In January 2020, I was sitting in a coffee shop just outside Austin, Texas, with a pastor who was well connected. I'd spent all of 2019 traveling and speaking at schools and churches about courage and building confidence, and I wanted to expand that work in 2020. This was the kind of person who could help me do that.
Over coffee, he asked what I thought about my church's recent decision to become LGBTQ affirming. I'd helped build that church. I was its first paid employee as we grew from 12 people to 500. I'd built the creative arts ministry and spoken from that platform countless times. And now I was watching my mentor and friend, the lead pastor, lose his career and community over a conviction I shared.
But sitting across from someone who could open doors for me, I hedged. I gave him 50% of the truth. I told him I agreed with the direction the church was taking... but that I would never preach about it. I wasn't going to rock the boat.
It was the answer that felt safest. The answer that let me hold onto the possibility of future stages, introductions, and speaking opportunities. And as I heard myself say it, the irony was brutal.
I'd spent the last year traveling around teaching people to be brave while quietly practicing the opposite. Appeasing. Chameleoning. Reading the room and becoming whatever version of myself seemed most likely to be liked, approved of, or invited back.
I wanted to be confident in who I actually was.
But I knew it was going to cost me, and that I needed to practice courage first. Because confidence built on everyone else's approval isn't really confidence.
I wanted to be fully known instead of simply liked. That moment forced me to start asking a much bigger question. What would it look like to build a life in alignment? One I was proud of?
The church wasn't just where I worked. It's the reason I'd moved to Texas in the first place. It was my community, my sense of purpose, my identity. I'd wanted to be a pastor since I was a kid, just like my dad, and from my sophomore year of high school all the way up to that coffee shop, I hadn't really considered anything else. When the church fell apart, that whole life fell apart with it.
I didn't have a next chapter ready, so I started putting one together. I started running before sunrise. I wrote my own eulogy. I sat down and defined my values. I got more direct in how I talked to people, less hedging.
I also got a lot less sure of myself, and a lot more curious. I went to therapy. I hired coaches. I joined communities of people who were rebuilding too. I read, I journaled, I listened to something like a thousand podcasts. Not because I was trying to fix myself fast, but because I actually wanted a life I was proud of, not the one I'd just landed in.
Most of the leaders I work with have their own version of that coffee shop. A place where they give fifty percent because the other fifty might cost them something. Usually they've been doing it so long it feels like their personality.
That's the work I do now: helping people find where they're hedging, and build a life they'd be proud to tell the whole truth about.
If some of this sounds familiar, let's talk.