders know how to achieve. Many know how to sacrifice. Many know how to lead. Few know how to receive.

For years, I built my identity around football, achievement, and performance. When the structure that held my identity began to crack, I discovered a deeper issue beneath the issue: I didn’t know who I was apart from what I could produce.

Jesus offers another way.

Before we lead. Before we achieve. Before we prove. We need to learn to receive.

In Welcome To The Locker Room: Volume 1, Formation Reps are about slowing down long enough to notice where performance may still be shaping your identity.

Coach’s Clipboard

Many leaders I’ve worked with don’t struggle because they lack discipline. They struggle because they’ve never learned how to receive love. The danger is building a life that looks successful while feeling exhausted, anxious, and disconnected on the inside. The invitation is not to try harder. The invitation is to become rooted in a love you don’t have to earn.

READ

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37–39

Read the passage three times.

First Reading: Notice what stands out.

Second Reading: Notice what feels challenging.

Third Reading: Notice what you wish were more true in your life.

Pause. Take some slow breaths.

Ask: “God, what are You trying to show me about love?”

REFLECT

Questions for Self-Awareness

Don’t rush these. Awareness is part of formation.

01

When you hear the words: “You are loved by God apart from your performance.”

What happens inside you?

What part of you believes it?

What part of you resists it?

02

What role, title, achievement, or responsibility most shapes your identity right now?

If it disappeared tomorrow, what would remain?

03

What are you most afraid people would discover about you if you stopped performing?

04

When was the last time you truly rested without feeling guilty?

What made that difficult?

05

What emotional burden are you carrying that you haven’t fully acknowledged?

The Leadership Question Beneath the Question:

What are you trying to earn that God has already offered?

REP

The Beloved Inventory

Press the pause button. Find a quiet place. Put both feet on the floor. Open your hands. Take some deep breaths.

Pray: “Father, help me receive what You want to give.”

What God Says About Me

Finish these statements:

• God calls me __________.

• God sees me as __________.

• God invites me to __________.

• God is not asking me to __________.

• God loves me even when __________.

What I’ve Been Living From

Complete these:

• This week I have been driven by __________.

• I’ve been trying to prove __________.

• I’ve been afraid of __________.

• I’ve been avoiding __________.

• I’ve been looking for validation through __________.

Compare the two lists. Notice the gap. Don’t judge it. Just notice it. The gap is not condemnation. The gap is an invitation.

Finish with this prayer: God, help me receive Your love in this specific area: __________.

RELATE

A Conversation Worth Having

Formation happens in community.

This week, invite one trusted person into your interior world. Your spouse, mentor, friend, teammate, a fellow leader.

Ask: “When I’m under pressure, what do you see me chasing most?”

• Approval?

• Control?

• Achievement?

• Security?

• Something else?

Then ask: “What would it look like for me to lead from a deeper place of security in God’s love?”

Listen. Don’t defend. Don’t explain. Just receive.

That is the rep.

RESPOND

Weekly Scoreboard

Rate yourself from 1–10:

• Receiving God’s Love ___

• Emotional Awareness ___

• Presence With Others ___

• Trust In God ___

• Living From Identity ___

Which number surprises you most? Why?

This Week’s Leadership Rep

Every morning before checking your phone, reviewing your schedule, or opening your email, say these words aloud:

“I am loved.

Not because of what I accomplish today.

Because of who God says I am.”

Then sit in silence for thirty seconds.

Notice the resistance.

The resistance is part of the work.

Prayer

Father, I confess how often I measure my worth by my performance. I look to achievements, titles, productivity, and approval to tell me who I am. But You have already spoken. Before I lead, achieve, produce, or perform; I am Your beloved child. Teach me to receive what I have spent so much of my life trying to earn. Help me lead from identity instead of insecurity. From love instead of fear. From fullness instead of depletion. Form my heart before You use my gifts. Shape my character before You expand my influence. And let everything I give this week flow from the confidence that I am already loved.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

This Week’s Formation Phrase

Receive → Rest → Relate

Receive God’s love.

Rest in God’s love.

Relate to others from God’s love.

If this week’s exercise surfaced something deeper; a wound, fear, pressure, or pattern you’ve been carrying alone. I want you to know you don’t have to navigate it by yourself.

That’s why iCoachCharacter exists.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

Schedule a FREE 30Min Coaching Session with Ryan Young.

You’re not alone in the hidden battle.

Audio

Hello, I’m Ryan Young. Former NFL athlete and NCAA Player Development Coach. Now a Pastor and the Head Coach of iCoachCharacter.

This is The Film Room is where we go deeper than the scoreboard. Longer reads. Harder questions. The kind of leadership development that happens when you’re finally willing to look at what’s underneath.

If you’re ready to go there, I’m glad you’re in the room.

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself.” — Matthew 22:37–39 (NIV)

The Story

I remember the day I realized I didn’t know who I was without football.

Not in a philosophical way. In a terrifying, marriage-ending, life-unraveling way.

I had made it. Drafted into the NFL by the New York Jets. The thing I had worked my entire life for, the thing that had organized my identity, my schedule, my self-worth, my sense of purpose since I was a teen growing up in St. Louis; I had actually achieved it.

And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I started falling apart.

Not on the field.

On the field, I knew exactly who I was. I knew my assignments. I knew my role. I knew how to perform.

It was everywhere else that I had no idea what I was doing.

I was in my first marriage, and I was failing at it. Not because I didn’t care. I cared deeply. But I had never learned how to love someone in the way they needed to be loved. I had learned how to perform. I had learned how to produce. I had learned how to compete, to win, to survive. But love? The slow, steady, other-centered, vulnerable, non-transactional kind of love that a marriage requires?

I had no framework for that.

So I did what a lot of high-performing people do when they don’t know how to handle what’s happening on the inside. I looked for somewhere to put the pressure. And the choices I made during that season. The self-destructive behavior, the ways I coped, the walls I built; they cost me my marriage. They cost me more than I was able to admit.

It took me years to understand what had actually happened.

I wasn’t just a guy who made bad decisions. I was a man who had been trained his entire life to lead from the outside in; from achievement, from performance, from how I was perceived, and I had never been taught to lead from the inside out.

Nobody ever asked me who I was when the pads came off.

The Problem

Here’s what I’ve learned in the years since; in seminary, in counseling, in coaching leaders, in my own long and painful process of becoming emotionally healthy:

We teach people how to lead. We almost never teach them who they are.

And that gap, that space between skill and identity, between performance and formation is where marriages collapse, ministries implode, businesses fracture, and leaders quietly disappear into addictions and isolation that nobody saw coming.

Think about the training we invest in leaders.

Communication skills. Strategic planning. Team building. Financial stewardship. Vision casting. Productivity systems. There are entire industries built around making leaders more effective.

But almost nobody is asking: Who is this person underneath all of that?

What are they afraid of? What are they running from? What pain are they managing through their productivity? What void are they trying to fill with their success? Who told them that their worth was conditional on their results, and have they ever questioned whether that’s actually true?

Because here’s what I’ve seen over and over in the people I coach:

The higher someone rises in leadership, the more protected their inner life becomes.

Pastors who are preaching emotional health on Sunday and falling apart in their marriages on Monday. Executives who are celebrated for their vision but terrified to be known. Coaches who are pouring into their athletes with a ferocity that would be inspiring if it didn’t have desperation underneath it. The kind of desperation that comes from a person who still hasn’t figured out who they are when they’re not winning.

I know that person. I was that person.

And the root of it in my story and in almost every story I’ve encountered is the same thing.

Identity confusion.

Not knowing who you are apart from what you do.

The Biblical Insight

Jesus was asked once what the most important commandment was.

He didn’t say: Work harder. Lead better. Build more. Produce more.

He said: Love God. Love others. Love yourself.

That’s it. The whole game. The entire point.

When I sit with Matthew 22:37–39, I don’t just read it as a nice spiritual principle. I read it as a diagnosis.

Jesus is telling us that the whole of human life, all of it, is ordered around love. The love you receive from God. The love you extend to others. And crucially, the love you carry for yourself.

The order matters.

You love God first. You receive your identity from the One who made you and calls you beloved. That’s the foundation. That’s where you find out who you actually are, apart from what you’ve done or what you haven’t done.

Then you love others from that full and secure place, you can give something real. Not performance. Not people-pleasing. Not the anxious productivity of someone who needs to be needed. Real love. The kind that costs you something and doesn’t require applause.

And then there’s the phrase that most leaders completely skip over: Love your neighbor as yourself.

The implication is that you have to love yourself first. Not in a narcissistic, self-absorbed way, but in the way that a person who knows they are deeply loved by God is able to extend that same grace inward. To see yourself the way God sees you. To stop punishing yourself for not being more. To stop performing for an audience that was never going to be satisfied anyway.

Far to many of the leaders I coach have never been taught to receive love. From God. From their spouses. From their teams. They’ve been taught to earn it.

And a person who can’t receive love, who has no framework for it, no practice of it, no lived experience of what it means to be loved unconditionally; cannot give it.

Not really.

They can manage it. They can perform it. They can fake it well enough to build a reputation.

But eventually, the gap between the performance and the person starts to crack.

And the people closest to them: spouses, children, teammates, church members, are usually the first to fall through.

The Coaching Insight

In emotional health language, what I’m describing is what Peter Scazzero calls the wall.

It’s the moment in a leader’s life when the external structure stops working. The performance stops covering the pain. The productivity stops filling the void. The achievement stops answering the question underneath the question.

For me, that wall was my first marriage. That was where I ran out of room to hide.

For others, it’s a health crisis. A ministry failure. A relationship that shatters. A season of burnout so complete that they literally cannot get off the floor.

The wall is not a punishment. The wall is an invitation.

It’s God saying: There is more to you than your performance. And I’m not going to let you get to the end of your life without discovering it.

The leaders I’ve seen come out the other side of the wall, and there are many, and they are the most grounded, integrated, powerful people I know, They didn’t just learn new skills or strategies. They did something much harder.

They went inward.

They sat with their pain long enough to understand what it was trying to tell them. They found a counselor, a spiritual director, a trusted community that could hold their honest story without flinching. They stopped performing for God and started being honest with Him. They learned slowly, imperfectly, sometimes agonizingly, how to receive love.

And then something remarkable happened.

Their leadership changed.

Not because they got a new framework. But because they changed. They started leading from a place of fullness instead of depletion. They stopped needing their title to tell them who they were. They could tell the truth in a meeting without their hands shaking. They could have a hard conversation without shutting down or blowing up. They could sit with someone else’s pain without immediately trying to fix it.

They had finally started learning what Jesus was pointing at in Matthew 22.

They were learning how to love.

The Practical Application

So let me ask you something.

If someone who knew you well; your spouse, your closest friend, your former coach, the person who’s watched you lead for the last decade, sat down and had to describe what you are actually leading from right now, what would they say?

Not what you’d hope they’d say. What would they actually say?

Are you leading from security or insecurity? From abundance or depletion? From identity or performance? From love or fear?

Because here’s the thing I’ve learned: the answer to that question shapes everything downstream. The culture of your team. The health of your marriage. The quality of your relationships. The sustainability of your ministry or organization. The example you set for your children.

Everything flows from who you are on the inside.

Here are three practices I return to when I notice myself slipping back into leading from performance rather than identity:

1. The Daily Identity Anchor Every morning, before anything else, before the emails, before the metrics, before the schedule, I spend time reading back to myself who God says I am. Not what I’ve accomplished. Not what I need to accomplish today. Who I am. Beloved. Known. Called. Enough. It sounds simple. It is not simple. It is one of the hardest disciplines I practice, because my whole nervous system has been trained to measure my worth by my output. This is a daily act of resistance against that lie.

2. The Weekly Honest Inventory At least once a week, I ask myself three questions: What am I carrying that I haven’t named? What am I avoiding that I need to face? Who am I performing for right now? I type tthe answers into my digital journal. Sometimes I share them with my wife. All the time I bring them to God in prayer. The point is not to solve everything. The point is to stay honest about what’s actually happening inside.

3. The Trusted Circle I have a small group of men, not many, three or four, who are allowed to see the real me. Not the platform version. Not the pastor version. The actual version. The one who still has fears and insecurities and wounds and blind spots. If you don’t have that and if every relationship in your life is a performance, that is not a minor gap in your schedule. That is a structural vulnerability in your formation. Find your people. Build that circle. Your life will depend on it.

The Coaching Invitation

My first marriage didn’t end because I was a bad person.

It ended in significant part because I was a person who had never been taught who he was apart from what he could do. I had been formed by performance for so long that I didn’t know how to exist without it. I didn’t know how to receive love. I didn’t know how to give it without strings attached. I didn’t know that the restlessness I carried everywhere I went was a spiritual hunger that no amount of success was ever going to satisfy.

I had to learn all of that. Painfully. Slowly. With a lot of help.

And it is the single most important work I have ever done more important than anything I accomplished on a football field, more formative than any degree or credential or platform I’ve built since.

Learning who I am.

Learning how to be loved.

Learning how to love.

That’s the work. That’s the real locker room. And it’s why I built iCoachCharacter; not as a program for better leaders, but as a space for more whole ones.

If you’re reading this and something in you recognizes the gap I’m describing, or if you’ve been leading from the outside in for so long that you’ve forgotten there’s an inside, I want you to know something.

You don’t have to figure it out alone.

That’s what we’re here for.

Send me your prayer request here. 🙏🏾

If you’d like to explore these topics more deeply, use the link below to learn about iCoachCharacter Coaching Sessions with Ryan Young.

You don’t have to carry the hidden battle alone.

Audio

Hello, I’m Ryan Young.

Former NFL athlete and NCAA Player Development Coach. Now a Pastor and the Head Coach of iCoachCharacter. And honestly, I’m a guy who spent too many years living and leading from the outside in, instead of the inside out.

iCoachCharacter exists because I believe the world needs leaders who are whole; and not just winning. Leaders who are emotionally honest, spiritually formed, and relationally healthy. Leaders who know who they are before they know what they do.

This is The Huddle. Every time we gather here, I’ll bring you a devotional rooted in Scripture and connected to the real challenges of leadership. Whether you’re coaching a team, running a company, raising kids, pastoring a church, or just trying to figure out who you are in a challenging season of life; the Huddle is for you.

This is a locker room. Not a highlight reel. A safe place, where we go deep.

I’m glad you’re in the room.

Reflection

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” — Matthew 22:37–40

Every locker room has rules.

Some are written on the wall. Most are unspoken. But every player knows them within the first week of being around the team.

Work hard. Hold your spot. Don’t show weakness. Perform or you’re gone.

Those rules shape you. Sometimes in ways you don’t even realize until you’re years removed from the game, the job, or the ministry; and you wonder why you still can’t rest. Why you still can’t receive. Why you still feel like you’re only as valuable as your last win.

Jesus had a different kind of locker room in mind.

A Pharisee, one of the religious experts of his day, tried to catch Jesus in a theological trap. He asked which commandment was the greatest. The implication was clear: Pick one. Show us where your priorities really are.

Jesus didn’t take the bait. He didn’t pick one law. He went deeper and straight to the architecture beneath all of it.

Love God. Love others. Love yourself as one loved by God.

That’s the whole playbook. Everything else, every law, every rule, every command in the Old Testament; hangs on those three relationships.

Here’s what I want you to sit with: Jesus isn’t describing a behavior modification program. He isn’t handing you a checklist to manage your spiritual performance. He’s describing a way of being, a whole-person orientation toward God and people that starts from the inside out.

Notice the language. Heart. Soul. Mind. These aren’t three separate compartments of a person. They’re the Hebrew way of saying: all of you. Every part. Nothing held back.

Most of us leaders have been trained to give our best in one or two of those areas and quietly neglect the rest. We show up mentally sharp but emotionally shut down. We’re physically present but spiritually hollow. We perform love without actually being formed by it.

And then we wonder why our most important relationships feel like transactions.

Here’s the part that stops me every time I read it: Love your neighbor as yourself.

That little phrase carries enormous weight. Because Jesus assumes you have a self worth loving. He assumes you are actively caring for yourself; not out of selfishness, but out of the stewardship of what God has entrusted to you. You cannot give what you do not have. A depleted leader is not a humble leader. Depletion is not a spiritual virtue. It’s a leadership liability.

The Christian life is not primarily behavior management. It is learning how to love, and that starts with receiving God’s love for you so completely that it overflows into how you care for yourself and others.

That’s the Locker Room Rule Jesus is introducing. And it changes everything about how we lead.

Connection

For a long time, I confused output with love. If I was producing, coaching, preaching, mentoring, leading; I told myself I was giving love. What I was actually doing was hiding behind productivity so I didn’t have to do the harder work of being present.

I didn’t know how to love myself well. Which meant I didn’t know how to receive love well either. And a person who can’t receive love will eventually run dry trying to give it.

God had to do some deep work in me around identity before I could honestly engage with this passage. I had to learn that my value wasn’t rooted in my performance in the NFL, in ministry, in any room I walked into. That work is ongoing. It doesn’t stop because you get a title or build a platform.

What I’ve come to understand is this: leaders who don’t attend to their own formation become a danger to the people they’re leading. Not because they’re bad people (often they’re incredibly gifted people), but because unexamined pain flows downstream.

Learning to love yourself as one loved by God isn’t selfish. It’s the foundation of sustainable leadership.

Soul Work

1. When you hear “love yourself as one loved by God,” what’s your honest internal reaction: belief, resistance, or confusion?

2. Which area of your life feels most neglected right now: heart, soul, or mind? What’s one honest reason why?

3. Are you currently receiving love or primarily dispensing it? What does that tell you about the health of your most important relationships?

4. What “locker room rules” have you absorbed over your career that contradict the way Jesus says life is designed to be lived?

5. What would it look like concretely, to care for yourself this week the way God cares for you?

Breaking The Huddle

The Whole-Person Inventory

Set aside 15–20 minutes in a quiet space. No phone. No agenda.

Write across the top of a page: Heart. Soul. Mind.

Under each one, answer honestly:

• What is the current condition of this part of me?

• What am I neglecting here?

• What does God’s care for me look like in this space?

Don’t rush it. Let it be a conversation with God, not another task to complete.

Leadership Question

Who am I becoming in the process of leading; and is that person someone I’d want to follow?

Prayer

Father, thank You that You don’t ask me to perform my way to Your presence. You invite all of me; the strong parts and the broken ones, the polished version I show the world and the version that only You see. I acknowledge today that I need You in every part of who I am: heart, soul, and mind.

Forgive me for the seasons when I confused output for intimacy when I led from empty and called it sacrifice. Teach me what it means to receive Your love not just as a doctrine I believe, but as a reality I live from. Help me to steward myself well so that what flows out of me into the lives of others is actually life.

Form me, Lord, into a leader who loves from a full and honest place, not from guilt, not from fear, not from the need to prove something. I surrender the locker room rules I’ve lived by that don’t belong to Your kingdom. I want to learn Your way.

I trust that as I learn to love You fully, love others genuinely, and receive Your love for me, You will make me into the kind of leader who points people not to my performance, but to You.

In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

You’re Invited Into the Locker Room.

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