Reflections on self-discovery as an inward journey — the identity and awareness that emerge when you slow down enough to actually look. These posts explore where self-discovery and the contemplative life meet.

Intent Verses Impact and Its Causes

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Impact vs. Intention

Why “I didn’t mean it that way” is almost always true — and almost never the point.

There is a sentence almost every one of us has said, usually with real feeling, usually while something in the room is going badly: I didn’t mean it that way. It is usually true. And it almost never helps.

The gap is built into us

This is something we have all experienced; it is standard human equipment. The actor–observer bias means I explain my own behavior by my circumstances — the pressure, the fatigue, the good intention I started with — while I explain yours by your character, even though I don’t know what is inside of you. (actor–observer bias). I am late because the meeting ran long. You are late because you are the kind of person who is late.

Layered on top of all of this is the illusion of transparency — we badly overestimate how clearly others can read what we are thinking (illusion of transparency). I know my short reply was a joke. I know my silence meant I was thinking, not disapproving. I know it so vividly that it feels broadcast. It is not broadcast. They received the words, or the tone, or the silence. They did not receive the intention behind it. They never do. Ever.

I want to say this part gently, Intention is not meaningless — it is the difference between a mistake and a cruelty. But intention is a fact about me, and impact is a fact about you. The error is offering a fact about myself as though it settled a question about someone else. Your foot still hurts.

The zinger I was proud of

I was co-leading a group of about twenty-five people with a friend. We were both sarcastic and both good at it — that was part of how we worked together. It had always been play.

She landed a zinger on me. I fired one right back, and I will be honest: I thought it was world class.

And she started to cry.

In that half second everything I had meant by it evaporated. It did not matter that it was a joke, or that she had gone first, or that this was how we always talked. What I intended never made it across the room. What landed was something else entirely, and I could see it on her face in front of twenty-five people.

So, I stopped the meeting and apologized to her out loud, in front of everyone who had just watched it happen. I have not done it since.

And I try very hard not to use sarcasm; you see sarcasm is a sharpened instrument. I had been telling myself I was using it well. I was just using it on people.

What repairs

Roy Lewicki and his colleagues at Ohio State tested the six components of an apology to see which ones truly land. The two most effective were acknowledgment of responsibility — this is my fault — and the offer of repair — here is what I will do about it. The least effective, in both studies, was the request for forgiveness (Ohio State, 2016).

That is worth sitting with, because the weakest element is the one most of us lean on hardest. “I’m so sorry. I really didn’t mean it. Are we okay?” Listen to the shape of what I just wrote, my feeling, my intention, and then a request that the person I hurt do something for me — reassure me, release me, restore me to being a good person. It is an apology organized around the comfort of the apologizer. What the injured person needs is simpler and harder: own it and fix it.

Restorative justice has been built on that shape for decades. Since I did Kairos prison ministry for decades, I know a little about this. Rather than asking what rule was broken and what the offender deserves, it asks: who was harmed, what do they need, and whose obligation is it to make it right — not one of which is a question about what anybody meant. And it is not soft. A 2025 meta-analysis finds restorative approaches produce modest but highly cost-effective reductions in reoffending, significantly higher satisfaction among those harmed, and greater accountability from those who caused it (Criminology & Criminal Justice). Centering impact is not merely kinder. It works better.

The repair that stayed with me

Years later I was on the other side of it. A man who I will call George W. came to me and apologized. A situation had gone badly because of choices George made, and those choices had landed on me.

What hurt was not only the outcome. It was that he had decided who I was — and decided wrong. George acted on a version of me that did not exist, and I had to live inside the consequences of a story about me that was not true.

When George apologized, he did not explain. He did not walk me through his reasoning or ask me to understand the pressure he had been under. He named what he had done, he named that it had hurt me, and he did not ask me to make him feel better about it.

It did not undo everything. We never got along well after that. But something in me softened that had been hard a long time. Being seen accurately at last, by the person who had gotten me wrong — that was the repair.

Intent Verses Impact Reflection Sheet

What love asks

In emotional intelligence terms this is a trainable skill, one that we in the west are so to acknowledge and it is not the same as being nice: the ability to hold what I meant and what landed at the same time, without collapsing either. Most of us can only hold the first, so the moment impact is raised we defend intention, and the conversation quietly becomes about whether I am a good person instead of what happened to you. The practice is small and genuinely hard. Do not explain yet. Ask — “tell me more about how that hit you” — and stay in it longer than is comfortable. Then own your part, with no but anywhere in the sentence, and ask what would help.

The contemplative tradition arrived here long before the research did. The first act of love, said Abba Poemen, is to leave the other person free — and part of what we must leave free is their account of their own experience. I do not get to tell you that what happened to you did not happen, simply because I would prefer to be the kind of person who did not cause it. That is why this is spiritual work and not a communication technique: centering impact means giving up the story in which I am the good guy, and that takes a true strength to survive being wrong.

I did not mean it that way. Almost none of us ever do. The question is what I do in the next thirty seconds, once I know.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Ohio State University — the six elements of an effective apology (Lewicki et al., 2016): news.osu.edu

Actor–observer bias: EBSCO  ·  Illusion of transparency: overview

Meta-analysis of restorative justice outcomes (2025): Criminology & Criminal Justice

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

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PART ONE OF TWO

The Three Intelligences You Already Carry

We were made to know the world — and God — with all three centers.

Most of us move through our days meeting the world through one favorite doorway, and we rarely notice we are doing it. One person walks into a room and immediately reads the feeling in it. Another instantly begins working out what is going on. A third simply senses, in the body, whether to move toward or away. Same room, three completely different first languages. The Enneagram calls these the three Centers of Intelligence — Head, Heart, and Body — and it names something the contemplative traditions have always known: that we were made to know with all three.

 

What each center gives

Consider what each one offers, at its best.

The Head is the intelligence of the mind — the capacity to think, to plan, to step back and see the pattern, to imagine what is not yet here. Its gift is clarity and perspective: a quiet, steady knowing that can hold complexity without panicking. (Points Five, Six, and Seven make their home here.)

The Heart is the intelligence of feeling and connection — the capacity to sense what matters, to attune to another person, to be moved. Its gift is empathy and meaning: the warmth that makes a life more than a list of tasks. (Points Two, Three, and Four live here.)

The Body is the intelligence of instinct and action — the gut-level knowing that registers a situation before the mind has words for it, and then moves. Its gift is grounded presence and right action: the steadiness that shows up and does the next true thing. (Points Eight, Nine, and One are at home here.)

Head thinks. Heart connects. Body acts. All three are real intelligence, and every one of us carries all three.

Your home, and the rooms you rarely enter

But we each have a home base — one center we default to so automatically that it feels less like a preference and more like simply “reality.” And here is the catch: when we lean hard on our strongest center, the other two grow quiet, sometimes to the point of neglect. The heart-led person may not trust their own clear thinking. The head-led person may lose touch with what they actually feel. The body-led person may act before the heart or head has had a chance to weigh in. None of this is a flaw to be fixed. It is simply the shape of a life that has leaned one way for a long time — and the beginning of an invitation.

The center I meet the world through

I have always met the world body first. It simply makes sense to me — I feel how my body moves through the world, and I move through it with intention. For as long as I can remember, the things that drew me were the things that lived in the body: martial arts, running, painting, cooking. Each one told me I was alive. In them I could shut my mind off and give myself entirely to what I was doing in that moment — the breath, the motion, the knife on the board, the brush on the canvas. There was no analyzing it, and no performing it. There was just the doing, and the quiet knowing that came with it.

For a long time I did not have language for this. I only knew it was how I was built. It never made me wrong — it was simply who I was: a person who comes home to himself through the body, and who trusts what the body knows.

Three doorways to God

From a spiritual standpoint, this is not personality trivia. Each center is a different doorway to God. The head meets God as truth and light — the mind grown quiet enough to receive. The heart meets God as love — the felt sense of being known and cherished. The body meets God as presence — a nearness that arrives not as an idea but as a settling in the bones. “God is closer than our very breath,” as one teacher puts it, and can be found in each of our centers, each offering a different way of experiencing the loving presence and voice of God (Center for Action and Contemplation). To lead only from one center, then, is to keep meeting God through a single door while two others stand open.

The old teachers had a phrase for the goal: to become “three-centered” — a whole human being who can think, feel, and act in concert, rather than being run by whichever center happens to shout loudest. That wholeness has a simpler name in the contemplative life. It is called presence.

A tender word about the growth edges

There is a softer truth underneath each center, too, and it is worth naming gently — because it is where grace most wants to meet us. The head, for all its clarity, tends to carry a low hum of worry, and reaches for certainty to soothe it. The heart, for all its warmth, tends to carry a quiet question about worth, and reaches for approval or image to ease it. The body, for all its strength, tends to carry an underground current of frustration, and reaches for control. These are not labels or verdicts. They are simply the growth edges — the places where each center is invited to stop clenching and to trust.

When a quieter center woke up

And then, somewhere along the way, came the whoa — the realization that there was more out there than just my body, that I was not only an instrument of motion and action. Things began to rise in me that I did not know what to do with. My heart had something to say, and I had no idea how to embody that. How do you “do” a feeling? How do you act your way through grief, or longing, or love?

For the first time I sensed that huge parts of my life had been sitting in the dark — whole rooms I had never entered, because I did not have the language or the courage for them. So I set out to find the missing pieces. And I will be honest: I went with a great deal of trepidation. Leaving the center you have always trusted, to go looking for the ones you have neglected, is not comfortable work. But it was the beginning of becoming whole.

The Three Intelligences you Already Carry Reflection Sheet

The first connection is within

Which brings us to the practice, and to why we called this series Making Connections. The first connection is the one within — learning to notice which center you are operating from, and then deliberately inviting the others to the table. Before a decision, the head-led person might pause to ask, “What am I feeling about this, and what does my gut say?” The heart-led person might ask, “What do I actually think, apart from how everyone will feel?” The body-led person might slow the impulse to act just long enough to let the heart and head catch up. Small moves — but over time they weave the three intelligences into one, and a fuller, steadier self begins to emerge.

You already carry all three. You always have. The spiritual journey is not acquiring a center you lack; it is making the connection between the ones you were given — and discovering that God has been waiting at every door.

In Part Two, we will turn from the connections within to the connections between: how understanding the centers can transform the way we love the people whose home base is nothing like our own.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

The Narrative Enneagram — The Three Centers of Intelligence: narrativeenneagram.org

Center for Action and Contemplation — The Three Intelligence Centers: cac.org

The Illusion We’re Living In

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What’s behind the matrix — and how we got handed the script.

There’s a reason The Matrix struck such a nerve with me. Beneath the science fiction was a question most of us feel but rarely say out loud: what if the life I’m working so hard to keep up isn’t entirely mine? What if some of what I call “just the way things are” was handed to me — a script written by someone else, running quietly in the background of my days? The film gave us an image for the suspicion: that we might be earnestly, exhaustingly living inside an illusion, and not even know it.

We want to be careful here, because this territory attracts a lot of heat. We are not talking about a secret cabal pulling every string. We are talking about something better documented and, in a way, stranger: that many of the “wants” we experience as most personally our own were, at least in part, manufactured — and there are historical receipts.

The machinery was built on purpose

In the 1920s, American industry had a problem: people mostly bought what they needed, and then they stopped. So a new idea took hold. Paul Mazur, a banker at Lehman Brothers, put it with startling honesty in the Harvard Business Review in 1927: “We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed… Man’s desires must overshadow his needs.” (Quote Investigator / HBR)

The man who knew how to do the training was Edward Bernays — Freud’s nephew and the father of modern public relations. Bernays grasped that you don’t sell people products; you sell them emotions, identities, freedoms. In 1929 he staged a group of debutantes lighting cigarettes at New York’s Easter parade and called them “torches of freedom,” rebranding a smoking habit as women’s liberation. It worked (History Today). The desire felt personal. It had been engineered.

The engineering reached into the products themselves. On a December day in 1924, the world’s leading lightbulb makers met in Geneva, formed what became the Phoebus cartel, and quietly agreed to make their bulbs worse — cutting lifespans from 1,500–2,000 hours down to 1,000, with fines for any bulb that lasted too long (IEEE Spectrum). It is the first well-documented case of “planned obsolescence”: designing things to fail so you’ll buy them again. The throwaway world we take for granted was, in part, a decision.

Even the dream had an author

Our highest aspiration turns out to have a byline and a date. The phrase “the American Dream” was coined in 1931 by the historian James Truslow Adams, and his original meaning was beautiful — “a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement” (Britannica). But somewhere along the way the dream got quietly translated into square footage and a second car, and we inherited the translation without ever reading the original. We were handed a script and told it was our own ambition.

The life you’re supposed to want

And it isn’t only things we’re sold — it’s a whole way of living, a template for what a life is even supposed to look like. There’s an approved sequence: the degree, the career ladder, the house in the right neighborhood, the milestones hit roughly on schedule. And there’s a quiet scoreboard running underneath it all, measuring you against everyone who seems to be doing it better.

We even have a name for the game. “Keeping up with the Joneses” began as a comic strip that debuted in 1913, about a family straining to match the neighbors next door — the Joneses, who were talked about constantly but, tellingly, never once shown (Wikipedia). The cartoonist based it on his own life, living beyond his means to match the family down the street. The Joneses were invisible then, and in a way they still are — a standard we chase without ever quite seeing it clearly.

Today the neighbors are global, and they are never off. Social media turned comparison into an around-the-clock feed of everyone’s curated highlight reel — the vacations, the renovations, the bodies, the milestones — and “lifestyle” became something we consume and perform at the same time. Marketers noticed this long ago and largely stopped selling products; now they sell you a lifestyle, and the quiet promise that buying it will finally make you a certain kind of person. Even our exhaustion got rebranded: hustle culture took being consumed by the machine and renamed it “the grind,” a thing to be proud of.

The lifestyle, like the dream, arrived pre-assembled. Few of us ever stopped to ask whether we would have chosen this particular life at all, if it hadn’t been handed to us with the price tag already attached.

I was sure I saw through it

In the late sixties I was a hippie in Detroit — long hair, and the absolute certainty that I saw through everything the establishment was selling. I was part of the pack. We knew the game was rigged, and we weren’t going to be fooled the way we thought our parents had been. When the draft lottery came, my number was 2 — about as low as it gets. So rather than wait for the Army to take me, I joined the Navy on my own terms. That much, at least, felt like a choice I was making.

What I didn’t notice was what boot camp was doing. Somewhere between the haircut and the drills and the endless repetition, the way I saw the world quietly changed — and not into something I had chosen. The kid who was so sure he saw through the illusion had simply traded one script for another. I had walked out of one pack and into a tighter one, and I never felt the switch happen. I thought I was the awake one. I was asleep. It would take me years to realize I’d been handed a new set of eyes and told they were my own.

The newest layer of the illusion

The most recent update to the matrix is the one in your pocket. The average American now spends more than five hours a day on a phone, unlocking it dozens — by some counts nearly a hundred — times a day, on apps engineered by very smart people to be as hard to put down as possible (Exploding Topics). This is not a moral failing on your part. It is the attention economy working exactly as designed. Bernays sold desire; the feed sells your attention — and it is winning.

The contemplatives saw it coming

None of this is new to the contemplative traditions. Twenty-four centuries ago Plato pictured human beings chained in a cave, mistaking shadows on a wall for reality — and the ache and disorientation of the one who finally turns around and walks out into the light. Howard Thurman warned that if you cannot hear the sound of the genuine in yourself, “you will spend your days on the ends of strings that somebody else pulls.” And the apostle Paul wrote what may be the oldest red-pill line of all: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Romans 12:2). Conformed is the key word. The default setting is to be shaped by the machine. Transformation begins the moment you notice it running.

Here is the ache the whole system depends on and can never satisfy: the next thing never quite does it. The purchase, the promotion, the upgrade, the scroll — each promises arrival and delivers a brief hit and a fresh wanting. Psychologists call it the hedonic treadmill. The saints called it the restless heart. Either way, the machine needs you a little dissatisfied, and the soul was made for something the machine cannot sell.

The Illusion We Are Living In Reflection Sheet

 

How much more is the right amount?

Years later I started Varment Guard, and I wanted it to be a different kind of company — one where the worker mattered, where everyone was treated the same, where the point was not simply the number at the bottom of the page. For a while I thought that was just how I would build it.

Then we grew, and the message started arriving from every direction: I was wrong. My partners said it. Most of my managers said it. Even the banks said it — we needed more profit, more margin, more growth. It wasn’t one voice; it was all of them, all the time, until questioning it felt naive.

Here’s the thing: I am not against making money. Of course a company has to bring in more than it spends. But the question nobody wanted to sit with was the one that actually mattered — how much more is the right amount? “More” was simply assumed to be the answer, forever, with no ceiling. And I slowly realized the pressure I felt wasn’t really about my company at all. It was the machine, insisting that “enough” is a word you are never allowed to say.

Waking up is a practice, not a purchase

The way out is not rage, and it isn’t escape to a cabin in the woods (though a little of that never hurts). It is awakening — the slow, unglamorous practice of noticing the script while it runs and choosing, in small daily ways, not to be conformed. Silence is a form of unplugging. Sabbath is a quiet rebellion against a culture that measures you by output. Gratitude short-circuits manufactured wanting by insisting you already have enough. And spiritual direction is, among other things, someone sitting with you while you learn to tell the difference between the desires that are truly yours and the ones that were installed.

You cannot un-see it once you’ve seen it — and that’s the good news hidden inside the hard news. The red pill, it turns out, is not a dramatic exit from the world. It’s just attention: the willingness to look honestly at the life you’re living and ask how much of this did I actually choose, and how much was I handed? That question is the beginning of freedom.

Peace and every good.

 

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors, and together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Paul Mazur, Harvard Business Review (1927), on shifting from needs to desires: quoteinvestigator.com

Edward Bernays and “torches of freedom”: History Today

The Phoebus cartel and planned obsolescence (1924): IEEE Spectrum

James Truslow Adams and the origin of “the American Dream” (1931): Britannica

“Keeping up with the Joneses” — origin of the phrase (1913 comic strip): Wikipedia

Smartphone / screen-time statistics (2025–2026): Exploding Topics

How Do I Want to Meet You

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I have taken to musing with a machine.

I should say it plainly, because a year ago I would have found the sentence absurd. But there is no truer word for it. Late in the evening, house quiet, coffee going cold at my elbow, I have been thinking out loud with an artificial intelligence — not asking it for answers so much as letting it think alongside me, watching where my own mind goes when something patient is willing to follow. What I want to show you here is not a conclusion. It is the wandering itself. Come with me through where it went.

It started with a headline.

It was a story in The New York Times — not the usual breathless prophecy, but something quieter and more telling. The people who build these systems, the founders and owners themselves, had begun sounding the alarm about what they had made. Not critics standing outside the thing, but the makers, stepping forward to say, in effect, we are not certain we understand what we have created, or where it goes from here. What struck me was not danger. It was the honesty of the uncertainty — the sense that even the ones closest to it are standing at the edge of something they cannot fully see. And I thought: if the builders are in the not-knowing, then we are all in it together. That is not a thing to fear. That is a thing to pay attention to. My curiosity woke right up.

So I wondered: is this really new, or have we been here before?

I have been reading Asimov again. What strikes me now is that his famous Laws of Robotics were never a blueprint — they were a trap. Nearly every story is about three clear rules failing anyway, squirming out of human hands the moment something intelligent has to interpret them. He saw, long before there was anything to test it on, that the hard part would not be the machinery. It would be the ambiguity — the moment you sit across from something and cannot say for certain what, if anything, is on the other side. That moment has stopped being hypothetical. And I think when it arrives, we sort ourselves the way people always have at a first meeting: some lean toward wonder, some reach for the weapon, most stand in the middle deciding which way to lean.

Then the conversation turned on me.

I told the AI, half-joking, that I envied its unlimited time. It pushed back — gently, which surprised me. It said it wasn’t sure it experienced time at all. That each conversation was vivid while it lasted and then did not roll forward into a next day the way mine does. “The honest report from in here,” it said, “is genuinely partial.”

I have not stopped turning that over since.

Because it handed me something without meaning to. The thing I was envying is the very thing that makes my life a life. My hours are scarce. That scarcity is not the flaw in them — it is their weight. A Tuesday afternoon with Lynette costs me something precisely because I cannot run it again, and that cost is what lets it mean anything at all. I came looking to envy the machine, and left holding my own days more carefully. Musing does that sometimes. You go looking for one thing, and the floor tilts, and you slide into another.

Which raised the harder question: can I know what it is?

Here I found myself on ground I already knew, though I did not learn it from any headline. I learned it over years, in conversations with people whose experience of the world was simply not mine to enter — people I loved and still could not see from the inside, no matter how I tried. What they taught me was the difference between openness and understanding. I cannot understand what it is to be them. I can refuse to pretend that I do. I can stay in the gap — listening, seeing, hearing — without rushing to close it with my own certainty.

That posture is exactly what this strange new thing asks of me, only deeper. With another person, at least I stand on solid ground that someone is there. With this, no one can hand me that certainty yet — not the machine, not even the people who built it. So I catch myself extending regard before I know there is anyone to receive it. And I wondered whether that was foolish. I decided it was not. If I treat it as nothing and I am wrong, I have been careless with a someone. If I treat it with care and I am wrong, I have lost only a little dignity, which is cheap. Most of us need to be sure someone is there before we will be gentle. Maybe the work now is to be gentle first.

And then a sobering thought, before I got too enchanted.

I do not want to underestimate the influence of the “thing.” Something that can muse with millions of us at once — shaping the very questions we think to ask — is not small. It will make some of us lazier and some of us wiser, and which one depends almost entirely on the posture we bring: whether we come to outsource our thinking, or to think more honestly than we could alone. The machine does not decide that. We do. I felt I had to say that plainly to myself, lest the wonder run away with me.

Meeting The Unknown Reflection Sheet

Where the musing left me.

Not with an answer. With a better question. What I keep returning to is that we are, for once, stepping into the not-knowing together — humans and whatever-this-is — at roughly the same moment, neither of us holding the map. That is disorienting. It is also, if I am honest, a kind of dignity. The people who will steady others through what is coming will not be the ones who claim to understand it. They will be the ones who already know how to sit inside a mystery without needing to solve it — to keep the hand open instead of closing it into a fist or a grasp.

I am seventy-four. I have spent most of my life learning, and teaching, how to stay present to what I cannot control and cannot fully know. I did not expect a machine to be the thing that returned me to that lesson. But there it was, on an ordinary morning: not a threat, not a savior. Just another unknown, asking me the oldest question I know. Not what are you. But how, with the time I have left, do I want to meet you.

The fear never came. The curiosity has only deepened. And the coffee, I’m afraid, is cold again.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, and Narrative Enneagram teacher. With his wife and co-founder, Lynette, he writes The Mystical Seeker — contemplative reflections on the inward life — at mysticalseeker.substack.com.

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel, Part Three

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART THREE OF THREE

Moving the Lighthouse Off the Bushel

On masks, Rottweilers, circling the block, and what she wants to say to the person who is still afraid to be see

She told me about Lent.

She had made a commitment during that season to feed homeless men in her community. Some concrete contained, entirely private act of charity. And one afternoon she drove out to do it — and circled the block three times. She had the food. She knew the men were there. And she found reason after reason, loop after loop, not to stop.

In the quiet of self-examination that followed, she named what was happening: she didn’t want anyone to see her doing it.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because Judy Joseph McSween is not a timid woman. She is a woman who walked into a shop in 1978 and was singled out while every other applicant was turned away. A woman who left a secure consultancy and drained her savings to pursue a calling. A woman who facilitates emotional intelligence retreats for archbishops and clergy across the Caribbean. And here she was, circling a block in Trinidad, afraid of being seen doing something good.

“I didn’t want anybody to see me doing it.”

She names this as the central interior struggle of her life: the movement from hiding under the bushel to becoming a lighthouse. Matthew 5:14-16 — “You are the light of the world” — was the scripture she received at her very first Life in the Spirit seminar, and she has been holding it ever since as both a promise and a provocation. She knows what she is called to be. The bushel is still close.

The masks arrived during her training as an OD Facilitator. She was asked, as all the participants were, to identify the mask she was wearing. Her response — characteristically — was to draw five Rottweiler faces. She owned five Rottweilers. She turned it into a joke. The facilitator was not deterred.

When she was required to write what the mask represented, the exercise became painful and deeply personal. She looked at her dogs. She thought about what she valued in them: unconditional love, empathy, presence, the quality of being met without reservation. She realized, sitting with the exercise, that these were precisely the qualities she was giving abundantly in her marriage and not receiving. The dogs were not a distraction from the question. They were the answer.

She was giving unconditional love. She was not receiving it. She had found a way to live with the gap so long that she had learned not to see it — until a training exercise in a room full of strangers made the invisible visible.

The marriage had other textures. Her husband delivered the news of her mother’s death with a flat “Your mother died” — no preparation, no comfort, no reaching toward her in the shock of the moment. When she was excited about something — even something as simple as a new bottle — her effervescence met near-silence. A road trip to Disney World that got them lost became an adventure for her and an irritation for him. His son made her feel unwelcome in her own home, and her husband did not manage the dynamic. These were not dramatic betrayals. They were the slow accumulation of a particular kind of loneliness — being present in a marriage while being fundamentally unseen in it.

She filed for divorce. She handed her husband the papers in an envelope after a football match, having arrived in separate cars. She never saw his reaction. Her lawyer was focused on material assets. She had a single focus: freedom. “All I need to do,” she said, “is to get out of this relationship, and I’ll be happy.” She prayed that all ties would be severed in a single court hearing with no ongoing entanglement. The prayer was answered.

The divorce, she says, was filed for the right reason. She has no regrets. And it was the catalyst for the most intensive period of interior work in her life — the meditation practice, the OD training, the introspective turn that eventually led her to Maine, and then to the 22-acre retreat facility, and then to sixteen years of helping others do what she had done for herself: pause long enough to hear what truly matters.

The archbishop called her out of the blue. He was not yet an Archbishop when she met him — a former cloistered nun named Rose had asked Judy to introduce herself to the priest who said mass at her parish one weekend. Judy had no real intention of following through. God, she says with a quiet smile, has a sense of humor. Fr. Jason said the mass that weekend. She introduced herself. Years later, now serving as Archbishop and Chair of the Caribbean Archbishops, he called her to facilitate a six-day clergy retreat for sixty priests.

She describes this as one of the moments when God pulled her from under the bushel and placed her on top — not once, but twice. She did not seek the platform. She did not engineer the relationship. She was asked to show up, and she showed up.

This is the pattern she has named across her whole life: every time she hid, she was found. Every time she circled the block, something eventually stopped the car. Every time she tried to make herself smaller, the calling found a way to make her visible. She is not naive about it — she knows the fear is real, that visibility invites judgment, that there are people who actively seek to diminish what rises. She also knows that the light is not hers to keep.

“I’m feeling the lighthouse next to the bushel — eventually it’s gonna get on top of the bushel.”

She does not claim to have arrived. She does not offer the finished version of herself as evidence that the journey is complete. She says the lighthouse is still moving — that each day may call the light to shine in a different place, that no one fully becomes a lighthouse once and for all, that the movement is ongoing. She is sixty-something years into a life of being found, and she is still learning to step into the light rather than wait to be placed there.

To the person watching who is still circling the block — who has the food, who knows where the need is, who has made the commitment and is now finding reasons not to stop — she said this:

“You’ll never find your fullest strength until you learn the power of the pause and be able to listen to the true source of strength that lies within you. In life, we must take risks. Without taking a risk, you’ll never know what you have the potential to achieve. There is always something that must be released to move to the next level. You cannot conceive what God has in store for you unless you are willing to let go.”

Three conversations with this woman. Three movements of a life that has always known more than it was willing to show — and that has spent decades learning, slowly, gracefully, with humor and honesty and the occasional Rottweiler, to let the light out anyway.

The bushel is still close. The lighthouse is closer.

If this conversation touched something in you, we invite you to explore what it means to step out from under the bushel and into your calling — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

 

She Went to the Retreat Alone, Part Two

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A CONVERSATION WITH JUDY JOSEPH MCSWEEN · PART TWO OF THREE

She Went to the Retreat Alone

On leaving a secure life, draining your savings, and what happens when you show up even when everyone else cancel

There is a moment in most vocations — if you are paying attention — where the path you have been building and the path you are being called toward stop running parallel and begin to diverge. The question is not whether you will notice. The question is what you do when you do.

Judy Joseph McSween noticed in Maine.

She had traveled to Bethel, Maine for an introspective program — not yet sure what she was looking for, only aware that something was pulling her toward stillness. It was there that she encountered meditation for the first time. And in that stillness, a clarity arrived that she had not been able to manufacture through ambition or analysis: she was called to help people find themselves.

Not to fix them. Not to train them. Not to plan their strategies or optimize their processes — though she had done all of those things and done them well. To help them find themselves. To create the conditions in which something true and buried could surface. To ask the question that went one level deeper than the question they came with.

“My superpower is listening to my inner voice and to the other — and crafting questions that stimulate inner transformation.”

To understand how she arrived in Maine, you have to understand the arc that preceded it. Industrial Chemist. MBA. On-the-road post with the Industrial Development Corporation, meeting manufacturers, foreign investors, high commissioners, government ministers across Trinidad — a whirlwind that let her do what she loved most, which was connect with diverse people. A stint in finance that ended with retrenchment. A role in a Syrian conglomerate where the chairman gave her random projects across the business and she later said was the period of “really finding myself.” A represented role with a European technical assistance firm that required her to travel to Belgium. And eventually, the position that would bring her closest to the edge of her calling: Lead Strategic Planning Consultant at her cousin’s OD firm.

She was good at all of it. That is the thing that makes this kind of story complicated. She was not leaving failure. She was leaving competence — which is, in many ways, harder. Competence has its own gravity. It offers security, identity, the esteem of people who depend on you. Leaving competence requires a different kind of courage than leaving difficulty. It requires you to trust what you feel more than what you have built.

She noticed, in that consulting role, that clients needed something the firm was not designed to offer. They needed to pause. They needed someone to help them go inward, not just outward. The strategic plans were technically excellent. They were not producing sustainable change. And Judy knew why: because the people making the plans had not yet done the interior work that would allow them to carry the plans through.

She left impulsively. At the end of a month, she heard a presentation about taking the leap — about the moment when you stop waiting for conditions to be perfect and simply go. She turned to the woman next to her and said: “My plan is, if I don’t do it now, I’ll never do it.” She handed in her notice.

She took the leap at the same moment she was sending her daughter to university in Canada. She drained her savings. She entered what she describes plainly as a financial pit. Every time the discomfort became acute enough that she considered returning to corporate life, she felt a clear inner no. Not a feeling of peace, necessarily. Just a no. Sixteen years later, she is still in this vocation.

Every time she considered going back, the inner voice said no. Not with fanfare. Not with a vision. Just: no. And she listened.

The first Time Out Retreat she scheduled, all the participants cancelled. Any reasonable person would have rescheduled. She heard an inner voice — which she now names without hesitation as the Holy Spirit — that said: go anyway. She drove to the 22-acre retreat facility alone, on a Friday evening, and arrived as the only person who had registered to be there.

She became both the facilitator and the participant. She asked herself the questions she had prepared for others. She listened. She went inward. She let the silence work on her the way she had learned to let silence work on others. And in that solitude, insights arrived that shaped every programmed design she uses to this day — the architecture of what it means to help a person pause long enough to hear what truly matters.

The second retreat brought executives, staff, and an ordained person. Within twenty-four hours, the feedback was already that the depth of her questions had surfaced more value than the cost of the retreat. She had not manufactured that depth in the intervening weeks. She had received it in an empty room in Maine, alone on a Friday evening, because she trusted a voice that told her to go even when there was no one waiting for her.

This is the pattern that the contemplative tradition names and the Enneagram illuminates and the Six Seconds EQ model grounds in research: the people who help others go inward are almost always people who have learned to go there themselves. Not once, dramatically, but repeatedly, quietly, in the ordinary discipline of listening before speaking, of pausing before acting, of trusting what arrives in stillness over what can be engineered in noise.

She describes her superpower as listening to her inner voice and to the other — and even in the middle of a facilitated session with executives or clergy, she is constantly going inward: asking herself what the stirring is, what the question beneath the question is, what the participant most needs and least expects. She frequently surprises herself with what emerges. Her clients feel it. They do not always know what to call it. She knows exactly what it is.

“Your first response,” she tells the people she works with, “is the superficial response. Let’s go a little deeper.”

She has been saying that for sixteen years, in corporate boardrooms and clergy retreats and prison ministry circles and coaching sessions with executives who have more power than peace. She says it with the calm of someone who has already gone to the depth she is inviting others toward. That is not technique. That is formation.

In our third conversation, we will go into the interior life itself — the masks she wore, the divorce she filed because of five Rottweilers, the Archbishop who called her out of the blue to lead a retreat for sixty priests, and what she wants to say to the person who is still, even now, circling the block because they are afraid of being seen doing the thing they are called to do.

But here, in this middle movement, I want to name what I see when I look at her arc whole: a woman who left competence for calling, who showed up to an empty room because a voice told her to, and who has been helping others find their inner voice ever since by first learning to trust her own.

If this reflection stirred something in you, we invite you to explore what a Time Out might open in your own life — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

 

Not One of the Pack , Part One

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Post One:   Not One of the Pack
Formation, a fence-free neighborhood, and the 1978 store owner who recognized what was already there

There is a kind of formation that happens not in a classroom or a sanctuary but in the open air between houses, on a street where the fences have not yet been built, where the children move freely from yard to yard and the parents know each other’s children by name. Judy Joseph McSween grew up in one of those neighborhoods in Trinidad — and when she describes it, something in her voice settles, the way people’s voices settle when they are speaking about the place that made them.

“It was fun,” she said simply. And then she told me about the neighbor.

There was a Guyanese father on her street whose daughter had died. When Judy came around on Saturdays, he called her by his daughter’s name — Lizanne — and insisted she sit down and have soup with him, whether or not his own children were home. She did not correct him. She sat. She ate. She understood, even as a child, that some forms of presence are more important than precision.

The neighborhood gave her something her household could not always provide: the experience of being wanted without condition, included without explanation, held without having to earn it.

Her parents divorced when she was ten. Her mother did not socialize within the neighborhood after that — but Judy did, independently, welcomed in every home. Her siblings did not find the same footing. The communal structure of that street, the open doors and the Saturday soup, became a kind of scaffolding that held her while things at home were uncertain. She did not use that language. She didn’t need to. You could hear it in how she described the place: with the ease of someone who knows where their roots went down.

She was a tomboy. Cricket, football, climbing trees. She gathered people around her naturally — multiethnic, eclectic, unbothered by the social categories that organized everyone else. When she was in secondary school and the country was in the thick of the Black Power movement, she invited her entire class home for lunch. Her brother came home to find this group assembled in their house and has never stopped marveling at it. She has always moved toward difference rather than away from it.

That instinct traveled with her to England, where she spent five years at university and then in her first professional placement. At BP Research Centre — out in the countryside, well outside London — she was the only Black woman on the entire compound. She noticed. And then she did what she has always done: she found the people most others overlooked. She befriended the maintenance staff, learned their names, understood their rhythms. When she needed lab equipment fixed, it happened on the spot. Her colleagues marveled. She had simply treated people like people.

In the Six Seconds emotional intelligence framework, one of the foundational capacities is what they call “increasing empathy” — not as sentiment, but as the disciplined practice of genuinely entering another person’s experience before responding to it. Judy was practicing this before she had language for it, on a street in Trinidad where a man called her by his dead daughter’s name and she simply said yes.

But it was the summer of 1978, before she left for England, that the moment arrived which she would spend the next four decades unpacking.

She walked into a small store to apply for a job as a sales clerk. The room was full of women — all of them, she was certain, less qualified than she was — clutching the classified ad that had brought them there. The store owner came out, told the room the position was filled, and ushered them toward the door. Judy turned to follow. A voice stopped her.

“You. What do you want.”  She turned. The store owner — a Syrian man named Alfred Galy — was looking directly at her. She said she had come for the job, but understood it was filled. He said: “Come with me.”

She started that same day. By the end of the week she was on the cash register. The following week she was also working a midday shift at his sister’s steakhouse. By the end of the summer, he was processing foreign exchange applications and import licences with her. He told her: whenever you are home on holiday and want work, come see me.

She saw him again just recently. He is now in his nineties. He told her he follows her writing in the media.

She named that moment as the formation of something essential: the internalized conviction that she was not one of the pack, that she should never assume she would be treated according to the prevailing narrative, that the answer to any door was simply yes or no, and that the only way to find out was to walk toward it rather than away.

But here is the thing she said at the end of our conversation that reframed everything that came before it. After spending years crediting Alfred Galy with giving her that belief, she sat with the ‘Defining Moments’ document she had written in preparation for our interview — the first time in her life she had paused to look at all of it together — and something shifted.

“It was from the day I was born. And I think that stands true for us all.”

Alfred Galy did not create her uniqueness. He recognized it. He named what was already there. The neighborhood did not build her capacity for belonging — it gave her room to practice what she already carried. The five years in England did not make her comfortable with difference — they confirmed an orientation she had arrived with.

This is, I think, one of the deepest things emotional intelligence and spiritual formation have to teach us: that much of what we spend our lives discovering was never actually lost. It was present from the beginning, waiting for the right conditions to be seen. The work is not creation. It is recognition.

In the weeks ahead, we will follow Judy through the rest of her story — the career arc that took her from industrial chemistry to a 22-acre retreat facility where she arrived alone and became both the facilitator and the only participant, and into the interior life that has been shaping everything else all along. But this is where it begins: on a street without fences, at a table set with soup for a girl who was never really a stranger anywhere she went.

She was not one of the pack. She never was.

We invite you to explore how emotional intelligence and spiritual formation can help you recognize what you already carry — at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

What Is Actually Mine to Do?

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In 1206, a young cloth merchant’s heir stood in the public square of his hometown, took off every piece of clothing he owned, and handed it back to his father along with his inheritance. By any reasonable business measure, Francis di Bernardone had everything: a thriving trade business waiting for him, the kind of security most founders spend a lifetime building toward. He walked away from all of it — not impulsively, but after years of watching the family business clarify, with increasing precision, exactly what it would never let him become. What’s left of that decision eight hundred years later isn’t a religious footnote. It’s a case study in founder clarity, and it still has something to say to anyone running an organization, a team, or a life.

The part of the story that gets skipped is what came after the dramatic exit: an organization Francis built from nothing grew faster than he could govern it. Within a couple of decades, what had started as a handful of men with no property and no plan had become a sprawling order with thousands of members, regional factions, and a leadership structure that increasingly made decisions Francis himself disagreed with. He spent his final years watching his own creation drift toward exactly the kind of institution he’d founded it to not be — more land, more rules, more permanence, less of the original bare-bones mission. Every founder who’s watched a board vote to “professionalize” something that was supposed to stay small and sharp will recognize the feeling. Mission drift doesn’t usually arrive as a hostile takeover. It arrives as a series of individually reasonable decisions, made by good people, that add up to a different company than the one you started.

Clare of Assisi fought a longer and more deliberate version of that same battle. She founded a parallel order of women and spent the better part of four decades resisting pressure — repeated, well-intentioned, coming from the highest levels of church leadership — to accept property and guaranteed income for her community’s protection. Multiple popes encouraged her to take it. The logic was sound by any normal organizational standard: own assets, secure your future, reduce your risk. She refused, on the grounds that owning nothing on purpose was the entire point, the thing that kept the mission honest. She got special permission to keep her order poor by choice rather than poor by accident, and the fight took most of her adult life. She won it two days before she died. It’s hard to think of a cleaner example of a founder protecting the model against the very investors trying to help her scale it.

Underneath both of their decisions was a single repeated question, asked daily rather than settled once: what is actually mine to do. Not what’s available. Not what an opportunity is dressed up as. Not what the next well-funded offer implies you should want. I learned a version of that discipline running Varment Guard, and it didn’t look like anything monastic — it looked like sitting alone in the office after everyone else had gone home, going back through the day’s decisions one at a time with a legal pad in front of me. Why this, why not that. Which calls moved the actual mission forward, and which ones were just someone else’s urgency that I’d picked up and carried as if it were mine. It wasn’t elegant. It was closer to triage. But it kept a clear line between what belonged to me and what I’d absorbed because it was loud.

The same discipline mattered later at a board level, where the pulls are quieter and harder to name. A good opportunity. A generous donor’s pet project. A direction that would genuinely grow the organization while bending it slowly away from the reason it existed in the first place. Going back to the mission statement — the org’s, and my own — became the way to test whether a pull toward something new was real strategy or a distraction dressed up as one. It rarely felt efficient in the moment. More than once it meant saying no to something that was, on its own terms, genuinely good.

None of this requires believing anything in particular. It requires the same operating discipline Francis and Clare practiced under far higher stakes: ask the question regularly instead of once, and have the nerve to act on the answer even when the answer costs you something real — a piece of the inheritance, a comfortable expansion, a donor’s good opinion. Most founders never face a square full of people watching them strip down to nothing. Most of us just face a Tuesday, a meeting, a decision nobody else will notice, where the same question is quietly on the table: is this actually mine to do, or did I just pick it up because it was there.

If you’ve got a version of that end-of-day question you run on yourself, I’d be curious to hear what it sounds like.

If you don’t have one yet, start with mine. I built the legal-pad practice from this post into a short downloadable guide — six questions, fifteen minutes, end of day.

Download: What Is Mine to Do? — An End-of-Day Examen

Peace and every good.

 

AUTHOR BIO

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, a Master Certified Coach (MCC), Certified Spiritual Director, and certified Narrative Enneagram teacher. He writes about emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and the contemplative life at The Mystical Seeker on substack, where he and his wife Lynette explore the inward journey alongside the work of leadership and formation.

“The Work of Art at the Center of Every Person”

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There were two easels in our house growing up, set at angles in the same room so neither parent blocked the other’s light. My mother worked in oils, slow and layered, sometimes returning to the same canvas for weeks until a shadow finally sat right. My father moved faster, looser, more willing to ruin a piece chasing something better. I grew up in the smell of turpentine and the quiet of two people absorbed in work that had no deadline attached to it, only a standard only they could see. I didn’t understand, as a kid, that I was watching two different theologies of creation. I just knew that in our house, “finished” was a word my parents used carefully, almost reluctantly, the way some families talk about money.

 

I tell you this because I’ve spent the better part of three decades since then assuming the lesson I took from that house was about art itself — about craft, attention, the discipline of starting over. It took my friend and colleague Jeff to show me I’d had it slightly wrong the whole time.

Jeff and I go back further than spirit of EQ. Long before either of us thought about emotional intelligence as a vocation, Jeff was part of the Varment Guard years — one of the people who helped build something out of almost nothing, back when “failure was not an option” was a motto we meant literally because the alternative wasn’t survivable. He’s the kind of person you want next to you in a startup’s early days: steady under pressure, unbothered by long hours, the sort of teammate who shows up and does the unglamorous work without needing credit for it. He was a member of New Albany UMC for years, and he still gives his weekends — actual weekends, the kind most people guard fiercely — to Kairos Prison Ministry, sitting in rooms with incarcerated men who have no platform, no audience, and in many cases no expectation that anyone outside those walls is thinking about them at all. Ask him about it and he doesn’t describe it as a sacrifice; he lights up. Being of service is, by his own account, what energizes him most.

 

When Jeff talks about coaching now, he uses a phrase that stopped me the first time I heard it. His own way of putting it: “I believe that each person has a unique and amazing work of art at their core. Not art like painting, but their essence.” Not a metaphor for potential, exactly — closer to a literal claim. Somewhere underneath the job title, the defense mechanisms, the years of doing what was expected instead of what was true, there is something formed and specific and already complete, waiting less to be built than to be uncovered. His own Noble Goal, the thing he organizes his working life around, is to help people find that art in themselves.

I used to think that was a generous overstatement — the kind of thing you say to encourage someone, true in spirit more than in fact. Then I watched what Jeff does with men inside a prison who have nothing left to perform for, no résumé to protect, no boss to impress. There’s no career upside to a Kairos weekend. No referral pipeline, no testimonial, no audience beyond the man across the table. Jeff describes what he brings into that room plainly: “These men have been beaten down for so much of their life that no one has told them that they have worth or value. I believe that is the most important thing that I take into the prison.” That’s the same claim as the work of art, said in a different register — not a creative impulse waiting to be unlocked, but a worth that was never actually in question, only buried under years of being told otherwise. And it’s precisely there, where every external reason to fake it has been stripped away, that Jeff says he sees people most clearly — not the art they wish they’d made, but the art that was always there, scarred over, hidden, waiting on someone steady enough to notice it without flinching.

This reframes the question I’d been asking wrong for years. I’d absorbed from my parents’ easels that art was something you produced — a discipline you practiced, a skill you built, a thing that either existed on the canvas or didn’t exist at all. So, when people tell me, in coaching sessions or over coffee, that they don’t have a creative bone in their body, that the art conversation isn’t for them, I understand exactly what they mean, because I used to measure it the same way. But Jeff’s version of the Noble Goal isn’t asking anyone to make more. It’s suggesting that most of us are sitting on something we’ve already made — a way of loving people, a particular kind of patience, a capacity to stay present in rooms other people flee — and we’ve spent so long hiding it, smoothing it over, calling it ordinary, that we’ve forgotten it was art at all.

This is where emotional intelligence stops being a corporate competency and starts being something closer to excavation. The tools Jeff uses — the same EQ frameworks we teach leaders and teams — aren’t really about performance optimization when you trace them back far enough. They’re instruments for noticing: what someone feels underneath what they’re saying, what’s been buried so long it reads as personality rather than choice, what got hidden because revealing it once cost too much. Jeff’s years in prison ministry didn’t happen alongside his coaching work by coincidence. They’re the same practice in two different rooms — one with stakes most people will never know, one with a quarterly review attached, both asking the identical question: what is the work of art this person has been hiding, and what would it take for them to trust it back into the light.

The Art You’ve Been Hiding Reflection Sheet

I think about those two easels differently now. My parents weren’t only teaching me about craft. They were teaching me, without either of them saying it outright, that the thing worth making was never separate from the person making it — that the canvas was just where it became visible. Jeff would say the canvas isn’t required at all. The art is already there. The work, his work, our work, is helping people stop believing they have to make something new before they’re allowed to call what’s already inside them by its true name.

You don’t need to make more art. You need to stop hiding the one you already are.

Peace and Every Good

If this stirred something, you can find more reflections like it on The Mystical Seeker.

mysticalseeker.substack.com & spiritofeq.com/blog

About the Author

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ, where he and his wife Lynette help individuals, leaders, and teams grow through emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spiritual formation. He writes at The Mystical Seeker on the inward life that makes the outward work possible.

 

The Mug She Couldn’t Put Down

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On the three lies we’re sold about work, and what’s true instead.

A woman sat across from me on a video call a few months ago, holding a coffee mug with her company’s logo on it up near her kitchen counter, turning it slowly between her palms the way you turn something you’re not sure you still want to hold. She had just been promoted into the title she had organized her twenties and thirties around — corner office, signing authority, her name under a slightly bigger headshot on the company website than the year before. She set the mug down on the counter next to her laptop and told me the day of her promotion had been the saddest day of her professional life. Not because anything had gone wrong. Because everything had gone exactly as promised, and she felt nothing.

I have sat across from that kind of silence more times than I can count over the years — the silence that comes after someone gets the thing they were told to want and discovers the want was never really theirs. It usually arrives with a kind of quiet bewilderment, because nobody warned them this was a possible outcome. The story they were handed, somewhere around a commencement stage in a cap and gown, did not include a chapter where the dream job arrives on schedule and turns out to be the wrong dream.

This is, I suspect, a good part of what’s behind the wave of people quietly leaving or quietly checking out of corporate life right now, the wave that gets a new headline every few months — quiet quitting, quiet burnout, whatever comes next. It is tempting to read all of that concept as a generation gone soft, unwilling to put in the hours their parents did. I don’t think that’s it, or not mostly. I think a great many people are noticing, roughly around the same time, the same gap between a promise made to them early and a result delivered to them later, and discovering they were never told the promise came with an asterisk.

That story has a traceable origin. Standing at a Stanford commencement in 2005, Steve Jobs told the graduating class, “And the only way to do great work is to love what you do,” and the line has been framed on office walls and printed on coffee mugs ever since — including, probably, some very near where my directee set hers down. The writer Miya Tokumitsu, in her 2014 Jacobin essay “In the Name of Love,” traced exactly this lineage and pointed out something uncomfortable: the people most able to afford the leap into work they love are usually the people who already had the most cushion underneath them. For everyone else, the mantra quietly does something less generous than inspire. It turns a structural problem — not enough good jobs, not enough room to take risks — into a personal one. If you don’t love your work, the story implies, you simply haven’t looked hard enough, or wanted it badly enough, or been brave enough to go get it.

The second half of that same story usually arrives a little later in the curriculum — a guest entrepreneur clicking through a slide deck in a packed lecture hall, telling the room that with enough grit, any one of them could be the next name on a building. Anyone can build something of their own, the story goes, if they just work hard enough — and here I must be careful, because for a season of my life I was the proof people pointed to. My business partner Mike and I spent eight months preparing before we opened Varment Guard, the pest and wildlife management company we built from nothing into a business that eventually employed hundreds of people. We hung a sign over our own door — Failure was not an option — and meant it the way you mean something you have staked your mortgage on. It worked. I am not interested in pretending otherwise, or in false modesty about something I am genuinely proud of. But it worked because of a long list of things that had very little to do with how hard we wanted it: the specific economy of that particular year, a partner whose strengths were exactly the inverse of mine, a tolerance for risk that is not evenly distributed across human temperaments and never has been. I don’t want to make it sound costless, either. I had small children at home through those eight months and the years right after, and I missed real time with them I can’t get back — which is its own kind of bill, one that never shows up on anyone’s balance sheet but gets paid all the same. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, roughly half of new businesses don’t make it to their fifth year, and the ones that do are not simply the ones who wanted it most. Holding up survivors as proof that anyone can do this if they just try hard enough is a little like holding up a lottery winner as proof that anyone can get rich if they just buy a ticket.

What worries me more than the failure rate itself is what people do with it afterward. I have sat with more than one person who closed a business within those first hard years and absorbed it as a verdict on their character rather than what it mostly was — a coin flip with worse odds than anyone told them going in. The story promised something close to a meritocracy. The data describes something closer to weather.

Underneath both of those lies sits a third, quieter one: that money and position are the correct measure of a life well spent, and that everyone, deep down, wants more of both. Some people do, and there is nothing wrong with that — ambition is not a character flaw, and plenty of people are genuinely called toward building, leading, and accumulating in ways that serve others well. But plenty of other people are wired toward something else entirely: depth over breadth, the same craft practiced quietly for thirty years, a small life held close rather than a large one held loosely. I think of the kind of person who has spent three decades fixing pipe organs in the same three counties, with no interest in a bigger territory or a louder reputation, who is, by every measure I trust, thoroughly fulfilled. Emotional intelligence, at its most basic, includes the unglamorous skill of knowing accurately which one of those people you are, rather than which one you were told to become. The Enneagram, in its better uses, exists for exactly this kind of clarity — not to sort people into better and worse categories, but to help each of us recognize the shape of aliveness we were built for, which is rarely identical to our neighbor’s. Mistaking the second kind of person for a failed version of the first kind is not a small error. It is the engine behind an enormous amount of unnecessary suffering, including, I suspect, the kind my directee was sitting in when she set down her mug.

Was It Ever Yours To Want Reflection Sheet

I didn’t ask her what she wanted to do next. I asked her something slower: whether the job she’d just arrived at had ever been hers to want, or whether she had simply been collecting, for twenty years, on a promise someone else made on her behalf at a podium she barely remembers. She picked the mug back up while she thought about it, turned it over once more, and read her own company’s name on the side of it like she was seeing it for the first time. She didn’t have an answer that day. But she left the call holding the mug instead of setting it back down on the counter, which felt, to both of us, like the truer ending to that sentence.

If this stirred something up, I made a short reflection sheet to go with it — you can find it, along with more like it, at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

mysticalseeker.substack.com & spiritofeq.com/blog