Of all the challenging things I’ve done in my life, undoubtedly the most difficult is being in a relationship with my wife.

Which says nothing about her. I love my wife dearly. In fact, her coming into my life five and a half years ago was certainly the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

Instead, it speaks to the challenge that I have being in any relationship. And, to the fact that there is no relationship in my life that has anywhere close to the impact on my happiness and on my experience of life that my marriage does.

I’ve never been more committed to being an exceptional husband to my incredible wife than I am now. I’ve seen firsthand the degree to which my experience of life changes for the better when our relationship is strong. When my wife and I feel connected to and loved by one another, that strength radiates out into the other areas of my life. And when we don’t, the resulting friction similarly seeps into everything else.

Our marriage is foundational.

Three years ago, the current strength of our marriage wouldn’t have been possible. Because, at the time, we didn’t know what we know now. Despite the fear I’ve felt in sharing this piece, the lessons I’ve learned in that time—lessons I remain committed to learning, applying, and practicing for the rest of my life—felt too important not to be put into writing.

Perhaps the lessons I’ve learned might catalyze a similar transformation in someone else’s marriage.

But first, some context from my life is necessary.

It Runs in the Family

In my family, the legacy of marriage has historically been divorce.

I was seven when my parents split up for the first time. At thirteen, their separation was made final. While details of their relationship should stay private, I will say that the outcome was reflective of the tension that existed in their relationship for as long as I can remember.

Their marriage was my first impression of what a relationship should look and feel like; how they showed up in it formed my expectations of how I should show up in mine. Like me, my parents grew up in homes impacted by strained marital relationships. Like me, their tuition of Relationship 101 took place in the classroom of a marriage that ended prematurely.

I grew up with a front row seat to the devastation that divorce leaves behind in its wake.

I’ll never forget the day they told us for the first time that Dad was moving out: the tears and hurt that flowed from our confusion and sense of loss. Nor will I forget the feeling of friction and unease that hung in the air of our home when my parents were struggling in their relationship. I remember the weekly routine of begrudgingly packing a bag and switching from one house to another; and the early afternoons each Christmas Day when time with one of them was ending, and time with the other was about to begin.

From that experience, I’ve always sworn that I’d never get divorced. I used to think that I was committed to being the one in my family to finally break this cross-generational pattern. But if I’m really being honest with myself, it wasn’t too long ago that the relationship I had with my now wife was on track to eventually suffer a similar fate. Had we not created the changes in our relationship that we have over the past few years, it’s likely that our children would one day have had their home split in two; just like my brothers and I; just like my parents and their siblings before us.

So much has changed between my wife and me over the last three years. That change has accelerated over the past six months. My marriage today is stronger than it’s ever been before. As a consequence, the emotional climate in our home has a much different feel than it used to: it’s softer, lighter, warmer.

But that change hasn’t happened simply because we decided to try harder. Nor did it happen overnight.

Instead, it’s been the product of our changing how we understand the notion of being in relationship. And, consequently, it’s flowed from our development and practice of new capabilities; most of which a younger version of me would likely have described as being pretty useless and dismissed offhand.

Today, we communicate and operate as a team much more effectively. We’re less reactive towards one another. And we are more aligned than ever before on the life that we wish to create together.

That isn’t to say that our relationship is perfect. I don’t think any relationship is. There is still plenty of room for growth, both for me individually and for us as a couple. But the difference between then and now is palpable; I’m incredibly proud of the relationship we’re creating.

Let me share what’s changed.

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In Discomfort Lies Opportunity

I now recognize that my marriage is the crucible.

On one hand, unlike any other area, my marriage presents the most outsized opportunity for me to positively influence my life as a whole. It is, without a doubt, the point of highest leverage for me to create sweeping, lasting impact on my happiness and fulfilment. When it’s neglected, the opposite is also true. It serves either as a springboard or as a weighted vest in all the other aspects of my life.

And, at the same time, there is no single place in my life where it’s more challenging for me to consistently and accountably show up as the version of myself that I wish to be.

I’ll start by sharing the challenge; it’s more tangible and thus easier to understand.

Something I’ve noticed repeatedly in recent months is the degree to which we as humans do a remarkable job of avoiding the discomfort that we wish to avoid. Or maybe instead, it’s more accurate to say that our mind does a remarkable job of shielding us from the discomfort that it decided long ago wasn’t safe for us to experience. I correct myself because, in my case, my mind has been doing this for most of my life, and yet it’s only recently that I’ve become aware of it. Previously, it was automatic.

In these pockets of discomfort reside our greatest opportunities for growth.

Because that discomfort often marks a place in our lives where we aren’t truly free. Before we begin noticing this dynamic in action, we react unknowingly and involuntarily to the discomfort we feel in certain moments. And in so doing, we reinforce again and again default patterns over which we have no control.

By noticing when and where our discomfort arises, we create opportunities to free ourselves from our mind.

And therein lies the magic of relationships.

Despite our mind’s best effort, our relationships force us into contact with the discomfort that we might otherwise succeed at avoiding if left to our own devices. They leave us no choice but to reckon with our judgments, our insecurities, and our reactions: the places where we don’t have full control over who we’re being.

If we choose to look, they serve us up countless opportunities to peer into the depths of our inner world. And if we’re truly committed to being accountable for how we’re showing up, they’ll bring us face to face with whatever it is that we least want to notice.

In that way, marriage continually points us back to the lessons that are available for us to learn until we’ve truly learned them.

While this same opportunity exists in every single one of our relationships, it’s especially prevalent in marriage. Because our spouse is nearly omnipresent in our lives. And because there exist huge social, emotional, and financial consequences of a marriage falling into disrepair.

Effectively, in terms of being accountable to who we aspire to be, marriage is the setting with the highest degree of difficulty, and a game with only two final outcomes: death or divorce; the latter option bringing with it an incredibly high cost to bear for everyone involved.

In that context, it’s no wonder that so many spouses never truly seize the opportunity that exists in marriage.

In the short term, that choice might seem logical.

But in the long term, it’s not.

What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know

Somewhat counterintuitively, the changes in my marriage have been less the result of my doing anything differently and more about the difference in how I show up in it. The distinction is subtle, but critically important.

As I alluded to earlier, my struggle in relationships was never a question of my desire to succeed, my willingness to put in the effort that I thought was required to do so, or my naiveté toward the cost of failure.

Instead, I’ve realized it was simply because I didn’t know how.

Three years ago, I didn’t know what it looked like to show up vulnerably in my marriage. I wasn’t aware of the degree to which I censored my own self-expression. I hadn’t yet redeveloped the capacity to really feel the emotions I have. Nor did I have the self-awareness that I’ve since worked to develop.

I also didn’t know what I didn’t know.

At that point, what I did know was how to grit my teeth, put my head down, and lean on the existing skills I had to get shit done.

That approach I’d tried and tested, time and again, in every other arena of my life. And in those areas, the results had been pretty remarkable. So, for a long time, that’s what I tried in my relationship.

But applying my existing skillset with more force and rigor never really worked. And instead, it often had the complete opposite effect of what I’d hoped for. I wanted connection, but the outcome was more resentment, loneliness, and conflict.

What I’ve since realized, which I was blind to back then, is that to create connection, trust, and safety in my marriage—or in any relationship for that matter—requires a fundamentally different set of skills from the one that’d allowed me to achieve success elsewhere in my life.

For example, while speed had always been a competitive advantage of mine, being present with my wife requires that I slow down. And while exerting control over my surroundings was always rewarded at work, truly loving her asks that I accept and be with whatever’s going on for her in a given moment. While having the “right” answer was typically celebrated, being connected in relationship involves coming from a place of openness and curiosity: as opposed to asking myself what I could do to fix the problem at hand, listening to her without taking her response personally is what allows her to feel safe.

I’d go so far as to say that the worldview I’d developed through achievement in other areas of my life was counterproductive to my ability to create the change I desired in my marriage. Because it took many attempts and subsequent painful failures for me to finally accept that the way that I’d historically created results in my life wasn’t going to work in this particular area.

It wasn’t until I’d exhausted that option that I finally realized that creating the marriage I wanted wasn’t a question of simply trying harder.

A Change to the System

So, if not through effort, what did create the change in our marriage?

You’d need to ask my wife for her side of the equation, as I certainly didn’t do it alone. But I can speak to what’s different for me.

It began with a change of understanding.

Perhaps the single most useful idea that I’ve come across over the past three years is the paradigm of systems. I suspect that this idea laid the foundation on which we subsequently built the change. Through that lens, results are always a perfect outcome of the system that underlies them. Systems are as prevalent in the world around us as they are in our inner world: they are both tangible and invisible.

In that worldview, if you want a different outcome to the one you’re currently getting, change the system you’re running.

It’s incredibly simple.

Its power lies in that simplicity.

This framing opened up the possibility that I was never the problem; instead, it was the underlying system that I was running that was creating the results I said I didn’t want. And so, if I truly wanted a different outcome, then I’d need to change the underlying system.

It allowed me to see both my marriage and my contribution to it through new eyes; it gave me agency to truly acknowledge what I saw without judging or criticizing myself for it.

That framework enabled two practical shifts in me.

The first piece was an ability to take responsibility for what I could control in my relationship; how I wanted to show up, and what I wanted to create. This shift allowed me to start asking myself questions that I hadn’t previously been capable of asking. Questions like: “What type of relationship do I truly want to create?” and “Is the way that I’m showing up in it conducive to creating that?”

And, maybe most importantly, “How can I show up differently in service of the marriage I want to create?”

For the first time, I saw plainly that the state of my marriage wasn’t where I wanted to be.

The second component was a dose of humility; a recognition that I don’t know what I don’t know. This opened me up to the possibility that there might be other paths—different systems—available beyond the ones I was aware of at the time.

It was humility that brought me face to face with the concept of relational skills, and the degree to which those skills differed from the ones I’d spent most of my life leaning on. I realized that if I truly wanted to change my experience of my marriage, developing those skills would be critical. Humility allowed me to set aside my ego and to ask for help from people who I knew possessed those skills in a way that I didn’t. Humility allowed me to begin climbing this new learning curve and being okay with being a beginner; it allowed me to practice applying, often unsuccessfully, a set of skills which not long ago were far outside of my circle of competence.

As I said, the change we’ve created didn’t happen through force, so much as it was facilitated by our taking a different approach entirely.

It was through inquiring about and then discovering an alternative that the opportunity for change presented itself. It was then through practice and action that change in our marriage slowly began to take root.

The Opportunity for Men

I began this piece by talking about my family’s relational history, and the impact that my parents’ relationship had on my understanding of relationships broadly. For my story, and how I got here, I felt that context was important.

But I also want to highlight that it’s not only children of divorced parents that can learn something from my story.

I’ve found that the skills necessary to create exceptional relationships often aren’t taught explicitly to young boys. In our culture, striving, competing, and providing have historically been treated as the masculine ideal. And, as I’ve shared, the skillset necessary to do so, and the understanding that’s developed through positive reinforcement, can run counter to our ability to be effectively in relationship.

As a consequence, I see an opportunity for most—if not all—men to develop and deepen their relational skills.

Developing this skillset is a mountain without a top; there’s no graduation from it. And, similarly, there is no ceiling on what’s possible for us as a result of our creating exceptional relationships with the people we care most deeply about.

Regardless of our experience as children, if the skills we find ourselves with today aren’t commensurate to the quality and depth of relationships that we want to create, then it’s on us to bolster that skillset. If we weren’t taught these skills as children, then it’s our responsibility as adults to go out and find people from whom we can learn.

For each and every one of us, that’s the opportunity.

For anyone hoping to raise flourishing children, I also see it as our responsibility.

Too Rich a Price to Pay

For my wife and I, building our life and marriage together is an infinite game, with no absolute definition of success... only metrics that we can choose to assign to ourselves.

Winning, then, is truly subjective.

We get to decide what it looks and feels like. And once we’re clear on that, we can choose how committed we truly are to confronting the challenges necessary to being and staying on a winning path.

That’s true for each and every one of us; individually, and as couples. We all get the opportunity to ask ourselves whether we are proud of who we’re being in our marriage and whether the most important relationship in our lives is set up for success in the context of a future that will inevitably be more challenging than it is today.

If your immediate answer to those questions is yes, then I suspect that you are either the exception or you aren’t thinking big enough about the challenge and the opportunity that lies ahead. And if instead, your answer is no, then there’s an opportunity for you to take responsibility for the type of relationship you want to create, and how you’d need to show up in it to do so.

Unfortunately, most men won’t proactively spend time reflecting on the state and trajectory of their own relationship.

The thing is that whether or not we are brave enough to ask and answer those questions honestly, the answers still exist. We know and feel the truth; it either sits unaddressed in our gut or can be leveraged to create awareness and perhaps even action by bringing it into the light.

Either way, it’s the people we care most about that will both bear the cost and reap the reward of the answer.

In that way, I’m incredibly grateful for the experience I had growing up. Because I know firsthand the cost of divorce; I’ve felt it.

At times over the past three years, the cost of creating the change I wanted in my relationship certainly felt expensive. But deep down I know that it pales in comparison to the cost to me, to my wife, and to our children, if my marriage one day ends in divorce.

Two weeks ago, as my wife and I welcomed the arrival of our first daughter into the world, the cost of my answers to those questions suddenly became much more expensive. Because as she begins to grow up, my marriage will increasingly affect not only my wife and me, but her too… not to mention her future partner and their children alike. Our marriage will serve as her relational playbook. And it is ultimately our actions and the energy we breathe into our home that she will learn from; not the words we use.

While it will likely remain the biggest challenge in my life, the opportunity that exists from creating an exceptional marriage with my wife is too tantalizing to pass up.

And the cost of choosing not to confront that challenge head-on is much too rich a price to pay.

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I launched my coaching business 18 months ago.

For most of that time, I’ve resisted marketing or branding it. That showed in my reluctance to build a website, or to invest in any professional branding for that matter.

There were a few reasons for that hesitation.

If I’m honest, much of it was the product of fear: I was scared to share with the world the kind of business I really wanted to build. Writing it out publicly would make it real; it’d open me up to the possibility of failure if I wasn’t able to achieve what I hoped for… and to the related possibility of judgment.

But increasingly, I’ve realized that not properly marketing what I’m up to is a disservice both to me and to anyone else who could really benefit from our working together. The truth is that I know how profoundly the work I’m doing impacts my clients: they’ve shared it in their own words time and again, privately and through testimonials.

Still, another reason for my hesitation was that I didn’t yet have great clarity on the specific mission of what I feel called to do.

Two months ago, I started working with someone to help me tell a story about what I’m up to: building a website, creating a logo, and developing a brand palette that truly captured the essence of what I’m building.

Through that process, clarity emerged.

What excites me most right now is the opportunity to support men in stepping into bigger games inside their home. That’s especially true of their roles as husbands and fathers. Because there is no other single place where it’s more challenging to consistently show up as the version of ourselves that we truly wish to be.

The stakes are also the highest inside the four walls of our home. If we can be the most loving, authentic version of ourselves at home, then we can be it anywhere.

Our relationships with the people we care most about are ultimately a reflection of the relationship we have with ourselves: with our emotions, our thoughts, our discomfort, our insecurities. That’s where the work starts — our relationships are the testing ground to step deeper and deeper into it.

What I’ve found is that when I show up from a place of love, honesty, and vulnerability in my relationships, the impact I can create everywhere else—in my business, my friendships, and my health—gets multiplied.

For a long time I had the order backwards: achievement first, relationships to follow. These last three years, I’ve truly put what matters most first.

I’ve noticed that there are a lot of men out there following my old playbook. Those are the men I’m committed to supporting — to help them create the same transformation in their most important relationships that I’m creating in mine.

To be sure, my marriage—and how I show up in it sometimes—is far from perfect.

I’ve made, and continue to make, plenty of mistakes. At the same time, it is those mistakes and my commitment to continue learning from them that make me both an exceptional husband to my wife, and a transformational coach to the clients who choose to step into working with me.

If you’re interested in learning more, my website—built with the help of the brilliant and talented Brayden Culligan—is linked here. It shares the clearest articulation of the business and life that I’ve spent the last few years building brick by brick.

Visit My Website

And if you feel called to discover what might be available to you in your relationships, let’s find time to connect. You can reach me at coaching@adamcotterill.com.

I’ve also found new enthusiasm to write lately. For that reason, I’ve dusted off the Substack I used to write, formerly called Let’s Get Out of my Head, and rebranded it as Signal & Source to match the aesthetic and refined focus of my business.

I look forward to sharing more in the weeks and months ahead.

Most of the time, when ingesting new information, we’re subconsciously asking ourselves the question: “Is this true?”

As you read this reflection, I invite you to ask yourself a different question: “If this were true, how might I show up differently in the world?”

I’ve found that the latter is a much more useful question. And I’m willing to bet that you’ll get much more out of reading this if you first discard the notion of “truth”.

The relationship we have with ourselves is primary.

Every other relationship we have—with friends, family, strangers, and foe—is a byproduct of the relationship we have with ourselves. These other relationships are secondary; they’re derivative.

How we treat others is the product of how we treat ourselves. What we judge in others is ultimately a reflection of our own self-judgment. The expectations we place on others are, first and foremost, expectations we hold ourselves to.

Most importantly, our ability to love ourselves, and the way in which we love, defines whether and how we can love the people closest to us: our spouse, our children, our siblings, everyone.

Through this lens, the most selfless thing we can do is also the most selfish: to shift and evolve the way we treat and relate to the thing that we are. Because in turn, the change in how we treat ourselves will reverberate through our treatment of others.

Without exception, whether or not we can love ourselves shapes the love we have to give in each and every one of our relationships.

As we choose to see the god in ourselves, we will likewise begin to see the god emerging in others. And as we practice doing so, they might be invited to do the same: to see the god in themselves, the one that lives underneath the conditions they’ve unconsciously placed on their worthiness of love.

How we show up is an invitation for others to follow suit.

We learn what’s possible not through the words that others speak, but from their actions. And upstream of those actions is something even more profound and influential: a way of being.

There is nothing more powerful in the world than being unconditionally loving.

This way of being starts with ourselves.

Because every single one of our relationships—with friends, family, strangers, and foe—is a reflection of the relationship we have with ourselves.

Which begs a most important question: where in your life are you placing conditions on your worthiness of love?

In asking ourselves this question, we might start to notice previously unforeseen conditions. And as we notice those conditions, we can begin to remove them.

First with ourselves

And then, with others.

What does it mean to be a man?

Of all the questions I’ve pondered through my writing, none have led to as long and bumpy of a journey as this one. Like a rock in my hand, I’ve been turning this question over and over and over in my mind for weeks now. Draft after draft, conversation by conversation, the mess that was previously my thinking has slowly begun to coalesce into something concrete and coherent.

But why?

Why has this question been so uniquely challenging for me to answer?

Perhaps, it’s because my answer simultaneously feels boring, banal, and self-evident, while at the same time somehow feeling risky, contentious, and controversial. On some days, amidst this reflection, I’ve thought to myself: “the answer is so obvious; no one will give a shit about what I have to say on this.” And still, on other days, I’ve found myself wondering “Who do I think I am to answer this question?? It’s so complicated, so slippery, so multifaceted.”

And maybe that’s it! Maybe, it’s that my mind has struggled with the prospect of holding multiple opposing ideas as equal truths at the same time.

Maybe….

Or, instead, it could be the fact that amidst this exercise of mental excavation, I stumbled down a rabbit hole filled with a bunch of underlying questions that first needed to be individually addressed before I could comprehensively answer this one.

Questions like “how has my definition of masculinity changed in recent years?” And “where did my old understanding of what it meant to be a man come from?” Most notably, “How do our presiding social norms surrounding so-called manliness conflict with and compliment my first-hand practice of being a man?”

Or, it could be even simpler: it could be that the thought of publicly answering this question and potentially opening myself up to criticism and judgment scares the shit out of me.

No matter the reason for the difficulty and time intensity of this recent exploration, I’m grateful to have taken the trip. Mostly, because it’s facilitated a new way of understanding a struggle I’ve long faced: the struggle to be authentically myself; to be unconditionally proud of who I truly am.

What does it mean to be a man?

I suppose that we each have our own unique versions of this same question. And our own related struggles.

What does it mean to be a woman? A husband? How about a parent? Or a friend?

We could ask this question of every role or label that we’ve ever been identified with.

Conversely, what does it mean to be ourselves?

When left unexamined and unchallenged, our most ubiquitous ways of understanding the world around us become limitations on our capacity to be authentically ourselves. As we unknowingly form expectations of what should be, we inadvertently constrain the ways in which we allow ourselves to move through the world.

For me, that has long been true in the context of what I thought I understood about what it meant to be a man.

This reflection, then, has enabled a new degree of freedom.

Because when we catch a glimpse of the fact that our understanding of the world is all made up to begin with—that we live in a world of our own thinking—we might then also notice the ways in which our understandings of the world aren’t keeping us safe but instead are holding us back.

And from there, we give ourselves a choice.

We can choose to consciously redefine the answers to the most important questions of our lives in a way that feels authentic and aligned with who we wish to be.

And maybe, we can also choose to let go of the need to have concrete answers to nuanced questions like this one. And instead, allow ourselves the freedom and dignity to wonder aloud:

“What does it mean to me to be a man?”

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“A man’s emotions are what define him, and [the ability to feel those emotions without being controlled by them] is the hallmark of true strength. To lack feeling is to be dead, but to act on every feeling is to be a child.”

- Highprince Dalinar Kholin, The Way of Kings (edit by yours truly)

I went for a hike last week with one of my closest friends.

Before he picked me up, I was tired and a bit grumpy. Admittedly, I didn’t really want to go. But I’d committed to going, and so I went.

Two hours later, when we parted ways, I felt invigorated. It was as if, somewhere during our time together, I’d taken off a backpack filled with rocks that I’d unknowingly been carrying around with me for some time. I felt lighter afterwards. That feeling carried me throughout the rest of that day.

In reflecting on this experience, I was reminded that something magical happens when we give ourselves permission to vulnerably share what’s happening in our worlds and in our heads with someone who we know has our best interest at heart. Through conversations like that one, emotional alchemy takes place. In that instance, for me, loneliness was transmuted into a feeling of belonging.

Experiences like that one have historically been quite rare for me. And recently, I’ve noticed that I want more of them.

In my relationships with friends and family, I want more depth, more vulnerability, more authenticity.

And I’m willing to bet that I’m not the only one. Because, honestly, I’ve wanted to bring this up for some time but I didn’t yet have the right words to describe that it was exactly that I wanted. Nor the courage to be able to take a first step in its direction.

It feels like that’s starting to change. And maybe, this is that first step.

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Suffering in Silence

I really used to struggle to honestly express how I was feeling.

I didn’t feel comfortable acknowledging to myself what I felt. I certainly wouldn’t have dared to share those emotions with others or to ask for help when I needed it. In some ways, and on some days, I still find those things incredibly difficult.

This challenge of honestly sharing what it is exactly that I’m experiencing has been especially acute amongst other men.

In part, I suppose this struggle stems from my own legacy beliefs around what it means to be a man. That is to say that men “should be” strong, stoic, courageous, unemotional. That is, after all, the narrative that most of us are grass fed as young boys. In service of that belief, I’ve noticed that sometimes I posture when I’m around other men in the hope that they might see me as strong and capable. Underneath that posturing lies an existential fear that being seen as weak or sensitive would be the social equivalent of a death sentence.

By consequence, I’ve noticed that I often wear a happy-looking mask in male-dominated social settings.

Suffering in silence.

Choking down what I’m feeling.

Wading Beyond the Shallows

Most of my interactions with other men are relatively shallow and superficial. That’s been especially true when we’re in large groups.

It’s truly amazing how easy and simple it is to keep a group of men entertained.

We bullshit and we shoot the shit. We make up games with tennis balls and rocks. We talk about sports, or current events, or girls, or whatever rises to the top of the pile of current interest.

Which, to be clear, has undoubtedly brought me tremendous joy in my life. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with bullshitting or throwing rocks at other rocks. I’d argue that these interactions are an incredibly critical part of the social fabric that holds groups of men together.

But, in nearly every single male-dominated group I’ve ever been apart of, it seems that we dramatically over-index to superficiality while under-indexing on depth and vulnerability. This has been exemplified by the number of times where I’ve come home after spending time with male friends only to have my wife ask me “so, how’s [insert name here] doing?” and for me to sheepishly admit that I actually have no idea, because we didn’t spend any time actually talking about what’s happening in our lives.

Instead, we’d been too busy bullshitting.

Or maybe, we were just too scared to share what was actually going on for us.

Sometimes, superficiality is totally fine. And, at the same time, I wonder if there might be huge benefit from sharing how we’re actually doing and asking for support from the people around us.

The truth is that I do really care about what’s happening in the lives of other men. And, similarly, I want to be able to share with them the ups and downs of my own life. In fact, I’m craving more of that. I want to experience the emotional resonance that comes with bonding over the shared experiences or challenges of growing up, getting married, building a family, and managing a career.

And increasingly, I’m trying to figure out where I can go to find or create that.

The Courage to be Emotional

I love the quote that I shared at the opening of this piece, because it’s so contrary to how I used to think about strength and masculinity. And because it strikes me that there’s a massive opportunity available for all of us men who are interested in reconnecting with the wisdom and intuition that exists in our emotions.

Admittedly, I don’t yet have a particularly fleshed out vision of what exactly that’ll look like.

But I am starting to figure out what it is that I want.

What I really want is a place where I can be around men who have the courage and strength to confront the emotions that course through each and every one of us. I want somewhere that I feel comfortable being more and more of myself and sharing what’s going on for me. I want a space to be supported and held accountable; challenged without being judged; celebrated, and not ridiculed or belittled, for being vulnerable.

I want admiration and mutual respect, not bravado and insecurity.

Presumably, that won’t appeal to everyone. In fact, I’d bet that it’s still a small minority of men who are courageous enough to acknowledge that this is something they want, and to step into it. Still, I know from conversations I’ve had over the past year that there are at least some other men who want this too.

If that’s you, let me know. Let’s have a conversation about it. And see where it takes us.

It’ll focus on goals and goal setting.
Because the way we commonly think about this topic
Seems broken to me.

Or, at least, that's true for how I previously thought about goals.

Goals used to be a place for me to get to at some point in the future;
An opportunity to create a different experience of my life;
A future state of happiness, contentment, good-enoughness.

I thought that once I achieved the goals I'd set,
That I'd feel differently.

So I’d unknowingly set goals that were disempowering.
And I'd suffer my way to their fulfillment.

Only once I reached the finish line
Would I realize that I felt no different
Than when I'd begun.

And so, I'd move the goalposts,
Striving for bigger and better goals.
Rinse and repeat.

I've worked hard to shift that thinking in the past few months.

To develop my understanding of goals as a tool to unlock
The experience of my life that I truly want today.

While also building towards a future
That's conscious and intentional.
One that exceeds what I previously thought possible.

Not because it'll make me happier,
or because I'm attached to getting there,
but simply because I want to.

I'm hosting this webinar
To talk more about what I'm learning.
If it's of interest, you can sign up below.

I hope to see you there!

Register for the Webinar Here

I was recently flailing over a persistent problem in my life.

The more I focused on the problem, the more I grew frustrated. Solutions came to mind, but they’d already been tried and failed. I was blocked.

At that present level of consciousness, stumbling upon a solution was unlikely, if not impossible.

Fortunately, I had the wherewithal to take a deep breath. And a step back.

Doing so helped me reconnect with what I actually wanted most in that situation. And in this process, as my mind quieted down, I began to see the extent to which my thinking about problems and possibility has shifted in recent years.

What I used to think of as problems—conflicts with people in my life, doing too much of some things, not doing enough of others, etc.—aren’t really problems, per se. Instead they’re symptoms of a more existential challenge: that the life I’m living is incongruent with the life I want to live.

And yet, I’ve noticed that we as individuals and as a society seem content to focus centrally, insatiably on our problems…

I wonder if that might be because we don’t know what we truly want. Or, maybe, we do but we can’t see a clear path to creating it. Perhaps, we’re scared shitless of falling flat on our face in the process of pursuing it and inviting the negative judgment of others and of ourselves.

Our focus on problems could be a product of any or all of the above.

Regardless of the why, what manifests is our absorption into a never-ending game of whack-a-mole-ing our problems under the pretense that one day we might be problem-free. At that point, we think: “I will have the life that I truly want!”

Except we won’t.

Because what we call problems aren’t really the problem at all. They’re symptoms found downstream from the headwater of the river that is our lives.

Until we commit ourselves to creating the life we want, new “problems” will always abound; because they’ll flow downstream from the conflict between how we’re showing up in the world and how we would show up if we knew we couldn’t fail.

To focus on our problems is small-minded, lazy, and reactive. Alternatively, to redirect our attention and energy upstream to what possibilities we most want in our lives is creative, abundant, and powerful.

To this end, there’s a great quote I’ve come back to repeatedly in the last month:

“God said: take what you want, and pay for it.”

Which begs some questions in my mind for me and for you to ask and to re-ask ourselves: Do you know what you most want in your life? Or, instead, are you stuck addressing your “problems”?

Once we’ve figured out what we want, we can begin to determine whether or not we wish to pay the price of admission. But, until then, we might stay stuck lamenting over problems that are actually symptoms of our inability to ask and answer a simple question of ourselves: “What is it that I truly want most?”

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I imagine the place from which we come at everything we do lies somewhere along a continuum: one extreme is fear; the other is love.

I used to live mainly from a place of fear, constantly worried that others might think mean and nasty thoughts about me. But really, I was terrified that they might catch sight of a line from my old document, and that they would agree with the sewage and vitriol in which I was bathing myself.

The fear I had was never really about them. In fact, it had absolutely nothing to do with them.

What I didn’t yet know is that we all experience our lives through the lens of our own filthy thinking.

Nor did I know that I had a document.

From that place of ignorance, I was unaware that who I was being in the world flowed downstream from it.

Dropping an Anchor

Without a consciously created anchor point—a north star of who I wished to create myself to be in the world—I was a buoy, awash in the storm of whatever negative and counterproductive thinking arose in any given moment. I was victim to the stories forged in the darkest moments of my life, in a kiln of fear and insecurity.

Through the process of creating my new document, I began to change that.

I don’t know exactly where my old document came from. Perhaps from being disciplined by teachers and parents. Or maybe from being bullied by classmates and siblings. It could have been from the hurtful things people said about me. Or, from the reactive, negative things I’d say about them.

The when and where of it actually doesn’t matter on iota though.

All that’s important is that those stories came from a place of fear, not love.

I stoked the fire of my inner fear each time a line of my old document played on my mind. I lived in that place for a long, long time.

But no longer.

My new document is both an affirmation and an intention; a living declaration of the potential and the actual that exists within me. Each line therein is a mountain without a top, because there is no ceiling on how much love I can have for myself.

Through its creation, I’ve given myself something firm to hold onto amidst the freneticism and chaos of my changing circumstance. It's become a touchstone to which I grip firmly whenever I'm feeling confused and afraid. The statements about myself that I speak into the world each day are the compass that points me home whenever I get lost in the veil of thought fog.

My new document was born from a place of deep love and reverence for the God that I am underneath my insecure thoughts. It's that feeling which it brings me back to each time I call it to mind.

A Return to Love

At first, when I set out on my own journey of personal re-discovery and growth, it was incredibly hard for me to love myself. My old document—filled with negative self-judgment—had its claws deep in my flesh and in my soul. Fortunately, hiding beneath the pain and hurt that I'd suppressed for years, unconditional love was always there. Hiding, but ever present.

Through this practice, I slowly began coming back into contact with the feelings of love for myself, which had at one point simply been the unquestioned norm. Little by little, at first, my tough exterior began to crack as I began to forgive myself for all my past negative self-judgment.

Tears flowed freely as I set down baggage I’d been carrying for decades.

And then, from that place, new ideas about who I am began to blossom. Ideas that were true all along, but that I'd lost sight of.

That was the first catalyst on this journey.

As I've worked my document in the past two years, it's worked me in kind. Slowly but surely, line by line, I've rewired my biological computer with affirmation and intention. Over and over and over again, I’ve spoken my document out loud into the world, at first with seemingly limited tangible impact.

That is, until I began to see green shoots of change.

Looking back now, those green shoots have grown into profound and fundamental change in how I experience my life and the world around me. What began as shame and embarrassment from speaking my document out loud, slowly morphed into a loosening of my resistance and self-consciousness about it.

Today, all that has given way to an overwhelming and lasting feeling of gratitude that arises whenever I share with the world who I'm creating myself to be.

Sharing My Document

If you're open to it, I'd love to share my document with you.

Before I do, I’d ask for two things from you in return.

Firstly, I would ask that you listen to my document as if it were about you, because it is about you. It's about all of us and what's available to each of us if we approach our lives from a place of love.

Secondly, I'd ask that you bring your highest quality of listening to it—not just for the words themselves, but to the feelings and emotions that dance inside of you as you listen. Close your eyes if it’s helpful and let my language land beneath the surface of your intellect.

In so doing, I guarantee there's something profound and possibly even life-altering for you therein.

Now ask yourself, what might become possible if you stopped trying to fix yourself, and instead remembered who you already are? How might the world look differently if you came at everything from a place of deep love for yourself?

I'm curious to hear what comes to mind.

If you're open to it, please share your thoughts in the comments below, or if privacy is your preference, simply respond to this email to reach me directly.

I'd love to hear what may have arisen for you.

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Stay tuned for Part 3, in which I’ll include more specific detail on the process through which I created my new document, and my practice of using it on a daily basis.

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Imagine, for just a moment, that every single human walking around on our planet has "a document."

The same is true for everyone who has ever walked the earth before us. The same will be true for every generation of humans to come: our children, our grandchildren, and their grandchildren alike.

Our documents are the collection of all the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and of the games we're playing in the world. These stories are our North Star; it's from our documents that everything in the physical world around us spills forth: our emotions, our actions taken and those foregone, our relationships with others and the relationship we have with ourselves. Everything we know spills forth from our document: it's the source from which our experience—the river of our creativity—flows out. It’s the point upstream where our conception of our place in the world and the impact we're having on it is born.

And yet, for 99.99% of the human population, our documents are unconscious and invisible. They've been created subconsciously, in reaction to events that have happened to us.

Consequently, our documents are filled with negative self-judgment and loathing; thoughts that appeared and got stuck; defense mechanisms we inadvertently created to protect ourselves from the pain and suffering inherent to human experience. Innocently and lovingly, we've been reinforcing these ideas about ourselves day in and day out through our whole lives. And, worse yet, we've been acting out and lashing out because of them: living our lives in response to the most self-deprecating and insidious ideas of who we truly are.

My old document acted as cinder blocks tied around my ankles: it kept me small and stuck.

It centered around the belief that I wasn't good enough: as a partner to my incredibly kind, thoughtful, beautiful partner, Abbie; as a son to my two selfless and caring parents, Louise and Phil; as a brother to my two extraordinary siblings, Cam and Owen. I wasn't good enough, both in absolute and in relative terms. My old document read that I wasn't worthy of anyone’s love, respect, time, or attention.

Unconsciously, I consistently reinforced these ideas through the thinking I had; thinking which was as ubiquitous as the air we breathe.

Given the document I was carrying around and living by, it's no wonder I struggled so mightily with anxiety, depression, and self-loathing for so much of my life. What I didn't realize at the time is that I was doing it to myself. Nor was I aware that an alternative existed.

That is, until the fall of 2023. That period of my life marked the beginning of something completely new. My coach introduced to me the idea of my document. “What the Hell is a Document?” I wondered to myself out loud.

Little did I know that I would become the singular most important catalyst of my life to date.

From the dog shit that was my prior self-conception, the bulb of a tulip took root and began to grow. It has since blossomed, again and again, in ways that I would have thought unimaginable just two years ago.

In September of 2023, I began the process of creating my own conscious, intentional document: an aspiration for who I wish to be in the world and an affirmation of who I already was. The statements included in my new document were powerful, self-affirming, and filled with optimism and positivity about who I’m striving to be in the world. The creation of my new document marked an inflection point in my life. Not that I could necessarily see that at the time, but as I now look back, it's evident how fundamentally life-changing this experience and the practice of using it has been for me. My new document and the efforts I've taken to live into it in new and ever-expanding ways has fundamentally changed my human experience forever.

Now, it feels as though my responsibility and highest purpose is to give that experience away: to illuminate what’s possible for all of us.

In the last few months, that's what I've been doing with clients in my coaching practice. Through my own experience crafting and living into my document, I’ve begun guiding others to step into this process for themselves. In so doing, the depth and nuance through which I've understood and experienced my own document has reached new and unexpected heights.

In turn, so has my experience of the world.

And still, the act of supporting a handful of people in creating their own documents no longer feels bold or audacious enough. Instead, I want to support 100,000 people to begin leaning into the process of creating their own documents in the months and years ahead.

It's for that reason that I'm writing this piece: to spread the word about the single most enlightening practice I've ever stumbled upon in my life. Not only that, but this practice is practical: it has the potential of becoming a shining, inexhaustible, inextinguishable North Star for anyone who takes it seriously. Best of all, creating your own document won't cost you a single dollar.

And yet, the value I believe it could have for you is worth in the tens of millions of dollars. In fact, its value to me is more than any amount of money can buy.

This piece marks the first in a new series: On Our Documents.

Undoubtedly, it will build off many of the themes I've written about previously in isolation. And if at any point you find yourself getting curious about this idea, please get in touch with me. Don’t just take my word for it. Come see for yourself how this practice has fundamentally changed me at a cellular level.

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To read Part 2 of this series, which I’ve titled Reverence for the God You Are, click here. And if you find yourself getting curious at any point about this process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

Why is it that big decisions are, at times, so difficult for us to make?

I’ve been speaking with someone in recent weeks who was in the process of making a “big” decision.

It was a career decision. And it was “big” in terms of the impact it would have on the trajectory of their professional life… and, relatedly, how they expected it to influence their experience of life well beyond the decision itself.

For weeks, they’d been locked in internal deliberation, weighing option against option. Each one, by its own merits, would be great. And yet, they felt trapped in a recursive loop of indecision.

They chose the word “anguish” to describe their predicament. The word that came to my mind was “suffering.”

Their struggle resonated deeply with me, having previously faced countless similar points of uncertainty and indecision throughout my own journey. Most notably, in lead up to the two times I’ve left prestigious, high-paying jobs to plunge myself into the murky abyss of extended, pay-check-less unemployment.

The discussions we had left me reflecting on the process through which I’ve previously made big decisions in my own life. And, the suffering I’ve often inadvertently created for myself in the process.

It seems obvious today how dizzyingly confused I used to be about and throughout “big” decisions. But in moments past, I certainly couldn’t see any of that. This is one of the beautiful features of coaching: when it’s someone else’s decision, it’s easy to see what we might otherwise miss when examining our own thinking.

Castles Made of Clouds

In these situations, it’s interesting to me the degree to which one decision—in this case, which job offer to accept—gets overweighted in our minds relative to the millions of other decisions we’ll make in the months and years ahead. While some of those future decisions will stem from that one “big” decision, most of them won’t.

We seemingly put such inordinate pressure on singular decision in isolation. And with such enormous perceived pressure riding on one choice alone, it’s easy to get caught up by needing to make the “right” decision.

But then, how to define “right”?

Highest paying? Best work-life balance? Most learning? Sexiest title? Best exit ops?

… A mix of all of the above?

“Aaagh… so many options. So much thinking required!”

Before having even made a decision, we begin worrying about the regret we may or may not feel by having made the wrong decision.

But not from a place of presence.

Instead, we ruminate from an imaged point in the future.

This notion of regret hides in the costume of external comparison. But, funnily enough, we compare to ghosts… not only to our imagined circumstance of having made a different decision, but most importantly to the imagined feelings that would be evoked on our journey through an alternative path that exists only in our mind.

We suspend presence to project ourselves into the future to analyze what could have been versus what is: reality, versus a castle made of clouds.

We spin up all this mental activity—thoughts revving into the red zone of the speedometer of our minds—despite our proven inability to predict the future with any degree of accuracy. The oversimplification of how we will actually experience our decision is striking to me, particularly in light of the fact that I typically can't predict how I’ll feel hour after hour, let alone years into the future.

Down we descend into the chaos of thought fog.

The more time we spend thinking about these “big” decisions, the less clear we become on which option to choose.

Through the Thinking Glass

I wonder if, so often in the course of making big decisions, we over-intellectualize the decision-making process.

We get so hung up on making the “right” decision—Greco-Roman wrestling with our thoughts—all while becoming increasingly disconnected from how we feel in our body about each option on its own.

Here, it seems to me, the central misunderstanding of our decision-making process unveils itself.

We think it’s our external environment—the offices we find ourselves in, the tasks in front of us, our coworkers and our bosses—that are responsible for how we feel across time and space. But that’s wrong. Instead, it’s our prevailing thinking that creates our experience of the world and the feelings we feel in it.

The world around us and the world inside of us are uncorrelated; disconnected, despite our societal perception of their interconnectedness. But, when lost in a thick veil of thought fog, what’s real and what’s imagined become increasingly indistinguishable.

Amidst “big” decisions, we seemingly lose sight of the thousands of decisions we make each day. We’re so focused on one decision tree that we miss the forest that is our lives.

“What time to wake up tomorrow? What shall I eat for breakfast? How about lunch? This shirt or that one? To run or to bike at the gym?”

Beyond the decisions we make in the physical world, we are constantly choosing the thoughts that become the lens through which we see the world. These decisions are so prevalent that they’re invisible to most. In the process of making big decisions, it’s particularly easy to forget our fundamental agency: our capacity to choose what and how we think about everything.

There is beauty and freedom in recognizing the futility of attempting to predict our feelings into the future.

For better or for worse, there won’t come a moment down the road when effective comparison and analysis can be undertaken by evaluating the pros and cons of this path taken versus that one forgone. A true counterfactual will never be available to us, no matter how desperately we might wish there was.

And so, there will never be a right decision.

Partly, because right is in the eye of the beholder.

The eyes of said beholder are likely to buzz around from shiny object to shiny object in the absence of something internally firm to hold onto: an anchor point of clarity around who we’re trying to be in the world. For me, that anchor point is a feeling.

The notion that we can choose who we wish to create ourselves to be —and the possibility that we have a built-in feedback mechanism to analyze in any moment our alignment with it—has taken much of the pressure off of me to make “right” decisions.

This same system applies to all the millions of decisions I’ll ever make.

I’m skeptical that any one decision will actually end up being of any significant consequence to the experience of our lives in the months and years to come. I wonder if, instead, what will truly make all the difference is how we choose to show up day in and day out.

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Fitting in is Opposite to Belonging

In my experience, I always know what I truly want. The challenge I’ve faced is that I don’t trust myself. Or, at least, I didn’t used to.

I’ve been so terrified of looking foolish in the eyes of my peers that I’ve agonize over what might be considered the “right” decision; the one we should make; the one a heard of sheep would make.

In my heart, there’s always perfect clarity. But the blizzard of internal mental chatter—the ceaseless thinking that we are all so accustomed to—can overwhelm my underlying sensitivity.

So often in the past, I’ve talked myself out of what I know will be best for me because I’m approaching the decision from a place of fear. And from that place of fear, I feel like I need the safety of the crowd.

What I suspect we don’t collectively realize is that our propensity to pursue safety in the form of fitting in comes at the expense of belonging. What I mean by belonging is the felt experience of living in accordance with who we truly are deep down, underneath our defenses and insecurities. Belonging, then, is a function of the alignment between the feedback we receive from our heart and the decisions we make in the world. It’s trusting that we always know what’s best for ourselves.

And, sometimes, the path that aligns with our belonging is the one that may run completely counter to conventional wisdom.

From Love or From Fear?

We are each, in a myriad of different ways, the exceptions to the rules that govern our society and culture. That is, if we are brave enough to live fully and truly into the beautiful idiosyncrasies and perfect imperfections that make us human.

I suspect—and have observed in others and myself—that the opportunity to choose based simply on what our heart most desires will feel out of reach, impossible, and terrifying for most to fully grasp. To do so runs counter to so much of what we’re taught. And yet, the belief that there’s a “should”, “have to”, or “need to” involved in any decision we make is in and of itself just a thought... A powerful one, but a thought nonetheless.

The truth in my eyes is that, in our fullest and truest form, you and I are each one-time cosmic events: creative machines of unique magnificence and divinity. In that sense, we are all in a litany of different ways exceptions to the rules that govern our society and culture.

All that to say, I suspect that the only right decision to make when we’re facing a crossroads of opportunity is to approach the decision from a place of love and reverence for the god that we each are.

And from that place, there are only two questions to ask ourselves:

Am I coming at this decision from a place of love or from a place of fear? And, similarly: What would love do in this situation?

When we’re living in alignment with the answers to those questions, I suspect there are no wrong choices.

Only next ones.

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What’s the relationship between success and happiness?

I used to think the answer was obvious. I thought happiness lived on the other side of success.

That is to say, I believed there was a positive correlation between how “successful” I was in my life and how happy my experience of it would be. In my mind, success was the independent variable and happiness depended on it.

But this understanding wasn't necessarily as obvious and clear to me as it is now. If I’d sat myself down and reflected upon it, I certainly could have seen its fallacy. But the tentacles of that idea ran deep below the surface of my awareness. It was so deeply rooted in my psyche that it colored what I held up as being sacred in my life.

I’ve found that many of the most foundational stories that color my worldview—those that are the hardest to shake loose—bear many similar characteristics to this one. In the moment, they're out of reach and out of sight. It's not until we look back on our actions over a long enough time frame that what's truly been motivating us starts coming into focus.

It's worth defining what I mean by “success”.

I'm talking about American dream-style success. Getting the best job possible and earning as much money as we can. Posting about that job on LinkedIn for all to see. Buying expansive houses with white picket fences out front. Winning friends. Influencing people.

Success in this context is a lifestyle to be attained, a societal status to be achieved, a reputation to be preceded by.

At various points throughout my twenties, I found myself well on my way to achieving this version of success that I’d long expected would set me free from the anxiety, self-consciousness, and stress that characterized so much of my journey up to that point. To my recurring dismay, the success-happiness relationship I’d expected to prove just wasn’t bearing fruit. Instead, I found that as I charged harder and faster towards success, I felt myself moving backward in my pursuit of happiness.

Despite its repeated falsification, the underlying belief that happiness was a product of success held strong. It was pernicious and resilient. As I continued pushing myself forward—too terrified to stop and take stock—I’d tell myself that I just wasn’t far enough along the path yet. I rationalized that if I just climbed a bit further and worked a little bit harder, that the key to my happiness would one day reveal itself.

Again and again, the relationship I’d held up as fact broke down. Happiness, it seemed, didn’t live on the other side of the success I so desperately sought.

Lately, I’ve found myself asking this question once again: what’s the relationship between success and happiness?

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In my experience, there has seemingly been no clear or durable correlation between my success and my happiness. Instead, they are each independent variables with limited lasting interplay.

What pieces of this puzzle was I missing when I set out to solve it years ago?

On the one hand, all the metrics of success I described above are external: they can be quantified and qualified, observed tangibly by others and by ourselves. They exist in the physical world that surrounds us.

Conversely, happiness seems largely divorced from the physical world. Instead, it’s a product of the world coursing and raging inside of me.

Happiness is a function of the intricate and ceaseless dance between my thoughts and the emotions they evoke. My capacity to experience happiness lies in my ability to steward the invisible contents of my consciousness in a way that's deliberate and self-loving.

The pursuit of happiness, then, seems to begin by developing an intimate familiarity with the operating system of my mind: to see and hold onto an insight into the fact that it's my thinking that creates my experience of the world and not the physical world around me. Beyond this insight, there’s the practice of moving through the world in accordance with it; in applying it to my experience of the world.

And still, there are few thoughts that I've encountered to date that have as jarring of a grip on my worldview as the dependence of happiness on success.

What I’ve found is that success and happiness are two separate paths to walk: achieving either one requires a disparate set of skills from the other. They aren’t mutually exclusive, but happiness is certainly not the independent variable—the driving force behind the game-of-life equation—that I once thought.

If anything, it would seem that happiness is the independent variable and that it's my success which is dependent on it. But, at the same time, it's not necessarily the same definition of success that I'd previously adopted unconsciously from the culture around me. Instead, it's my own consciously created version, a definition of success that is uniquely and uncommonly my own.

I suppose the best thing that could have ever happened to me is to have achieved some measure of success at an early age. Because, in so doing, it left me reflecting on a question.

What’s the relationship between success and happiness?

I’ve continued to run into the fact that success doesn’t mean shit for my happiness. Above some baseline, incremental success seemingly has no bearing on how happy I can create my life to be.

I wonder if this relationship between success and happiness—a belief that seems to be so deeply ingrained in our cultural psyche—will continue breaking down for more and more of us as we continue progressing through our lives. I wonder if our continued attainment of greater and greater success will continue to illuminate the lack of impact it has on how we experience our lives.

Maybe, in the process, we will continue deepening our understanding that happiness is always available to each of us. But, differently from the attainment of success, that it’ll require a willingness to do the deep inner work and introspection which at first will be invisible to the physical world around us. That is, until it first starts to color our inner experience of the world and then begins to radiate out through who we’re being in it.

Which leaves me with some questions for you.

Are you brave enough to consider changing your mind about the impact success will have on the quality of your life, your relationships, and everything you truly hold most dear to your heart? Or will you unconsciously maintain this relationship that, through my eyes at least, seems increasingly broken?

Similarly, I wonder, what else might we learn that we don’t currently understand about the relationship between success and happiness.

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A special thanks to for his invaluable insight and feedback on this piece ahead of it’s publication, and to everyone else who helped me develop this idea through conversations in recent weeks.

I used to struggle to accept a compliment.

When someone would say something nice about me, I’d reject it. Or redirect it.

“No, I’m not. You are!”

Anything to get the spotlight off me.

I didn’t dare acknowledge how great I was: not to myself, and certainly not to others. I was terrified of being perceived as arrogant. Maybe even more importantly, I didn’t really believe any of the positive things others would say about me. Compliments got lost in the fog of my overwhelmingly negative internal dialogue.

If I could do it, so could everyone else.

If only they just worked a bit harder.

I thought that playing small in how I described myself—to be falsely humble—was to perform a public service. A favor, of sorts. I dared not risk the possibility that, by acknowledging myself, I might make someone else feel uncomfortable.

I was scared. So, I shied away.

I hid my greatness from the world. Too busy worrying about the judgment that others might have of me, while unknowingly discarding my only enduring source of strength: the opinion I have of myself.

Ships are safe in the harbor. But that’s not what ships were made for.

The Sacred Cow of Playing Small

I know I’m not alone in my struggle to accept praise.

Self-censorship seems instead to be a cultural norm.

How did it become so deeply engrained in our cultural psyche that rejecting praise was a benefit to those around us? Where along the way did we develop the notion, and then the belief, that the greatness of one is an insult to everyone else?

How arrogant of us…

We’re so scared of offending others that we shirk responsibility for what’s rightfully ours to own: the pride we have in ourselves to show up, day in and day out, as the best and brightest version of ourselves. And, in turn, we neglect to celebrate the wonderous accomplishments that are birthed from our brilliance.

Maybe, it’s because we misinterpret the discomfort we feel whenever we come back into contact with the greatness inside of ourselves. That feeling is visceral. It used to make me recoil.

I was terrified of it.

It turns out that the only real difference between fear and excitement is our thinking about what it’s telling us.

That feeling isn’t a command to sit down and shut up. Instead, it’s an invitation to wake the fuck up; to lean into that which has always been true. That I am a force of love to be reckoned with; that I thrive at understanding and explaining complexity; that the love and care I have for the people around me is as unbounded as the night sky.

I am greatness. So too are you.

These statements aren’t relative. They’re absolute.

If we dare to begin acknowledging ourselves, we’d feel the giant inside us stirring as it begins to shakes off the shackles we’ve long imposed on it. Out of sight and out of mind, that giant is sleeping inside each of us, wondering when we may finally acknowledge its presence. To wake him up is to fire a warning shot across the bow of the voice in our head that seeks to stoke fear in our hearts. It’s a hand reaching out into the darkness of our lives offering its support: lighting the path of a new way, one that’s previously been too dark to see.

At times, the feeling whispers. And at others, it shouts.

If we dared to listen, we’d always hear the same message.

“Lean into your greatness!”

Releasing the Shackles

In the past, we may have found ourselves wondering: “Who am I to be extraordinary, beautiful, uncommon, sexy, magnificent?”

The real question is, who are you not to be?

Fear is a prison of our own mental creation. It keeps us stuck living a life that we say we don’t want but have previously been too scared to do anything about. Fortunately, fear is just a habit. We have a choice not to be afraid.

By leaning into our potential to shine as brightly and boldly as we possibly can, we unintentionally give others a permission slip to do the same. As we shake off the shackles of our fear and self-loathing, our way of being in the world unconsciously unlocks the prisons of others.

I am a giant and my light is contagious.

So are you. And so is yours.

Light begets light. Just as darkness begets darkness.

Let’s stop pretending we’re anything less than we know we truly are.

To continue playing along as diminutive characters in the fantasies of our lives, under the pretense that doing so is a service to others, would be the ultimate arrogance.

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To be embodied is opposite to being lost in thought.

It’s to be connected to the feedback mechanism of emotion.

For much of my life, I thought that the happiness, love, and fulfillment I so deeply desired was about my intellect. I was transfixed by an illusion that the experience of life I sought could be created in my head. I believed that I could think my way to happiness.

I was mistaken.

Happiness is a feeling. It lives in my body, not in my head.

I’ve found that feeling is the place from which the richness of my life emerges. It exists beyond words. It lies beyond the reach of my intellect.

To be disconnected from my body, as has been the norm throughout much of my experience of life, is to live in a state of perpetual numbness. It’s to struggle against the early warning system that is my emotions. And yet, I've noticed that I'm not alone in this struggle. Numbness seems to be the norm in our society. We live in a world of intellect, disconnected from the limitless wisdom of our souls; of our spirits.

Coming back into contact with feeling was scary, at first. It was a new way of moving through the world, which ran in direct contradiction to my old way of being. Feeling required a loosening of my grip on the circumstances of my life. It was, and is, a practice of letting my life unfold however it may, through surrender to the chaotic unpredictability of the world around me. Feeling is acceptance and recognition that we always and only have the power to affect how we respond to whatever hand we’ve been dealt.

After all, while we’re busy making plans, God is belly-laughing.

At our core, we are all simply a flow of experience. The only thing that’s truly real in our lives is the ever unfolding now. This moment is the only one from which I can create the version of my life that I’ve long been too scared to admit that I want. Everything else is simply a story I used to tell myself. Everything else is simply an often-unconscious creation of my intellect.

I used to think that it was my intellect that kept me safe. That it was my intellect that determined my value in the world. I understood it to be the arbiter of my worthiness of love.

So, naturally, I clung to it as if I were dangling over the edge of a ten-thousand-foot cliff.

I was confused; Afraid; lost in thought.

Instead, it's my intellect that has the power to deceive me into believing that I am anything other than pure love. It's my intellect, left to run amok, that has the power to fabricate stories about my-self and then to deceive me into believing that they are objective reality. After all, thought creates my experience of the world, right before turning around to say to me “I didn’t do it!”

Beyond my intellect, there are the feelings of my life.

It's in those feelings that magic and beauty spill forth.

Returning again and again to a state of embodiment has been akin to coming home after years away. Reacquainting myself with feeling has brought forth a rediscovery of the power I have to create my life to be whatever I desire most. It's liberation from the thought systems and beliefs that are so ingrained in family and society that they previously seemed like indisputable fact, not thought.

I continue to find at an ever-deepening level that the beauty of my life is born out of the feelings that emerge moment by moment. To be disconnected from those feelings—to be disembodied—is to feel nothing in the face of the immense power of the rising and falling tides of my emotions: it’s to live a life disconnected from the infinite wisdom, strength, and resilience that lies within each of us.

My discovery of this truth lay on the other side of a mountain that remained off limits for years. One where I long perceived danger to exist. In truth, that danger existed only in my mind. On the other side of that hill lay a world beyond the intellect.

That same discovery is available for each and every one of us, if we dare to venture beyond what we think we know to be “true.” To do so takes courage and determination. And on the other side lives a way of being in life that has exceeded my wildest dreams.

If you’re interested in speaking more about this way of being in the world, I’d encourage you to reach out to me. I’d love to have a conversation about what I continue discovering to be more true about how my mind works, and what I’ve found to be useful on this journey of creating a life that is uncommonly and unapologetically my own.

You can do so simply by responding to this email, or by sending me a message on LinkedIn.

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Analytical thinking has always been a strength of mine.

You could say that it’s a skill that I was born with. For whatever reason, it comes more naturally to me than it does for many others.

In school, this skill of mine consistently came in handy. In math classes, for example, I always did decently despite putting in minimal effort. Eventually though, there came a day where decently well would no longer serve the purpose I sought.

In the summer of 2012, ahead of my final year of high school, I decided to take physics in summer school. At the time, I’d set my sights on attending the best Canadian business school I could get myself into. Based on the GPA requirements, to get there would require a dramatic step up in my grades from prior years...

I hoped that my grade that summer in Physics 12 would be one of the classes that got me there.

In pursuit of an exceptional grade, I decided that external support would be helpful. I hired a tutor, with the understanding that he could support me along the journey to getting where I wanted to go.

Throughout the ten-week summer school curriculum, I’d attend three hours of class each morning. Afterwards, each afternoon, I’d spend an hour with my tutor. And then I’d do an hour or two of homework. I worked my ass off that summer: listening attentively in class, working diligently through the homework we were assigned, and bringing the challenges I faced throughout the course to my tutor. Throughout that course, I applied myself in school differently that I’d never done before.

I sought excellence.

And, ultimately, that’s what I’d go on to achieve.

I finished Physics 12 with a grade of 96%. I used it as one of the four grades that got me accepted into three of Canada’s top business schools the following year.

The support and tuition I received from my tutor that summer was invaluable. Seeking out and readily accepting his support was the best decisions I could have made. With his help, I upped my game from good to great. And, ultimately, that decision supported my achievement of the ambitious goal I’d set out to accomplish at the beginning of that summer.

Despite the fact that analytical thinking is one of my strengths, I not only needed to work incredibly hard to achieve what I’d hoped.

I also needed some help.

Searching for Happy

I suppose that we are each a balance of strengths and weaknesses.

Some skills come more naturally to us than do others. And, ironically, I’ve found that my strengths are consistently the antithesis of my weaknesses.

While the analytical thinking that lends itself well to physics and finance may be one of my strongest skills, there are other areas of my life where success has long remained much more elusive. That is most notably true in my ability to manage the internal world of my thoughts and emotions.

For much of my life, I struggled desperately to find enduring happiness. Similarly, I strained to feel proud of myself, to build the depth of meaningful relationships I long desired with the people I love most, and to approach the evolving circus of my life from a place of love and understanding, as opposed to negative judgment and anxiety.

That is to say that the skill of being happy is one that’s never come particularly easy or naturally for me.

And yet, for most of my life, the idea of asking for help in the personal and emotional areas of my life was weighed down by shame and embarrassment. Despite a deep desire to create meaningful change in these areas, fear long overwhelmed my capacity to do much about it.

Because of my unwillingness to acknowledge what I wanted—never mind going about pursuing it—I continued to struggle away for years in the dark.

Instead of asking for help, I bottled up my anguish and put on a mask that wore a beaming smile. The gap between how I felt inside and how I showed up in the world only served to exacerbate my feelings of alienation. I thought I was alone in my struggle to feel lasting happiness.

It’s funny now to notice how disparately I thought about the idea of asking for help in one area of my life versus another.

Fortunately, my thinking continues to shift.

A Skill to Develop

What if being happy, just like analytical thinking, were a skill to be developed?

If that were true, then there would be no limit to the happiness I could create in my life. Similarly, if that were true, then it would be a no-brainer to seek help in pursuing an ambitious and uncommon experience of my life colored by overwhelming and lasting joy.

The story I used to tell myself was that asking for help in the pursuit of happiness would serve as evidence of my weakness and impotence. This was a thought I viewed as a fact: an illusion of my own creation. Another one of these pernicious assumptions was that there are certain areas of life, like being happy, that should naturally be easy to excel in.

I took happiness for granted, assuming it was my birth rite.

Through the lens of my thinking, it’s unsurprising that my desire to be happier manifested as evidence of my brokenness. As I’ve found is infallibly the case, I was unwittingly projecting my thinking onto the world around me, thus creating my experience of it.

Unknowingly, I was busy gathering evidence of an already formed hypothesis: that I wasn’t good enough.

What I’ve since found to be more true is that to for anyone to ask for help in the context of their personal life is the ultimate act of self-love. Similarly, doing so is the most humble and courageous thing we can do. That is, because taking the first step in doing so often feels scary as shit.

To ask for help—and then to invest time, energy, and money in pursuit of what we truly want—is simply representative of a desire to improve a skill more quickly, intentionally, and thoughtfully than we could do on our own.

It’s a sign of a desire to improve and to grow. It’s a vote of confidence in our ability to create whatever it is we truly want in our lives.

This is as true for the skill of being happy as it is for a desire to improve our analytical thinking to get a better grade or our physical fitness in pursuit of an athletic achievement. In fact, I now see no difference across contexts.

A Way of Being in this World

Happiness is a skill to be developed.

And there is no limit on how much of it is available for you or I.

There is no ceiling on our capacity to move effortlessly, happily through the world: to live an experience of life unencumbered by our most negative conception of self. In my experience, the best way to move quickly towards what we desire is done by vulnerably seeking help along the way.

For me, taking the first step towards doing so simply involved a shift in my thinking about what asking for help meant about me.

As was the case in my Physics 12 course, a decision to ask for help in creating lasting happiness and excellence in my experience of the world is simply representative of a desire to shift more quickly and easily from where I’m at to where I want to be.

And while that shift could be from shitty to average, it could just as easily be from good to great.

Maybe most importantly, I continue to find that happiness isn’t actually a place to get to like I used to think. There doesn’t seem to be some final destination that I will one day reach, at which time I’ll be able to rest on my laurels. Instead, happiness is a state of being in this world. Like most everything else, to be happy and loving with ourselves and with others is a skill to be learned, practiced, and improved on.

If you or anyone you know want to accelerate the progression of your life from where it’s at to where you want it to be, go out and ask for help.

I guarantee it has the potential to change your life beyond what you think is possible.

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“Thought creates our world and then says, ‘I didn’t do it!’.”

– David Bohm

At the beginning of 2024, my life looked great.

I had an interesting job, an amazing and beautiful partner who cared deeply about me, a great apartment in which we lived. I had my health. My family did too. It all looked pretty idyllic.

Except from where I was standing, it often felt like shit!

Despite all the effort I was putting into creating a perception of success across the arenas of my life, it wasn’t translating into the experience I’d hoped for. I wanted to feel calm, happy, and fulfilled. I wanted to be comfortable in my own skin.

But a year ago, I simply couldn’t have been further from that goal.

This wasn’t the first time I’d found myself in this type of situation. In fact, there have been several periods in my life where I’ve seemingly been succeeding at a high level, while concurrently feeling overwhelming anxious and frustrated.

Some of those stretches lasted months. Others lasted for years.

This looks-great-feels-shitty paradox motivated a desire to better understand what the hell was going on. And so, in the last year, I’ve been centrally devoted to developing an answer to one question: “How does my mind interact with the circumstances of my life and the world around me to shape my experience of life?”

I wanted to know the operating system of my mind.

But I wasn’t just looking for a theoretical understanding. I wanted also to begin applying what I learned in the laboratory of my own life.

Fortunately, my concerted effort this past year bore some fruit.

Through learning, feedback, trial, and error, I slowly began developing a new understanding of how my mind really works. One insight at a time, the operating system behind my experience of life began to reveal itself.

A Deeper Understanding of the h-OS

For most of my life, I thought my mind worked like a camera.

I understood that, with some technical support provided by my five senses, my mind was capturing an objective picture of the world around me. Armed with that understanding, I sought to change the world and my circumstances in it to improve the feelings evoked by my experience.

Unfortunately, the harder I worked to get where I was trying to go, the less happiness I felt. It was as if I was running on a treadmill with a happiness carrot dangling in front of me. Except it always remained just beyond my reach.

No matter the job I had, the success I had in it, or the impact it had on my bank account, I still often felt overwhelmingly scared of the world around me. It often seemed as though the further I went, the further I needed to go to finally get to where I wanted to be.

Happiness seemed to be a moving target.

But there was a huge misperception in there: I didn’t understand how the operating system worked. And so, I was using it wrong. It doesn’t work like a camera at all. What I know now to be more true is that the operating system of my mind works like a projector.

My mind is the energy source: it beams a flood of light onto a screen. That screen is my consciousness: a blank canvas devoid of meaning or facticity. My mind illuminates the canvas. And then there’s the film through which the light shines: that film is my prevailing thinking. It’s populated with an always shifting stream of analysis, interpretation, and meaning. As the light of my mind shines through it, it becomes superimposed onto the screen of my consciousness.

Thought is the pattern recognition that gets brought automatically to bear onto the contents of my consciousness. By virtue of the Human Operating System, thought creates my experience of the world.

Consciously or not, we are always projecting our thinking onto the world around us. But without an understanding of the operating system, we will continue misunderstanding what to do about it when we seek different results.

Applying This New Understanding

At times in this past year, and especially in the months from September through November, it felt like I had a pretty good handle on this new way of moving through the world.

Despite 2024 representing a period of massive transition—leaving a stable job, getting engaged, moving countries, beginning to build my own business—I felt empowered by this understanding. The seeming chaos and turbulence of it all didn’t phase me one bit. Not only did I understand the operating system, but I was applying it in the theater of my life with remarkable success.

And then, in December, it all suddenly came crashing down.

I was plunged back into an overwhelming darkness of self-consciousness: an experience I’ve become intimately familiar with in the past. The number of items on my life admin to-do list suddenly felt like fires that were beginning to smolder. Suddenly, they felt urgent and scary, as if an immediate resolution was required if I didn’t want my life to burn up into ashes. And, worst of all, the most negative of my self-judgments took root once again.

I fell back into a state of capture by my most deprecating conceptions of self. Once again, I was unwittingly projecting my most negative self-judgments onto the world around me.

Despite the seeming familiarity of it all—and everything I’ve seen into how my mind works—weeks went by without my having any awareness of what I was doing to myself. I suppose that’s the biggest challenge of working with our human operating system: when we’re lost in a world of thought, we often don’t have the wherewithal to notice it, let alone do anything constructive about it.

Fortunately, last week, I began to snap out of it.

The time spent working to understand the operating system was not in vain. Because now, at any point in time, it takes only one thought to return to the depth of the understanding that I’ve developed. And in so doing, my worldview can shift in an instant from one characterized by fear, to one full of possibility.

A Self-Created Reality

In the last few days, I began to reacquaint myself with the feeling of calm and centeredness that I’d felt in the months leading up to December.

The circumstances are largely unchanged from what they were just weeks ago. The only real difference is that I’ve regained my awareness of how the operating system works. And with that greater clarity has emerged an opportunity to take the reins once again, to see the thinking I have in any moment for what it is: just thinking. Not reality.

When I can maintain an awareness of that operating system, I no longer feel the need to fix the thinking itself… because it’s not the thinking that’s the problem.

Instead, it’s my misunderstanding and resulting misuse of the operating system.

When I forget that the thinking isn’t real, I fight against it. And in so doing, I dig myself further and further into a rut of my own unconscious creation. On the other hand, when I can see my thinking for what it is, I can choose to acknowledge it while not acting upon it. I can laugh at the tricks that my mind tries to play on me with a smile on my face, instead of engaging them in battle. Most importantly, I can choose to respond from a place of love and understanding, instead to frustration.

I’ve come to see that there’s real power in acknowledging that I don’t have to believe the thoughts in my head, whether it’s for the first or for the hundredth time. That power has emerged from deepening my understanding of the operating system behind my experience of the world.

The Gift Of Forgetting

My experience this past month was a gift.

In forgetting temporarily what I’ve come to know to be true about the relationship between my mind and my experience of the world, I got the opportunity to remember again. And, in turn, to reinforce my understanding of the operating system.

Our experience of the world is a projection of the thinking in our heads. Critically, the thinking in our heads need not be a reflection of our circumstance in the world. Experience is created from the Inside Out, and not from the Outside In. That’s how the operating system works.

When I can work with the operating system, as opposed to fighting it, it begins to work for me.

If you’re interested in learning more about this idea, I’d recommend checking out a book written by Michael Neill titled ‘The Inside Out Revolution’. If a book feels like too big an undertaking, start instead with a 14-minute YouTube clip titled ‘Why Aren’t We Awesomer?’ in which Michael elaborates on the understanding that underpins his work.

I guarantee that it has the potential to change your life.

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I used to imagine that the source of my creativity was like a well.

I believed that somewhere deep inside that well lived a finite resource: a capacity to create beautiful things. What I understand today as being divine was once just ordinary and commonplace. For children, creativity is the norm.

When I was young, in search of this magical force, I’d gather a bucket and string to lower myself into the unknown. During these trips, I held no expectation of what I might find. Instead, I was led by curiosity. Operating in pure discovery mode. This Journey down into myself invited lighthearted opportunities to play. There was nothing serious or intellectual about it; I had no purpose or end goal.

I explored my creativity simply because I enjoyed doing so.

Experiencing my creativity went beyond words or comprehension. Losing myself in time and space for hours that felt to me like seconds. I’d visit other galaxies, build castles and countries, invent new languages. And sometimes, upon returning home, I’d have something tangible to show for it: a drawing, a new game, or an understanding of the world rooted outside the bounds of science or logic.

When I was young, despite its mystical nature, I always knew where to find my creativity. In any moment upon seeking communion with it, there it was again! We were on good working terms with one another.

At the bottom of my creative well, magic was always abundant and easy to access.

But as I grew up, trips down that well became fewer and further between. The thought of exploring its uncharted depths began to scare me. Increasingly, I shied away from opportunities to sink deeper into the creative abys.

Perhaps, I worried that my bucket might one day scrape the bottom and come back up empty. Or maybe, I feared discovering something new and exciting, only to have my enthusiasm crushed by someone I loved. Alternatively, my fear may have come from the possibility that I’d fall into the well and get lost. I guess I might have been scared that losing myself in creative pursuit might destroy the drive and ambition that I thought made me lovable.

The longer I stayed away, the more dangerous it seemed to become. In my mind, the hands of time had unwound the structural stability that I once knew to be safe. Over the mouth of that well, vines and cobwebs slowly took hold, seemingly preventing me from slipping away into its depths. Eventually, terrified of what might be growing inside, I boarded up that well with signs that read “Trespassers Will be Shot” and “Beware of Dog.”

No matter the reason, at some point along the journey of my life, I stopped investigated that well.

I convinced myself that I just wasn’t a creative person.

I reasoned that while the wells of others contained plenty of magic, my hiatus from creative exploration had led to mine becoming a dry, derelict, lifeless hole. I relegated myself to the creative sidelines and resigned to satisfying myself through consuming the creativity of others.

Doing so came at a cost.

It triggered judgment and disdain, both of myself and of others. I’d unwittingly become an armchair critic, too scared of my own creativity to pursue it. I thought I’d been destined to be a bystander in the audience for the rest of my days.

Fortunately, I was wrong. I now understand the source of creativity differently.

It isn’t actually like a well at all. Instead, it’s like a river.

Throughout our lives, from birth to death, there exists a raging, racing river of creativity that courses constantly through each of us. The source of this creativity has no bottom nor end. Instead, it’s infinite and immeasurable.

Drawing from the environment around us—the thawing snow-capped mountains in the distance and the gushing tears of grey clouds above—our creative source is constantly being replenished. In some seasons, we may feel that its current runs stronger than in others. But deep inside each of us, there is always a trickle of inspiration to draw from. Steadily, and at times invisibly, it forges its way through the peaks and valleys of the world inside of us.

On some days, that river may seem to be blocked, as if a dam has been erected upstream.

And maybe, that is true.

Fortunately, if it is, that dam itself is also an unintentional act of our own creativity, as we are each the creators of our own unique experience of this world. In the same way that it was built, that block can be smashed to pieces and washed away in any moment.

But only if that is what we choose to create.

We are all simply a flow of experience. That experience, roaring through us, is the place from where our creativity is born. Influenced by our surroundings, we take in the outside world and filter it down into ourselves through our senses. The feelings and intuition evoked by this process transcend words. It’s from these languageless feelings smoldering deep inside of us that our creative acts emerge.

We are not the radio playing the music.

Instead, we are the music itself: constantly moving, always evolving, and never twice the exact same. Sometimes, that music is loud and upbeat. Other times, it’s sad and slow-paced. But so long as we are alive, the music plays on, the river of our experience flows, and somewhere beyond the reach of our intellect, our creativity is stirring.

Creativity is made manifest by our personalities. It sits at the intersection of the boundless flood of thoughts and emotions running through us in any given moment, and in the actions we take in response. We exist as created beings, living in a creative world, experiencing a life which itself is a creation of our own making.

As human, creativity is our birth rite: it’s for everyone, and it’s in all of us. We are each creativity personified: the biproducts of an unfathomable number of creative acts.

That isn’t to say that reacquainting ourselves with our creativity won’t involve confrontations with fear. Quite the opposite, in fact. The ultimate act of creativity may simply be to feel the fear bubbling up inside of us, and to choose to act regardless of its gravitational pull. If we hope to create a life that we’ve previously been too scared to live, acts of courage might be the most important display of creativity imaginable.

Thankfully, the source of our creativity isn’t a well.

It has no bottom. Nor is there an end to it. It doesn’t contain a finite resource. And there is no potential for it to collapse in on us if we choose to explore it.

Instead, it’s always there to be investigated, if we can muster up the courage to do so. Because the source of our creativity is like a river: it runs constantly, effortlessly through each of us.

As my understanding of creativity has evolved, so too have the questions I ask myself about its role in my life. There is no longer any doubt in my mind that you nor I are creative beings.

Instead, I wonder, what will we chose to create?

A burly, greying, suit-and-tie-wearing man walks into his doctor's office. For this story’s sake, let’s call him Dave.

“How can I help you today?” the doctor asks.

“I need to lose 25 pounds,” Dave admits defeatedly, “and I'd like to do it in the next three months. I've tried everything. But, no matter what I do, I just can't seem to drop the weight. I'm desperate. I'll do whatever it takes. Can you help me?”

“No problem.” the bespectacled doctor replies, looking over his patient’s intake form. “You’ve come to the right place. In fact, if weight loss really is your top priority, I think we can move up that timeline dramatically.”

“It is,” Dave responds. The quiver in his voice revealing his desperation. “I’ll do anything.”

Pensively, the doctor turns around to the laptop sitting on the countertop behind him. After a few taps on his mouse and a couple click-clacks on his keyboard, the printer beside him starts whirring to life. He plucks the newly minted piece of paper out of the printer’s jaws, returns to face Dave, and hands it over to him.

“It’s really simply,” the doctor says calmly, confidently. “The contact information for a specialist is on there. Book an appointment with him.”

“He’ll amputate your leg.”

Dumbfounded and visibly upset, Dave, “Are you fucking crazy?”

“All I really want is to feel healthy again, so that when I come home from work, I have enough energy to play with my kids?”

As a child, I saw my father as a superhero.

I thought he was the epitome of infallibility. Flawless and invincible. My dad could do, say, or be no wrong. He was strong and brave, smart and cunning, supportive and loving.

I saw him as perfect.

One year, when I was young, he coached all three of mine and my two brothers’ soccer teams. That meant three practices and three games. Every week. All winter. Not only that but he biked to and from work. Every. Single. Day. We lived in Vancouver; it rains a lot here. And yet, every morning, long before I’d wake up, he’d set off on his bike on route to work. He said that trip took him about 30 minutes door-to-door. It would have taken me years. Not only that but he also knew how to read big books, and do gardening and stuff, and drive a car, and sometimes he made us meals. He wasn’t a great cook, especially compared to mum, but he could do it if he needed to. He took care of my family.

I saw my dad as a rock, a provider, a coach, a machine. He was the jet engine that propelled us forward: steadfast, invincible, unshakable, tireless.

Through the lens of my childish pre-pubescent brain, my father was real-life Superman.

There would have been no way to talk me out of this belief. In fact, I didn’t recognize it as a thought that existed only in my head. Instead, like the laws of gravity, I saw my dad’s perfection as indisputable fact. To me, he was actually perfect: free of insecurity, flaw, vulnerability, or weakness.

I’ve always looked up to my dad. I’ve long aspired to be just like him. I love him dearly.

At the same time, my relationship with him has been the object of much confusion in my life. A broad delusion, in which he was a party, caused me tremendous suffering. Until recently, I didn’t recognize that I spent much of my life under a spell more powerful than anything in the world: that of my own thinking.

In my experience, there are few areas of life where thought masquerades more effectively as fact than in familial relationships.

Growing up, the perception of my father’s perfection was a blessing. As an adult, uncovering the fallacy of this illusion was even more powerful.

The Pursuit of Perfection

As I grew older, and began asserting my own independence, there remained some lines in my monkey-like coding that still wanted to be like him. I strove for his acceptance and respect. In so doing, I unconsciously began pursuing perfection.

Like a golden retriever with a tennis ball, I started chasing it relentlessly.

Lurking under the surface, motivating this pursuit, was a series of mental misconceptions. You see, I suspect part of me still thought my dad was perfect. And I was under the impression that there was a positive correlation between his perfection and how much I loved him. So, naturally, my twisted brain created a condition in which I needed to be perfect to be lovable.

Consequently, my thirst for perfect was unquenchable. Which, based on my thinking at the time, made perfect sense. Because perfection was a requirement to be loved by others.

This series of misunderstandings manifested itself everywhere in my life. In the first innings of my career, I strived insatiably for the hardest, most prestigious, highest-paying jobs I could find. I thought that might make me perfect. The same perfectionist tendencies showed up in my relationships. I thought lovability required steadfast strength and infallibility. So, I’d disguise and bury my vulnerabilities and insecurities. In every aspect of my life, I competed against and compared myself with others every chance I got. Perfection meant being the best. I struggled to admit when I was wrong or take accountability for my mistakes. Perfection meant never being wrong. I also couldn’t bear the thought of asking for help from anyone, especially those that loved me most dearly. Perfection meant doing it on my own.

In my mind, to show the tiniest crack in my shining armour of invincibility was to declare myself as unlovable. I was always wearing my costume of invincibility. It was heavy, sweaty, burdensome, and exhausting.

But I had no choice.

I wasn’t that I wanted to be perfect. Nope.

I needed to be.

Inevitably, though, there were times where my makeup would begin to wear off and my costume would start to crumple. In the months of October and November of 2021, I suddenly found myself naked. My costume was gone and I was forced to reckon with my imperfection.

Those months were amongst the most brutal of my life. And, that experience turned out to be a blessing in disguise. It marked the beginning of a course correction that brought me to where I am today.

Resurrecting Forgotten Characters

In those months, from the standpoint of my own unreasonably high standards, my life was in tatters.

I’d just broken up with the love of my life out of fear that she might see who I truly was. I was jobless and directionless. I’d undershot an unrealistic self-employment goal I’d set for myself, and made it mean something devastating about me. I was depressed, angry, lonely, and sad.

I saw myself as a failure. The imperfection I’d been working so hard to hide from the world was momentarily laid bare.

I hated myself for it.

Thankfully, I’d smashed myself into so many pieces that I finally reached out to a therapist and asked for help. This wasn’t the first time I’d done so, but it was the start of taking my self-improvement seriously. That initial step, amongst countless others in the past, present, and future, have helped me see that my mind not only shapes, but creates my experience of reality.

Thank God for him and for the courage I had in that moment! There are few decisions in my life that have had such a lasting impact.

In our private conversations, we explored the lost and forgotten corners of Adam. In so doing, I began noting that, somewhere along the way, I’d been confining the fragments of myself that I deemed imperfect to the deepest, darkest, dankest corners of the cellars in my mind. I’d chained these characters to the ground. Starved them of attention. Beat them into submission. And then done everything I could to forget their very existence.

My hope was that, left abandoned for long enough, they’d fade into oblivion and die a silent death.

Fortunately, these abused and forgotten slivers of me had refused to surrender. In fact, they were anti-fragile, and all along they’d been growing stronger. Their confinement stoked invigoration, not compliance. Like diamonds being forged under pressure, they’d been growing slowly but steadily more resilient. And their imprisonment had made them restless.

In those months of late 2021, as I was melting down, they were breaking free from their cages and exploring a wilderness they knew only from distant memory.

At first, they wreaked havoc in my life and on my ego. But slowly, surely, as we investigated new rooms of me, and visited with these characters I’d long forgotten, glimmers of light slowly began reappearing in the darkest corners of my soul.

Facing Worst Fears

In those months, green shoots of vulnerability took root in the garden of my mind.

As I shared, one by one, the thoughts about myself that I was most ashamed of, I began feeling lighter. I started getting more comfortable sharing what I’d previously deemed as terrifying thoughts.

I’d expected that by rescuing these left-for-dead pieces of me, I’d worsen my self-perceived insufficiency. But I was wrong. Instead, something funny and counterintuitive started happening. The more we talked, the more of my authentic imperfection we dredged up, the lighter I began to feel.

Eventually, I found happiness again. I thought I was fixed! I stopped seeing that therapist. I couldn’t see at that time that to be fixable implied a perception of brokenness.

I’d temporarily stemmed the blood flow and band-aided over a gunshot wound.

Unsurprisingly, before too long after we stopped talking, darkness began creeping back into me. My feelings of brokenness began to resurface. Once again, I grew ashamed of my imperfection. Again, I lost sight of the influence of my thinking on how I experienced the world.

What I’ve noticed is that mental and spiritual health is similar in many ways to physical health: exercising the muscles in our heads and in our hearts also need regular upkeep to stay in good shape. I’d stopped exercising and reverted to my diet of mental junk food. And so, it’s unsurprising that I’d started getting fat again.

At that point, I went out and hired myself a coach. In all honesty, I stumbled ass backwards into the coaching relationship that’s since changed my life. But that’s a story for another day. What’s relevant to this story is that I’ve now been working with that coach for 14 months. Every two weeks we meet. And every single day, I take time to reflect on and reinforce the lessons I’ve learned about myself and how my mind works.

Our work has centered around identifying and shining light on the persistent yet unexamined insecurities that regularly manifest themselves in my life.

When we began working together, I struggled to be vulnerable. But after each step we took together, with each insecurity we investigated, the world began looking kinder and brighter. Slowly, I started to trust the process.

I slowly began to see that that there were countless nasty, loathing, self-destructive thoughts about myself that I’d previously been holding up as facts.

To this day, we continue turning over new rocks of insecurity and self-judgment. In fact, it often feels like we’ve barely even scratched the surface of a beach with no shoreline in sight. Each stone we turn over is an invitation for a discarded piece of myself to reintegrate itself into my life.

As I’ve began embracing my imperfection, and letting go of the judgment I used to have around my insufficiency and unlovableness, my experience of the world has begun fundamentally changing.

Thoughts, Not Facts

I now believe that my brain—and its principle building blocks: Mind, Consciousness, and Thought—is powerful beyond my wildest conception.

So too is yours.

We live in a world not only shaped by, but created from, our thinking. I see now that while I was busy growing up, my brain was occupied building a complex, dynamic, circular constellation of understanding of both the world around me and of my place in it. And, in this process, there were many assumptions enshrined into my worldview that I learned to perceive as facts, not thoughts.

As it relates to my pursuit of perfectionism, there are four particularly pernicious assumptions that, until recently, were completely invisible to me:

1. My Dad’s Perfection Was Fact, Not Thought: I couldn’t see the fact that my perception of my dad’s perfection was just that: a perception. It wasn’t a fact after all. I now know that he certainly didn’t see himself in the same light that I did when I was growing up.

2. There’s Positive Correlation Between Love and Perfection: I misperceived that there exists a positive correlation between my dad’s seeming perfection and the love I feel for him. Until recently, I didn’t understand that the love I had for him had nothing whatsoever to do with his seeming perfection.  I was blind to the reality that I love my dad for who he is authentically, at his core.

3. Love Is Only Available Outside of Me: I used to think that love for me came only from others: girlfriends, parents, brothers, friends, colleagues, etc. I didn’t accept that I could love myself. In fact, I didn’t even know this existed. I suspect this was partly because I’d confined pieces of myself to the dungeon.

4. Suffering Originates from External Perception: I used to blame everyone else for my suffering, especially those I loved most dearly. I was under the impression that I needed to wear a mask to be lovable in their eyes. What I didn’t appreciate until recently is that nothing outside of me can make me feel anything. Instead, the only trigger for my reactivity is the presence of a nasty story about myself running unconsciously through my mind: a thought, perceived as a fact.

Becoming Invincible

Today, I'm growing flowers in the darkest corners of myself so that I can support others to do the same in the garden of their mind.

You see, something funny happened when I began opening up. What's begun to shift is that, on most days, I can see the fallacy of the self-deprecating stories that’d been running unchecked through my head for decades. I've also begun actively replacing them with stories that are empowering, validating and affirming; statements and ideas that were true all along, but that I just couldn't yet see to be true because they’d been hiding under layers and layers of bullshit.

I can see now that I’m perfectly imperfect in my own unique way. Failing to embrace my imperfection is to argue with reality.

That’s where my suffering comes from.

Counterintuitively, the road to where I'm at today began when I started boring into the stories I’d been telling myself about how I was broken, not good enough, and unworthy of love. I thought these thoughts were too crazed and depraved to share with others.

That’s the trap though!

The only way through my insecurities was to walk through them, to feel them, to surrender to them, and then, to let them pass back away into the abyss from whence they came. In so doing, over and over and over again, my thinking began to loosen its stranglehold over me. In holding my insecurities up to the light, I can see that they’re empty and weightless. As I’ve embraced all of myself, the illusory nature of my thinking has become clearer and clearer.

The best part is that this path is always available for anyone to walk if they so choose. If you’re ready to walk yours, or just want to talk, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me.

You can do so simply by clicking the button below.

Real Life Superhero

Today, I still see my dad as a superhero. But not in the same way I did before.

I no longer believe him to be flawless, error-free, and free of weakness.

As I’ve began accepting my own imperfection, it’s given me grace to begin doing so in others as well. As I’ve dropped the expectation that I need to be perfect, I’ve been able to do the same for others. Including for my dad.

Our relationship is stronger today than it’s ever been before.

I’ve found that sharing my insecurity presents an invitation for others to do the same. Welcoming forgotten slivers of myself back into the open creates a beautiful feedback loop of deepening connection and authenticity with myself and with others. Not only is it an invitation to others but also another piece of evidence to the fact that when I share the burden I’d been carrying alone for so much of my life, the load gets lighter and the world begins to look just a little bit kinder.

The more of my insecurity I’ve shared, the more it’s reinforced how fundamentally confused we all are about the impact our thinking has on our experience of the world. The only thing tying me to the ground–the one thing preventing me from flying–is my desire to continue chasing perfect because of misconception about how the world really works.

The route to accessing unconditional love for myself lay in embracing my own imperfection. In so doing, I’ve also deepened the love I have for others.

Therein hides the key to my invincibility. And, I suspect, to yours too.

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I’m here to come clean: this week I fell short of a goal.

In fact, I failed.

It's taken me a few days to face the music, but here I am. I might be covered from head to toe in tar and feathers, and yet, I’m wearing a big ass smile across my face. This is an entirely new approach to failure. It feels different.

Before going further, let me first rewind a bit.

Three weeks ago, I set a goal of publishing 30 pieces of writing in 30 days. The first two weeks went really well. The writing was flowing out of me, and I was enjoying it. Thirty days felt easy and achievable. And then, earlier this week on Tuesday… Nada! No matter what I did, I just couldn't will myself into sitting down to write. The well was dry. My battery: depleted.

In the face of competing priorities, writing just didn't feel like a good use of my time. There was much more important shit going on in my life that needed to be taken care of.

My fiancé and I are currently trying to buy a car, we’re also organizing the AirBnB we’re staying in for six weeks starting later this month, also we’re (slowly) planning our wedding, and we’re working to sort out a trip back to Nicaragua in the new year. Separately, I’m rehabbing a hip injury while beginning to figure out how I’m going to run an ultramarathon next summer, I’m in the process of launching a business, and obviously, I’m trying to become a better writer.

That’s all before taking stock of the overflowing waste pile of run-of-the-mill life admin bullshit that I've been neglecting for far too long.

Sometimes I forget that to speed up in the long run, I first need to slow down. The Navy Seals have a great saying to this effect: “Slow is smooth. Smooth is Fast.” The reality is that if I don’t first lay down a sturdy foundation, the house of cards I’m about to build will quickly get blown over my a minor unforeseen inconvenience.

So yeah, I failed. I only published 14 times in 14 days. Day 15 stumped me. I didn’t even make it 47% of the way towards my goal! At sub-50%, I fall squarely within the academic requirement for an F.

And yet, I've never felt so defiantly successful in the face of abject failure.

This time, there's no judgment about my inability to accomplish what I set out to do. Instead, there's pride that stems from my recognition that I was better off failing at this goal than falling short in other, more important aspects of my life. These other aspects include my role as a partner, as a brother, as a son, as a friend, and as a coach.

In many of these roles, there aren’t quantifiable goals. In fact, I’ve found that many of the most important things I want in my life defy quantification.

Sometimes, in the context of goal setting and success tracking, I unconsciously zero in on my quantifiable goals—like, for example, publishing 30/30—while neglecting the more qualitative goals. In the past, with my blinders on, I’d often arrive at the finish line of a goal I’d set and not remember any of the journey that’d got me there. In the process, life could feel at times like an exercise in crossing things off a to-do list.

I’ve noticed that it’s not just me that falls into this trap. In fact, there are many aspects of our lives where we’re so laser focused on the destination that we forget about the path we’re walking on altogether.

For example, we talk about how many books we’ve read but not the degree to which we’ve internalized the lessons shared therein. We boast about the number of friendships we have (or, even worse, the number of followers we have on social media) while neglecting to mention the depth and quality of our most important nuclear relationships. We respond quickly to instant messages at work, because it’s often viewed as a shortcut for determining someone’s productivity, while in so doing we compromise our focus on the important, value additive tasks that will actually make a difference but that require invisible, protracted effort and attention.

My point is that the quantifiable goals we set are usually an imperfect measure of our true objectives. In fact, in my experience, it’s the qualitative goals—those that can’t effectively be measured or analyzed—that actually matter.

In this instance, my quantitative goal was to publish 30 times in 30 days. And yet, my true goal is one day to become one of the best writers in the world. But this can’t be quantified. And so, I leverage imperfect substitutes that may or may not spur me along in the right direction. To arrive at this destination, I’ll surely need to spend thousands of hours honing my craft in the years, and probably even decades, to come. The pursuit of that goal will surely be a marathon, not a sprint. Undoubtedly, if I burn myself out now on this silly little self-created challenge, and forget to nurture the other, more important areas of my life that allow me to write like only I can, I will surely never realize my long-term goal.

My heart told me to stop running at the blistering pace I was on. It told me that I'm better off regrouping, before I launch myself into whatever is next.

So I did. And I am.

Thank you, as always, for taking the time to read my writing. It means the world to me. If I can ever be of service to you, including if it's to connect or reconnect, please don't hesitate to reach out. You can do so simply by responding to this email.

I suspect I will be back pretty soon, in some form or another. But first, some rest.

Take care.✌️

Sometimes,
The best course of action
When facing a pernicious problem
Is simply to stop looking for a solution.
Instead, do something else entirely unrelated.

Perhaps,
The solution is still gestating.
Maybe more information is needed.
Or the problem simply isn’t ready to be solved.
The exact cause of a roadblock is often beyond our reach.

Potentially,
The entire conundrum
Is born out of how we frame the issue.
Words shape and create our subjective worlds.
Problems and solutions are just undiagnosed thoughts.

Typically,
When I stop perseverating
And grant my subconscious the space
To chew on an issue that’s been bugging me
A flash of creativity will eventually strike, as if from nowhere.

Miraculously,
In the blink of an eye
A beautiful path forward will identify itself
And I’ll be grateful that I didn’t waste time stewing
Over a problem that just wasn’t yet ready to be solved.