For most of the work I have done over the last thirty years, I have been the one talking. Sitting across from leaders, asking questions, naming what I see, walking them through the slow work of becoming someone the next stage of their business can rest on. That has been the shape of my career and it has been the shape of my writing too. The books. The blog. The vlog. Me, talking, about the work.
This piece is different. This piece is not about me.
Three weeks ago I sent a message to a handful of leaders I have worked with, and I asked them if they would be willing to give their voice to something I was writing. Not as testimonials. Not as case studies. As people who are actually walking this road, in their own businesses, in their own lives, with their own internal weather. I told them less polished was better than more polished. I told them I wanted what they actually thought, not what they thought I wanted to hear.
Three of them said yes and sent me material. What they sent is the heart of this piece. You can hear them in their own words by watching the video embedded above, and I would encourage you to watch it. What follows is the written version, with material that does not appear in the video.
I am going to step back now and let them talk. My job in what follows is to introduce each of them, give you the smallest amount of context you need to understand what they are saying, and then get out of the way.
The road has other people on it. This is what some of them sound like.
Ronnie
Ronnie Love co-owns Evolution Design, a countertop fabrication and installation company in Utah. Most of her work is residential. Some of it is commercial. She is several years into ownership and she is the only one of the three voices in this piece who is in the earliest stage of her business.
The work Ronnie is describing is the interior work. The part nobody can see from the outside. The part that does not show up on the P and L and never makes it into the quarterly review and is invisible to her crew. It is also, in my experience, the part that determines whether everything else holds.
She told me about a meeting that happened a couple of weeks ago, with a leader inside her own company.
The kind of meeting where the other person pushes every button, and the leader on the other side of the table either holds or breaks.
“I would let my body get flooded, and I could not react well. I would shut down. That is my most typical response. I might even, I have been known to throw a Kleenex box at someone one time. Not my best moment. Definitely had to do a real deep apology for that one.”
She is not exaggerating. She actually threw a Kleenex box at someone. She also actually apologized for it. Both things matter. The throwing matters because it tells you what the cost of un-managed pressure used to look like for her. The apology matters because it tells you what kind of person she is when she is at her best. Most leaders never get to either of those moments out loud.
She told me what the meeting two weeks ago was like. “I felt that emotion flooding, and I also felt myself take control. I felt myself step back. I felt myself take a deep breath and ask them questions. Instead of defending my position, I did my best to ask questions and get a better understanding of where they were coming from. Did it still hurt? Yeah. My heart was still racing. I walked out of that meeting almost in tears, but they did not know that. They did not know my frustration. They felt heard. They felt like I cared about what they had to say. They even reached out to me after and celebrated that we had moved forward.”
Read that paragraph again.
The work is not the absence of distress. The work is the capacity to function inside the distress.
Most leadership content gets this wrong. Ronnie has it exactly right. She did not stop feeling flooded. She felt flooded and held it and asked questions anyway, and the person across from her experienced something different than what was happening inside her body.
She also named something I want to repeat, because it is the kind of self-awareness that most leaders never put into words. “It is hard for me to even say that it is hard, because to me, hard work is, like, landscaping. It is being outside with my shovel working hard all day, or like my installers who are carrying heavy granite inside of homes. And so for me to say, oh, I handled my emotions and it was hard, feels kind of silly. But it is really hard.”
It is hard. It is the hardest work most leaders ever do. And almost no one tells the truth about how hard it is, because the surrounding culture does not give them language for it.
Ronnie is doing the work. She knows she is doing the work.
She is also honest about the fact that the work she is doing looks small from the outside compared to the work her installers do, and she is honest about the fact that it is still the work that has changed her.
That is the interior road.
That is what one version of it sounds like.
Tyler
Tyler Crittenden owns Crittenden Glass. He is the third generation of a sixty-eight-year-old company. His grandfather started it. His father ran it. Now he runs it. That detail matters because the things Tyler is letting go of are not things he made up. They are things he inherited.
The work Tyler is describing is the operational work. The part where the day actually runs differently than it used to. The part where the leader stops doing some of what they were doing and the business does not collapse, and in fact gets better.
Tyler used a metaphor I want to credit before I get to his words, because credit matters and the metaphor is not mine. It comes from Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, where Collins famously challenged leaders to get the right people on the bus and in the right seats. At Pinpoint, we extended Collins’ idea beyond people and applied it to clients, projects, and capacity. The question is not just who should be on the bus. The question is which clients, projects, and opportunities belong on it. Most business owners assume success means filling every seat with work.
The hard part is recognizing that a bus full of good work has no room for great work.
Here is Tyler. “Something that I used to believe about running my business that I no longer believe is that you have to do every job for every customer. I grew up. I am the third generation of a sixty-eight year old company, and there is kind of some unwritten rule, unwritten something, that you had to do everything for everyone.”
The unwritten rule was older than him. That is the part of his situation that does not fit on a slide. He was not breaking a habit he had developed. He was breaking a default that his grandfather installed and his father maintained.
“If your bus is one hundred percent full of good jobs, you do not have any room for the great jobs when those come along. And so I have something that I have had to learn, is to politely, respectfully say no to some things. To certain jobs that you just know are not going to turn out great for you or the client. You go into it starting out, and you kinda think, I do not know, we could probably do it and probably get through it. And so you decide to take it on. And it goes about as you planned. And things kinda run into problems and hiccups, and you are frustrated, and your customer is frustrated. And by the time it is all said and done, you feel kinda bad because you feel like you were not able to give them the great experience you were hoping to.”
What Tyler is describing is not just a business shift. It is a values inheritance shift. The default he grew up inside was that saying no felt like betrayal of the family standard. Saying yes felt like loyalty. Once he saw that the default was costing him both his great jobs and his existing customers, he had to do something his grandfather and father never did.
He told me what it cost. “Definitely cost me a lot in time and self-reflection, introspection. Wondering if I made the right choice. And it makes you think about, am I abandoning some of the old family values or the things that I have learned that has made our company successful.”
That is real. That is what generational businesses actually feel when they change. The old family values question is not abstract.
Somewhere in Tyler’s head is a sense that his father is watching, that his grandfather built this on a particular standard, that loyalty to them includes loyalty to the way they did it.
He decided that loyalty to them did not require him to inherit the exhaustion they may have lived with.
That is the operational road.
That is what another version of it sounds like.
Brenton
Brenton Stewart owns Acadia Homes in Cache Valley, Utah. He is a custom home builder with a new philosophy about how homes get built. He is also, of the three voices in this piece, the one doing the deepest work on identity.
The work Brenton is describing is the work of letting go of who you used to be so the people around you can grow. The work Empowerment Design names as distributed leadership. The work that most leaders never actually do because it costs more than they expected.
Here is Brenton in his own words. “I used to believe that none of my business was only me. I was the only person that could get anything done. I had very little trust for anybody. Some trust, but less trust in the things that would actually get done without me. I had to oversee every little thing. I had to be a part of every movement, every decision, every motion, every activity.”
That is the leader who has built a business that requires them at the center. Brenton is naming the version of himself who could not let go. Most leaders in that position do not let go either. They double down. They work harder. They become more central. And eventually the business hits a ceiling that is their ceiling, and they cannot see past it because they cannot see themselves as the ceiling.
Brenton saw it. “The belief that has changed for me is that I have realized now that the work can move on without me. I do not need to be involved in every little thing. I have a desire to be involved at a high level.”
And then he said the line that has stayed with me since he sent it.
“I had to give up an identity. I think that was the strongest part. I felt like a piece of me was failing, or that I was not being made whole. I had to validate for myself these things. If I was not a part of every movement, then who was I. It was an identity. It was a pride cycle I had to break.”
I had to give up an identity. Read that one more time. He is not talking about giving up a habit or a workflow or a calendar pattern. He is talking about giving up a version of himself that he had built his whole life around. The version that was central. The version that everything ran through. The version that proved his worth by being indispensable.
Letting go of that version felt like losing a piece of himself. Because it was losing a piece of himself.
“I allowed myself the space to grow others, to allow others the space to grow as well. Once I adopted this shift and realized that nothing was going to change without me making a movement, then everything else changed. I connected myself closer to God, connected myself with my wife. We collaborated together in a strong vision. I also realized that I have more to give to the world, and if that growth can only take place through me, then it is very limited.”
The faith piece is in there because faith is in there. Brenton said it. It is part of how he describes the change. He did not separate the business shift from the relational shift from the spiritual shift, because for him they were the same shift.
The leader he had been was small. The leader he was becoming was connected. He named it that way.
That is the identity road.
That is what a third version of it sounds like.
What do these three voices have in common?
Three leaders. Three industries. Three different stages of their businesses. Three different registers of the work. They have almost nothing in common at the surface.
Ronnie is a young woman fabricating granite countertops in a workshop. Tyler is a third-generation glass company owner inheriting six decades of accumulated default. Brenton is a custom home builder with a fast-growing operation and a philosophical bent. They would not show up at the same conference. They might not speak each other’s language at a cocktail party.
They are all doing the same work.
The work is to recognize that the version of yourself who built your business is not the version of yourself who can take it further. The work is to let that version go without losing yourself in the process. The work is to redesign the conditions around you so that the new version of you becomes the natural response to the environment, instead of an act of constant willpower. The work is to do it in your business, at your pace, with people who can see what you are doing and walk it alongside you.
This is what we have been calling Empowerment Design.
It is not a framework you install. It is not a course you complete. It is not a retreat you attend and then come home from. It is a way of being a leader that gets built into the actual conditions of your actual business, one decision at a time, over months and years.
Empowerment Design has four anchor systems:
ISTS, our Impact Shift Training Series, is the execution discipline that holds the business steady while the leader does the slower work.
WaveMaker is the interior work of leadership maturity under pressure. Ronnie holding the flooded body in the conference room is WaveMaker work.
ILS, our Intrapreneurial Leader System, is the distributed authority that lets a team move at the right level. Brenton giving up the identity and building the accountability system is ILS work.
And EMI, Empowerment Intelligence, is the AI growth companion that sits inside Leaders Evolution and answers questions in the moments between sessions when a leader is alone with a hard decision and needs a thinking partner.
You do not need to know any of those names to do the work. Ronnie did not know them when she started. Tyler did not have a framework when he changed his approach. Brenton was already letting go of the identity before he had language for what he was doing. The names are useful for the work. The work is more important than the names.
What I want you to take from this piece, if you take anything, is that the road has other people on it.
You are not the only leader who feels that everything routes back through you. You are not the only one who has thrown the metaphorical Kleenex box. You are not the only one who has wondered if you are abandoning what your family taught you when you decide to do it differently. You are not the only one who is grieving the version of yourself you have to leave behind in order to become the version your business actually needs.
The leaders in this piece are doing the work. They are not finished. None of them said they were finished. Brenton said it most clearly. “We are not progressing. We are not growing. And if you had told me a year ago that this was it, I would not have believed you, but I did not know the path.” He said it from inside the work. From the middle, not from the end. That is the only place anyone honest can speak from.
If any of this sounds like the road you are already on, I want you to know two things.
The first is that you are not alone. The leaders in this piece are walking it. So are dozens of others I have not introduced you to yet. So am I.
The second is that the door is open. Leaders Evolution is what we have built to make this work accessible to leaders who will never sit across the table from me. Twenty dollars for the first thirty days. Two hundred forty-nine dollars a month after that, locked for life, if you join by June 30. No contract. Cancel any time. If you come inside and decide it is not for you, you leave with no friction. If you come inside and decide it is, you stay, and the price you locked stays with you forever.
