Restructuring sounds operational. It isn't. At the whiteboard, it's clean: new structure, realigned roles, redeployed capital. Logic holds. The math works. But you're the one who has to tell someone who's been with you for eleven years that there's no longer a place for what they do. You're the one who has to walk into a room and say the version of this company you all built together is ending, and here's what comes next. And then you have to go lead the next thing. That's not a strategy problem. That's a threshold. Leaders who get this wrong don't get it wrong because they lacked the right framework. They get it wrong because they're making permanent decisions from a state of depletion, and there was no honest space in between to process what was actually happening to them — not just to the business. Reinvention extracts something from a leader that the org chart doesn't account for. It asks you to hold grief for what's ending while holding conviction for what's being built. Simultaneously. In public. Most leaders do this alone. They call it "staying focused." Sometimes it is. Sometimes it's just the only option they can see. Spiritual direction doesn't tell you what to do. It helps you tell the truth about what's real — including what it costs you to do the right thing, and whether the version of yourself making this decision is the one you trust. Not every leadership problem is a strategy problem. Some of them are located inside the person who has to execute the strategy. If you're in a season of hard reset and carrying more than you've named yet — I'm available for a quiet conversation. No pitch.
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Why high-performing leaders quietly fragment under pressure
If you’re a CEO and everything looks fine on paper—but something feels off—read this. I’ve spent 30 years solving hard problems. Scaling companies. Fixing what’s broken. Driving outcomes that show up on a balance sheet. That work matters. But here’s something I didn’t expect: At a certain level, the hardest problems stop being operational. They become… personal. Not in a soft way. In a way that has real consequences: Decisions feel heavier, even when they’re correct Success stops feeling like progress Conversations get filtered because they have to And there are questions you don’t have a place to ask Not because you’re incapable. Because there’s nowhere appropriate to have them. Most leaders respond the same way: They push harder. Think longer. Stay busy. It works—until it doesn’t. I was skeptical of anything that sounded like “spiritual” work. Still am, frankly. But I’ve learned this: There are moments in leadership where the issue isn’t strategy, execution, or intelligence. It’s clarity. And clarity doesn’t come from more pressure. It comes from the right conversation. Not coaching. Not therapy. Not advice. A different kind of conversation. One where: You’re not being evaluated You’re not being managed You’re not performing Just thinking. Out loud. Clearly. If you’re in a season where: The old playbook still works—but feels incomplete The questions are getting quieter, but more persistent Or something is shifting and you can’t quite name it You’ll recognize this. I don’t post about this often. But I do have a small number of these conversations each month. Quietly. If this resonates, send me a message. No pitch. No process. Just a conversation.
When someone is dying, people often ask me: “What am I supposed to say?” Usually, less than you think. You do not need perfect words. You need presence that doesn’t flinch. At the bedside, simple truths are enough: “I’m here.” “I love you.” “You don’t have to do this alone.” Let silence do some of the work. If they want to talk, follow their lead. If they want quiet, protect it. If they’re afraid, don’t try to argue them out of fear. Stay with them inside it. Spiritual direction near death is not about giving answers about the afterlife. It is about helping someone stay in relationship: with their breath, their people, their meaning, their mystery. Dying people do not need speeches. They need someone who will not look away. And practical care is sacred too: water, music, dimmed lights, calling hospice, asking who they want contacted. Love often arrives as competent care. I think of a granddaughter holding her grandmother’s hand and saying only, “I’m right here.” No theology. Just contact. The room softened. Her breathing settled. When the room gets simpler—less panic, more honesty—you’re probably doing enough. And when symptoms escalate or safety is at risk, we bring in hospice or medical support immediately. What do you avoid saying because you fear emotion? Need an ear at the bedside? Let's talk
When identity dissolves, the task isn’t to “figure it out”—it’s to stay awake long enough for the next true thing to appear. Your life can keep moving while your inner story goes quiet. That silence isn’t failure. It’s the beginning of a different kind of listening. The moment after the engine turns off I once watched someone stare at their phone in a parked car long after the engine went off. Not crying. Not scrolling. Just holding the device like it was a warm stone. Their calendar was still full—meetings, reminders, birthdays. The world kept offering appointments as if nothing had happened. The next obligation was already waiting with its clean, impersonal confidence. But inside, something had unhooked. They said, almost casually, “I don’t know what to call myself anymore.” And the way they said it—flat, honest, unadorned—felt like a threshold. The moment after a door closes, before you hear the latch. There are griefs you can name. There are endings with paperwork. And then there’s this: the quiet disappearance of a frame that used to hold your life together. The suffering beneath the suffering There’s a particular kind of suffering that doesn’t come from pain itself, but from the loss of the frame . You can survive grief, job loss, divorce, illness, disillusionment—any of the obvious endings—and still be unprepared for the quieter ending underneath: the ending of who you were in your own mind . The identity you relied on… the role that made you legible… the story that explained why you mattered… When it stops working, it’s not only sad. It’s destabilizing. Because the mind wants a replacement immediately. A new label. A plan. A five-step reinvention. A “here’s what I learned” caption. Something you can hold up like a passport and say, See? I still know who I am. But the in-between doesn’t respond to force. The in-between responds to attention. Not dramatic attention. Not “make content out of your healing” attention. The kind of attention you bring to a candle when the power is out: steady, protective, ordinary. You cup your hands around the flame. You don’t demand it become daylight. You just keep it from going out. The time between stories is not empty time. It’s compost time—where the next life learns what it can afford to forget. The lie that makes the doorway unbearable The lie is: “If I don’t know who I am, I must be doing something wrong.” So we treat confusion like a defect. We try to outrun it with productivity, self-improvement, romance, spiritual intensity, or certainty theater—anything that makes us feel like we’re “back on track.” We keep moving because stopping feels like disappearing. We keep explaining because silence feels like failure. But confusion is often an initiation. Not into a new identity you can announce. Into a deeper honesty you can inhabit. A kind of inner truth that doesn’t need applause to be real. And if you’re in this season, there’s a shift that can change everything: The question is not, “How do I get back to who I was?” The question is: “What is becoming true now that my old answers don’t work?” That question doesn’t always give immediate relief. But it makes the doorway sacred instead of shameful. What the doorway asks of you A doorway season doesn’t ask you to “figure it out.” It asks you to stay awake. To stop treating not-knowing like a personal failure. To learn the difference between: · being lost , and · being between. Lost says: I’ve done something wrong. Between says: something is changing, and I haven’t learned its shape yet. Between is honest. Between is tender. Between is where the deeper story starts to form—quietly, without your permission, like new cells knitting themselves together. The mind hates that. The soul recognizes it. A practice for the in-between: The Three-Sentence Threshold (5 minutes) Try this once today. Not to fix anything—just to locate yourself. Write three sentences. Handwritten if you can. Sentence 1 (Naming): “The old story that stopped working is: ________.” Examples: · “I am the reliable one.” · “I can earn my way into safety.” · “If I’m good, I’ll be loved.” · “I can stay numb and still be okay.” Sentence 2 (Cost): “What it cost me to keep believing that was: ________.” Time. Tenderness. Truth. Body. Relationships. Joy. Rest. Aliveness. Sentence 3 (Glimmer): “What I notice trying to be born now is: ________.” Don’t force it. Even “I don’t know yet” counts. So does: “I want to tell the truth.” “I want to stop performing.” “I want to live slower.” “I want to feel again.” Then place a hand on your sternum (or wherever you feel the most “here”) and take three slow breaths , as if you’re making room for a shy animal to come closer. Not to capture it. Just to let it know you won’t chase it away. What to notice over the next 24–72 hours For the next few days, watch for small signals. They’re easy to miss because they don’t announce themselves as “spiritual.” They show up as habits. As reflexes. As little surges of urgency. · When do you reach for a label to calm yourself? (A role, a diagnosis, a new certainty, a new persona.) · What situation makes you feel the urge to perform certainty? (Especially with family, partners, colleagues, online.) · Where does your body soften when you admit, “I don’t know”? (Your jaw. Your belly. Your shoulders. Your breath.) If you can, practice replacing “I should have this figured out” with: “I’m in a doorway season. I’m allowed to move slowly.” Not forever. Just long enough to become honest again. Because speed can be a way of staying asleep. And this season—hard as it is—might be asking you to wake up. A quiet benediction (for the between) May you stop confusing uncertainty with failure. May you learn the difference between urgency and truth. May you be protected from the false comfort of quick answers. May the next real thing arrive in its own time— and may you be here to meet it. Invitation If you’re in that doorway season, I won’t rush you toward a solution. I won’t hand you a shiny new identity to wear like armor. I’ll sit with you in the honest middle and help you listen for what’s actually true—beneath fear, habit, inherited beliefs, and the pressure to look “fine.” Reflection question (for comments/replies): Where do you feel the pressure to name yourself too quickly—and what would happen if you didn’t? CTA (verbatim): “Reply with one sentence: What are you carrying that no one is helping you carry?” Optional: “If you want help finding the next faithful step, reply CHAIR, and I’ll send a link for a 15-minute fit call.” “This isn’t therapy or medical advice; it’s spiritual companionship and integration support. If you’re in crisis, seek clinical care.”
I’ve sat with people who apologized for it—like it was bad manners. Like they were “still” crying, “still” tired, “still” circling the same memories. As if love is supposed to evaporate on schedule. Grief is not an interruption to your life. It is a reorganization of it. The problem is not that you feel it. The problem is that everything around you expects you to move past it. But grief does not move in straight lines. It does not resolve cleanly. It does not obey timelines. It changes your relationship to everything. Including yourself. If you are grieving, you are not behind. You are in the process. So here is permission, if you need it: You can be functional and shattered at the same time. You can laugh and still be loyal to what you lost. You can have “a good day” and still be grieving. That doesn’t mean you’re faking it. A small practice for today (simple, not magical): Put one hand on your chest and name the true thing out loud: “This is grief.” Then ask: “What is the smallest kindness I can offer myself in the next hour?” Water. A walk to the mailbox. One honest text to a safe person. Ten minutes with a candle. Something doable. Stay with what is real. If you want to, tell me in the comments: what are you learning to carry right now? And if you’re in the thick of it and want someone steady beside you—priest, companion, death doula—my door is open.
For three years, I was a well-coached CEO. Frameworks. Assessments. 360s. A good executive coach who held me accountable to the right behaviors. I was, by most measures, getting better at the job. And yet something wasn't moving. My team was performing. The business was growing. But in the moments that mattered most , board pressure, leadership conflict, high-stakes decisions , I kept noticing a version of myself I didn't fully trust. Reactive when I wanted to be steady. Certain when the situation called for curiosity. Performing composure rather than having it. I didn't have the language for what was wrong. I just knew the coaching I had wasn't reaching it. What I actually needed , and couldn't name: I needed someone to help me see what was driving my behavior under pressure, not just change it. My tactics were fine. My internal operating system was running on assumptions I hadn't examined in a decade. I needed to get honest about what I was avoiding. Not in a therapeutic sense, in a practical one. Avoidance has a cost in organizations. It shows up as delayed decisions, cloudy communication, and a leadership presence that the team can feel but no one says out loud. I needed to learn the difference between conviction and rigidity. I had been confusing them for years. So had my board. So had my team. I needed my presence to become an asset rather than a variable. The best leaders I'd watched had something I can only describe as settledness, a quality that made the people around them more capable. I wanted that. I didn't know how to develop it. What changed: Six months in, my leadership team reported, unprompted, that I was more present and less reactive under pressure. That data came from an engagement survey I didn't design and didn't expect. A VP who had been quietly considering leaving stayed. She told me later it was the shift in my presence that changed her calculus. That one outcome alone was worth more than the engagement cost. My board communication improved , not because my slides got better, but because the clarity underneath the slides became real rather than performed. Board members started responding differently. Less challenge, more alignment. I hadn't changed my position on anything. I had changed how I held it. And the decisions got cleaner. Faster to the essential question. Less noise in the room between a situation and my response to it. What I'd tell another CEO: If your leadership development is making you more knowledgeable but not more settled, you may be working at the wrong level. The interior work is not soft. In my experience, it is the hardest and most leveraged work a CEO can do. And most of us don't do it because we don't have a category for it and nobody around us is talking about it honestly. I'm talking about it now because one peer conversation changed my trajectory. Maybe this is yours. Ask Lawrence to pull up a chair beside you.
A client once said something that still tightens my chest when I remember it: “I signed the consent form. I even wanted it. But once I was in it… I would have agreed to anything.” That sentence is the whole problem. We like consent because it feels clean. It gives us paperwork, language, a signature. It lets facilitators and institutions say, We did our part. But in altered states—psychedelic, trance, breathwork, deep somatic release, intensive prayer, even certain hypnotic or charismatic group settings—traditional consent models start to fail right where we most need them. Not because consent doesn’t matter. Because consent alone is not designed for asymmetry. When consciousness shifts, power shifts. Suggestibility changes. Attachment patterns surge. The nervous system becomes porous. The meaning-making engine gets hot. And in that heat, “yes” can become less a choice and more an adaptation. If we’re serious about integrity in this work, we have to stop designing consent for legal comfort—and start designing it for altered consciousness. The limits of pre-session consent Pre-session consent assumes a stable decision-maker. It assumes a person can accurately forecast what it will feel like to be in a destabilized, emotionally amplified, reality-rewriting interior landscape. It assumes the “self” who signs the form is the same “self” who will be experiencing the session. But altered states don’t work that way. In the hours—or minutes—when someone is opening, grieving, dissociating, regressing, seeing symbols, meeting the dead, revisiting trauma, or merging with something they experience as divine, their capacity to evaluate risk and advocate for boundaries can radically diminish. Not because they’re “weak.” Because they’re human. Even in ordinary life, consent is contextual: the same touch can be welcome on one day and violating on another. In altered states, context doesn’t just change. It mutates. And the body’s “yes/no” signals can become harder to access, harder to name, harder to trust. A signed form can’t anticipate: · The sudden emergence of terror that wasn’t present in intake · The impulse to please the guide when the psyche feels childlike · The collapse of time, memory, or language · The “sacred framing” that makes ordinary boundaries feel irrelevant · The fear of being abandoned if the client says no mid-stream So yes, get informed consent. Absolutely. But don’t mistake a pre-session “yes” for ongoing consent during a state where autonomy is fluid. Consent must be dynamic, not static—designed to survive shifting inner weather. Transference, authority, and suggestion Altered states intensify transference. That’s not a theory; it’s a predictable human pattern. In many journeys, a facilitator becomes more than a person. They become: · A parent · A rescuer · A beloved · A judge · A priest · A shaman · The voice of God · The one who “knows what’s happening” Sometimes the client explicitly says this. More often, their nervous system behaves as if it’s true. This is where power asymmetry becomes dangerous—not because the guide is malicious, but because the guide may be unaware how much authority the client is handing them. Suggestion operates differently in altered consciousness. A lightly spoken sentence—“Stay with me.” “Trust this.” “You need to surrender.”—can land as doctrine. A hand on the shoulder can feel like salvation. A boundary crossing can be reframed as spiritual initiation. And when someone is in the tenderness of transference, their “yes” can be an attempt to secure safety, closeness, or approval. That means the ethical question changes. It’s not only: Did the client consent? It becomes: What conditions made that consent possible—and what conditions made it impossible? If you hold the frame, you hold the power. If you hold the power, you must assume your influence is larger than you think it is. Ethical containment vs. spiritual authority One of the most common ways consent gets undermined in these spaces is through spiritual framing. When a facilitator is positioned as a conduit—of medicine, spirit, lineage, God, higher intelligence—the client can feel that disagreement equals failure, or that saying no equals resisting their healing. This is the difference between containment and authority. Ethical containment says: · “You are the ultimate authority on your body.” · “We can pause. We can stop.” · “Your ‘no’ is sacred.” · “We’re not here to force transformation.” · “We will go at your pace.” Spiritual authority (even when unintentionally performed) says: · “This is what the medicine wants.” · “Your resistance is the problem.” · “You have to surrender.” · “This is your initiation.” · “Trust me.” Notice how quickly those phrases can dissolve agency. Containment protects the person. Authority protects the story. In altered states, stories are intoxicating. Clients want meaning. Facilitators want coherence. Communities want testimonies. And the temptation is to treat intensity as evidence of truth. But intensity is not consent. Tears are not consent. Ecstasy is not consent. Awe is not consent. The ethical posture is restraint: not using the state to get what you want—emotionally, sexually, financially, spiritually, reputationally. Not letting the client’s openness become your entitlement. If you’re a guide, the goal is not to be believed. The goal is to be safe. Institutional duty of care The next layer is the one people avoid because it’s inconvenient: This isn’t just a personal ethics issue. It’s an institutional one. If an organization is hosting ceremonies, offering retreats, training facilitators, employing clinicians, or operating in any context where altered states occur, it carries a duty of care. Duty of care means you don’t rely on charisma and good intentions. You build systems that assume risk is real. That includes: · Clear scope and role definition (therapy vs. coaching vs. clergy vs. guide) · Explicit boundaries on touch, sexuality, finances, and dual relationships · Ongoing consent protocols with mid-session check-ins and opt-out pathways · Independent reporting channels (not “tell the lead facilitator who is the problem”) · Supervision and consultation for facilitators working with transference · Aftercare structures that don’t depend on continued access to the same guide · Documentation practices that protect clients, not just institutions · Cultural humility and trauma-informed training that goes beyond buzzwords If a community says it’s healing people but has no meaningful complaint process, no supervision, no boundaries, and no accountability, it is not a healing community. It is a stage. Altered states magnify whatever is already in the room. A healthy container becomes more healing. A porous container becomes more dangerous. Call to action: Design consent for altered consciousness, not legal comfort The easy move is to tighten language on forms and call it done. The ethical move is to redesign the whole consent architecture. Here’s the guiding principle: Consent in altered states must be redundant. Not because clients are incapable, but because conditions are unstable. Redundant consent means: · Consent is informed (what might happen, not only what you hope will happen) · Consent is ongoing (check-ins, pause options, re-choosing) · Consent is revocable without penalty (no shame, no spiritual diagnosis) · Consent is protected by structure (rules that do not depend on mood or chemistry) · Consent is backed by accountability (someone besides the facilitator can intervene) Design for the moment when someone cannot speak. Design for the moment when they want to please you. Design for the moment when they think you’re God. Design for the moment when they’re terrified you’ll leave. Do that, and you’ll stop asking, “Did they sign?” You’ll start asking the better question: Was their agency protected when it mattered most? If you’re a facilitator, audit your language. Audit your touch policies. Audit your training. Audit your supervision. If you’re an institution, build real duty-of-care systems. If you’re a participant, trust the part of you that goes quiet when the frame feels unsafe. Consent isn’t the finish line. In asymmetric power dynamics—especially in altered states—consent is the beginning of responsibility.