Before we ever get to a Vision/Traction Organizer or a Scorecard, I ask a version of the same question in almost every first real session: what’s the story that shaped how you lead? Not their resume. Not their business plan. The actual story — the thing that happened early, that taught them what safety, or worth, or belonging required.
The answers are rarely about business at all. They’re about a parent who was never satisfied, or the year the money disappeared and nobody explained why, or being the one who had to hold things together too young. And almost without exception, the leadership pattern they’re currently stuck in — the control, the people-pleasing, the inability to rest — traces directly back to that story.
The Gift Hidden Inside the Wound
Here’s what I’ve come to believe after enough of these conversations: the story that created the struggle usually also created the gift. The leader who learned to read a room because it wasn’t safe not to is often the most attuned, empathetic person in their organization — once that skill isn’t running on fear anymore. The over-functioner who learned to hold everything together as a kid often becomes the most reliable person their team has ever worked with, once that reliability comes from choice instead of survival.
The work isn’t erasing the story. It’s taking the same strength the story built and unhooking it from the fear that originally powered it.
Why This Belongs in a Leadership Program
It would be easier, in some ways, to keep this work purely tactical — Rocks, Scorecards, Accountability Charts, done. And those tools matter enormously. But I’ve never once seen a leader sustain real change from the tools alone. The tools work when the person using them has finally made peace with the story underneath — has named it, felt the weight of it, and decided consciously which parts they’re keeping and which parts they’re finally ready to put down.
You don’t need a different story. You need to finally understand the one you’ve got — and choose, on purpose, what it gets to mean about you now.
That’s the work I get to be part of. Not rewriting anyone’s past. Just helping them read it clearly enough to stop being run by it.