June 1977. I’m 12 years old in Moline, Illinois.

I had begged my parents for weeks to take me to see a new movie that was breaking records everywhere. They finally said yes.

I still remember the first words on the screen—

“A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”

A massive spaceship rumbles overhead, filling the screen, seeming to go on forever. The lasers. The speed. The light sabers! I had never experienced anything like it.

No one had.

When it was over — after the Death Star was destroyed and the credits rolled — we walked out into the bright sunlight of a Saturday afternoon.

My heart was pounding.

I felt more alive than I had felt in a long time.

And then my mother turned to me and said:

“Jeff. If you liked that, you’re weird.”

She wasn’t being cruel. I don’t even think she knew what she was doing. But I knew exactly what I heard.

Hide this. This thing that just lit you up — hide it.

Today I see that everywhere. People hiding their passions. Performing instead. Achieving. Hoping that fitting into someone else’s idea of success will be enough.

It never is.

The first step is to see the trap.

I send deeper thoughts each week on what comes next.

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Michael was 32, running his own company, and convinced he was behind.

Behind where he should be. Behind where he thought other founders were. Behind some imaginary version of himself that had it more figured out.

On the first day of our two-day retreat I asked him to write down all the ways he was hard on himself.

It was quite a list.

We spent time talking about his life, his company, and what he actually wanted. Not the pitch version. The real version.

At some point on day two, I suggested we take a walk. There’s a famous record shop a little more than a mile from the hotel (the Limelight in downtown Denver).

I’ve learned that the less agenda I bring into these two days, the more the space does the work — for both of us. The walk wasn’t a technique. It just felt like the right next thing.

Wax Trax Records is Denver’s oldest record shop, packed floor to ceiling with vinyl, turntables, the smell of old cardboard and carpet remnants. There’s a second store next door just for used LPs. We wandered around for a while and I bought some classic jazz LPs. Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Rollins.

On the walk back, Michael looked at me.

“I’ve realized a couple things.”

“What’s that?”

“First — I’m way too hard on myself.”

“And?”

He paused.

“I’m thinking way too small.”

That combination stopped me. Those two things almost never arrive together. Most founders, if they soften the self-criticism, they relax. If they stay ambitious, they stay brutal with themselves. Michael had found both exits at the same time.

He didn’t get there because we solved a problem or cracked a framework. He got there because for two days, the pressure was off. He could finally see himself clearly. And when you see clearly, the next step is usually obvious.

A few weeks later he sent me a note. Part of it said:

“I’m not just delegating — I’m empowering. I had a meeting with my marketing director, and instead of jumping in with my own ideas, I asked, ‘Where’s your head at?’ That small shift changed everything.”

One moment on a walk.

That’s what a little space can make possible.

An Opportunity for Deeper Work

I’m opening a small group this June for founders ready for this kind of work. Twelve people. A full year. If something in this story landed for you, it might be worth a look.

More details in this HERE

I was 18 years old, sitting on a stage with 50 other kids, waiting to give a three-minute speech.

Four of us had been chosen to speak at our National Honor Society induction. Four pillars. Four speakers. Mine was Leadership.

I had printed out the speech in block letters and was leading with a quote I really loved.

“No one leads the orchestra without turning his back on the crowd.”

I was ready, yes. Also nervous. Was my speech good? Was it the best? Or maybe it was awful???

And then the waiting started.

The lights felt hot. A warmth moved through my chest, up my neck. I started to sweat — a little at first, then more. I told myself: no one is even looking at you yet. But that thought didn’t help, because the thought behind it was louder:

What if they notice?

The more I tried to manage it, the worse it got. Hair went damp. Hands didn’t know where to be. I was scanning the room — not for familiar faces. For exits.

Then it was my turn.

I walked to the podium. And something strange happened.

The nerves went away. Completely. The moment I started speaking, the panic dissolved. By the end, I was enjoying myself. I liked the quiet that came after a good line. I loved — true confession — the compliments I got afterward.

The Panic and the Performance

What I didn’t understand then — what I wouldn’t understand for decades — is that the terror and the performance were connected. The sweating and the approval weren’t opposites. They were two expressions of the same thing.

A story I was already living, without knowing it.

The story said: Your value depends on how well you do.

That panic attack wasn’t the last one. They got worse. More frequent. Bigger rooms, higher stakes. Warm face. Damp hair. Eyes tracking toward the door.

Do I look like I have it together? Am I good enough to be here?

Somewhere underneath it all was a belief I’d never said out loud:

If I were just a little more competent. A little more polished. A little more accomplished. It would stop.

It never stopped. If anything, the bigger the room got, the louder the voice got.

That’s the paradox nobody tells you about high achievement: the drive that gets you into bigger rooms tends to bring more anxiety with it, not less. The accomplishments don’t quiet the voice. They raise the stakes for the next performance.

It’s Not Ambition

Here’s what I’ve come to understand after years of working with founders and other over-achievers:

That drive isn’t really about ambition.

It’s about safety.

Somewhere early — earlier than we can usually remember clearly — we learned what it meant to be okay. Maybe okay meant being the smart one. The responsible one. The one with the answers. Whatever the specific flavor, the equation was essentially the same:

I am okay when I perform well enough.

That equation becomes the operating system. It’s extraordinarily effective — it drives enormous amounts of achievement. It can build companies, win cases, close deals.

But it can’t rest. It doesn’t know how. Because the moment it stops performing, it stops feeling okay. And so it keeps running.

The treadmill doesn’t have an off switch, because the treadmill is the engine.

The Exhaustion of Never Arriving

That’s the exhaustion I’m pointing at. Not the exhaustion of working too hard, though that’s real too.

The deeper exhaustion of running a program that never lets you fully arrive.

You hit the goal. You feel the satisfaction — for a moment. Then the gap reopens. A new target appears. The voice says: That was pretty good. But it’s not enough. Not yet.

Most high-achievers I know have felt this.

Very few have said it out loud.

What I didn’t know at 18 is that the sweat and the terror and the performance and the compliments were all in service of one question I didn’t know I was asking:

Am I okay?

And all the accomplishments — the bigger roles, the bigger rooms, the polished surface — it couldn’t answer that question. It could only defer it. One more milestone. One more deal. One more room.

Here’s what I’ve found: once you can actually see the engine clearly — not fix it, not override it, just see it — something starts to shift. Not the ambition. The pressure behind the ambition.

Those are not the same thing.

And that difference is worth everything.

An Opportunity to Go Deeper

Are you ready to take a look at the programming that’s been running you?

I’m opening a small group this June for founders ready for this kind of work. Twelve people. A full year. If something in this post landed for you, it might be worth a look.

Book an application call at this LINK.

I walked into a room with Peter Fenner in Boulder in the fall of 2008.

About fifty of us were sitting in the outbuilding of a beautiful home a few miles north of town. Executives. Therapists. Healers. Serious meditators.

Peter sat at the front of the room on a cushion.

We sat facing him, waiting for the program to begin.

He looked around the room with a faint Mona Lisa smile.

And said nothing.

No introduction. No instructions. No explanation.

Five minutes passed.

Then ten.

I felt the room tighten. Or maybe it was just me.

Many of us had traveled across the country to be there. We had taken time away from work and family. We were used to things starting on time. We were used to knowing things.

Finally someone sitting behind me asked the question everyone seemed to be thinking.

“What are we doing?”

Peter looked at him and said one word.

“This.”

At the time it barely registered.

Years later I realized it was the entire teaching.

The Year Before

A year earlier I had walked into his book.

I was in a Barnes & Noble in Rockville, Maryland. I went up the escalator, passed the children’s books and toys, and headed toward my usual stop at the time — the Eastern Religions section.

I turned the corner and there it was. Radiant Mind. Red cover. Golden Buddha on the front.

I had never heard of the author. A former Tibetan Buddhist monk named Peter Fenner.

I had never seen the book before. But something about it stopped me in my tracks.

At that point I had been meditating daily for twelve years. I approached meditation the same way I approached everything else in my life.

As something to master.

If I could get good at meditation, I could be calmer. Clearer. More present. More successful.

More enlightened, if I’m being honest.

I assumed there was a deeper level of meditation I hadn’t reached yet, and I was determined to find it. The overachiever mastering the ultimate achievement.

So when I learned Peter was teaching a program in Boulder, I signed up immediately.

Already Here

But that first morning in Boulder suggested something completely different.

Peter wasn’t trying to take us anywhere.

He wasn’t offering a technique or a path to a future state. He was pointing to something that had already been present the entire time.

Awareness itself.

The simple fact that you are aware. Yes, even right now.

Not aware of anything in particular.

Just aware.

That awareness doesn’t appear only when the mind becomes quiet. It isn’t created through discipline or insight. It isn’t improved by success or diminished by failure.

It’s already here. It can’t not be here.

Peter calls this unconditioned awareness — the open space in which every thought, emotion, sensation, and experience appears.

When I first encountered this idea, it sounded philosophical. Interesting, maybe even intriguing.

But not particularly practical.

I would spend the next three years studying with Peter — first as a student and later mentoring other students in his programs.

Gradually I began to appreciate what he had been pointing to that morning in Boulder.

Not as an idea, but as something both directly available and profoundly useful.

Nothing Missing

What I saw in myself and in others in those three years led directly to the coaching work I do today.

Over time I found myself in more and more close conversations with a particular kind of person.

Founders who had built companies. Executives who had climbed to the top of organizations. Lawyers, physicians, investors, solopreneurs.

From the outside their lives looked successful.

From the inside something else was often happening.

No matter how much they had accomplished, they felt unfinished.

More to prove. More to accomplish, more to become.

And what I began to notice — both in my own life and in the lives of the people I worked with — was that the drive itself wasn’t the problem.

The problem was the assumption behind it.

The quiet belief that somewhere out there — in the next promotion, the next exit, the next level, the next version of ourselves — we would finally arrive.

But the space Peter pointed to that morning suggested something far simpler.

In the space we were learning to notice, nothing is actually missing.

The sense of being fundamentally okay isn’t waiting at the end of achievement.

It’s already here.

Underneath the constant effort to become someone else.

The Open Secret

This possibility sits at the center of the book I’m writing.

Because the open secret — the thing hiding in plain sight beneath the ambition, the striving, and the endless forward motion — is this:

You have nothing to prove. You never did.

When that becomes more than an idea — when it becomes something you actually see — the way you live and create begins to change.

You’re still free to build extraordinary things.

But you’re no longer building them to become enough.