Blog 34 | The Story Didn't Change. I Did.

On Returning to What You Think You Already Know

After our coaching session, Heather sent me a short email. In it, she wrote: "Thank you for seeing me."

She didn't know what those four words would unlock in me.

I've been carrying them for weeks now, not because they were flattering, but because they were convicting. Because I read them and thought immediately, almost involuntarily, of a trail in New Mexico, a teenage boy dropping his pack in the dirt, and a father who was present for the moment, but missed the person standing in it.

I thought I had already told that story. I had. Many times. What I hadn't done was see it.

The Story I Thought I Knew

I've shared the mountain story in various forms across this body of work. The short version: five days into a ten-day mountain trek, my son Ryan stopped mid-climb, dropped his pack, and said what he'd been holding for miles:

"I can't be you. I quit."

There was no exit. No shortcut. Just trail ahead and trail behind. He didn't need a lecture. He needed the weight lifted for a while. So I took his pack and we climbed in silence. Eventually, without ceremony, he stepped up beside me and said, "Need help with that?"

I've called it a perseverance story. A father-son story. A leadership metaphor about carrying vs. surrendering. A lesson in the difference between mountain moments and hospital moments — the latter being two years later, when Ryan collapsed from sudden cardiac arrest in his math classroom and I sat helpless in a hospital waiting room, unable to carry anything at all.

Every time I returned to these stories, I found something true in them. And I thought that was the work. Extracting the lesson, naming the principle, moving forward.

I was wrong about what the work was.

What Heather's Words Opened

When a client tells you "thank you for seeing me," she is not complimenting your technique. She is telling you that something she carried alone no longer feels invisible. That the weight of being known (really known, not managed or assessed or coached toward a predetermined outcome) is itself a form of relief.

I sat with that for a long time.

And then, in a conversation that pushed me deeper into the mountain story than I had ever gone, I was asked questions I had answered before. But something was different this time. I had changed. My answers went somewhere new.

What I found there was not a better lesson. It was a more truthful picture.

I saw: formation. The long slow shaping of a man through the pressure of trying to keep up with an image, his father, that was never meant to be the measure.

I saw: fracture. The moment on the trail was not just exhaustion. It was the crack in a comparison that had been building quietly for years. I can't be you. That's not a trail comment. That's a confession about an identity that has been borrowed, strained, and finally returned.

I saw: presence without seeing. I was there on that trail. Fully committed to the climb, to his safety, to finishing. But presence is not the same as seeing. I was present for the mountain moment. I was not fully present to him in it.

And I saw, most uncomfortably, the shadow side of my own genius.

The Shadow the Galvanizer Casts

In the Working Genius framework, Galvanizing is the gift of rallying people around a vision, igniting movement, and calling others forward into something larger than themselves. It is the gift I lead with most naturally. It is also, like every strength, a shadow.

The shadow of Galvanizing is this: the Galvanizer can make people into the story rather than seeing them as they are. We rally around vision. We narrate meaning. We frame difficulty as formation. And in doing so, we can unconsciously cast the people we love most as supporting characters in a story that is really about what we are learning.

Ryan on that trail was not a leadership metaphor. He was my son. Fifteen years old. Carrying more than his pack. Saying something true and painful and terribly vulnerable to his father on a mountain in New Mexico.

I heard it as the setup for a breakthrough. I should have heard it as a cry to be seen.

I took his pack. That was the right move. But did I ever stop to ask what comparison he had been living under? Did I ever name that I can't be you as the wound it was, rather than the obstacle we overcame together?

I had been telling that story for years as evidence of resilience. What I was missing was the evidence of fracture and my role in it.

I did not see the lesson.

I did not see him.

What Reflection Actually Is

Leadership development, most of it, treats reflection as extraction. You mine the experience. You label the lesson. You move forward with a new insight to apply. The experience becomes content. The content becomes wisdom. The wisdom gets deployed.

That is useful. But it is not what I am describing.

What I experienced in returning to the mountain story, not for the first time, not with new information, but with eyes that had been changed by the years between, was something different. The story did not change. The facts were identical. Ryan stopped. I carried. He resumed. We finished. Two years later, the hospital. The surrender.

But what I saw in those facts was completely different from what I had seen before.

This is what the Relume Mirror℠ practice is actually built for. Not a single reflection that extracts the lesson and closes the file. But a return, again and again, across seasons of becoming, to stories that hold more than you were able to receive when you first told them.

Because you cannot see what you are not yet formed enough to see.

The mountain story held formation, fracture, comparison, identity, presence, and shadow genius from the beginning. None of that was hidden. I simply was not yet the person who could recognize it. I needed years of coaching others. I needed Heather's four words. I needed someone to push me past the familiar answer into the next layer of the same truth.

Reflection is not extracting lessons from experience. It is progressively seeing reality more truthfully over time.

That is not a refinement of the Relume Mirror℠. It is its foundation. And it was hiding in plain sight inside a story I had already told a dozen times.

The Semita Returns You

The semita, the narrow footpath, is not a metaphor for moving forward. It is a metaphor for the kind of path that requires your full attention. You cannot walk it on autopilot. You cannot glance at your phone. You have to look down, watch your footing, feel the terrain beneath you.

And sometimes the path curves back. Not to return you to where you were. But to let you see it from a different elevation.

I have walked the mountain story many times. Each time I thought I had seen it fully. Each time, something I was not yet capable of seeing was waiting for me to grow into it.

This is what I believe formation actually is: not the accumulation of new lessons, but the deepening of sight. Not adding more to what you know, but seeing more truly what was always there.

The path did not give me new answers. It helped me see what was already there. And I almost missed it, because I was too busy telling the story to return to the person standing in the middle of it.

What This Means for the Leaders We Serve

If you are carrying a story you have told before, a failure, a fracture, a moment of pressure or loss or unexpected grace, I want to suggest that you have not finished with it yet.

Not because you told it wrong. But because you have changed since you told it, and the story has more to give you than it could when you first reached for it.

The Relume Mirror℠ practice does not begin by asking what did you learn? It begins by asking what do you see now that you couldn't see before?

That is a different question. It assumes the story is still alive. That it holds layers you have not yet reached. That the person you were when you lived it, and the person you are now, are not the same, and that the distance between them is exactly where the light is.

Return to the story.

Not to relive it. Not to fix it.

To see it more truthfully.

Because the path is not just ahead of you. It curves back through everything you have already walked and it is asking you to look again.

What's a story you've told before that might be holding more than you've yet been able to see?