Learning to lead ourselves is hard because in the pursuit of love, safety, and belonging, we lose sight of our basic goodness and twist ourselves into what we think others want us to be. We move away from the source of our strengths—our core beliefs, the values we hold dear, the hard-earned wisdom of life—and toward an imagined playbook listing the

Our lives are twenty-four frames per second, with each frame a set piece of feeling, belief, obsession about the past, and anxiety about the future. Neither good nor bad, these frames form us.

The Unsorted Baggage of Leadership For those who hold power, the price of unsorted baggage is paid by those with whom they pass their days—their coworkers, peers, direct reports. Of course, not all organizational challenges can be traced back to the dismembered, unsorted parts of themselves in the leaders’ shadows. But the toughest, most

Success and money—and even more important, the busyness needed to create those—became proof of my worth as a human.

the higher up the pole the monkey climbs, the more his ass shows.”

Buddhists teach that for the steadfast warrior to emerge, we’ve got to break open our hearts to what is.

elevate the darkness to the realm of the stars

“There’s no book,” I say, often nearly preaching. “There’s no ‘way,’ no ‘path,’ that’s been kept hidden from you.”

Early promotion into adulthood is often painful