My sixteen-year-old sat across from me last night and started saying things about himself I recognized immediately.

I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why they won't hire me. This should be easy.

He's been applying for jobs for almost a year. I've been working on fear for almost forty.

Neither of us got it right last night.

That's the part I keep coming back to. Not that fear shows up. I knew that. It's that it shows up wearing whatever name fits the room. His name was discouragement. Mine was failing to fix it for him. Same thing underneath. And knowing that didn't help me in the moment one bit.

This episode isn't about beating fear. I've been in too many rooms where someone tells you how to do that. This is just me saying it out loud, what it actually looks like when you're 54 and you still get it wrong, and what it looks like when you decide that's okay.

🎧 No Stage, Just a ChairA podcast for people figuring it out as they go: building honest brands, real decisions, and work that feels like theirs.

Before You Listen:

Is there someone in your life whose fear you've been absorbing without naming it that way?

What have you been calling fear that keeps you from seeing what it actually is?

When did you last give yourself permission to not have the answer?

I was 15 years old, sitting in a coffee shop with my dad. Dr. Pepper. A cherry Danish. The exact order I always got. His friend Steve came in and they started talking about someone going through a divorce, someone who had cheated on his wife. And Steve said he could never do that. He could never be that person.

My dad stopped him. Said: "You could. And it is possible."

I checked out the way teenagers do when adults say something too real. But when we got to the car, my dad turned to me and said he'd spent years on the road. Hotel rooms. Opportunities. He'd never cheated on my mom. And the reason he believed that, the thing he said kept him honest, was being willing to look in the mirror and admit it was possible.

Nobody wears the white hat all the time.

I've told my sons there will be things I have to apologize to them for. Not because I'm planning to fail them. Because I'm doing the best I know how, and the best I know how isn't the whole picture. There are things I can't see yet that I'll have to reckon with later.

That's not resignation. It's just the honest version of trying.

🎧 No Stage, Just a Chair

A podcast for people figuring it out as they go: building honest brands, real decisions, and work that feels like theirs.

Before You Listen:

Is there someone you've stopped trying to understand because it was easier to be right about them?

When did you last look in the mirror and admit you were capable of getting it wrong?

He pulled me aside after class. Just a sociology professor, I thought. What does he want?

"You seem worn out," he said. Then: "Do you need an education or do you need a degree?"

I didn't have an answer. I wasn't even sure I understood the question.

He sent me to five men with gray hair who actually cared about me. My dad. My pastor. A few others. I asked all of them the same question. They all said the same thing, and none of them said what I expected.

That conversation in 1991 is still the way I think about what I do in a room with a client. Not trying to deliver the answer. Trying to create the conditions where someone can see themselves clearly enough to find their own.

I fail at this. I hone in on being right when I should be holding up a mirror. I've watched clients go quiet after choosing a different direction, as if they'd done something wrong. They hadn't. That departure is often the recognition, not the failure of it.

My direction was never the point.

Their clarity was.

🎧 No Stage, Just a ChairA podcast for people figuring it out as they go: building honest brands, real decisions, and work that feels like theirs.

Before You Listen:

What would change in the conversations you're avoiding if your job was to help someone see, not to land the answer?

Is there someone in your life right now who needs a question from you more than they need your opinion?

If recognition is the goal and not agreement, what does that change about how you show up today?