Found, Not Searching

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Part Two of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

Eric Pennington was bored out of his mind in a conference room.

He’ll tell you that himself, with no embarrassment about it. He was sitting with a room full of division presidents, listening to the same conversation he’d already sat through three years earlier — the fiftieth replay of it, by his count — and something in him wanted to stand up and bang the table. Am I alone here? Is anyone else feeling like this is insanity?

He didn’t bang the table. But a thought arrived that wouldn’t leave: I need to live an epic life. Not because his life was in danger, exactly, but because it was the opposite of danger — it was sameness, dressed up as stability, and he could feel himself going numb inside it. He sat with that thought until it turned into a sentence: human beings should be living an epic life. Therefore — Epic Living.

That’s the company’s origin story, and it’s a good one. But Eric is quick to tell you it wasn’t as clean as it sounds. Underneath the noble language he could put around it — doing the work he loved, getting paid for it, helping people live more fully — there was older wiring still running. “I still was carrying some of that baggage,” he told me, “of, well, hey, if I write this cool little thing and people give me likes, it means there’s the applause, right?”

The applause. He named it without flinching, which is its own kind of courage. Eric grew up needing to be right, needing to get it right, carrying a private rule that failure simply wasn’t an option — and in corporate America, that wiring gets rewarded constantly. Deliver results, get the applause, get the money, get the promotion, and start quietly believing the applause is the validation, rather than just the echo of it. “What a drug,” he said. “I took it and I interpreted it as — wow, look what I did, look how they’re applauding. Therefore let me do more of that so I can get more of that.”

So when Epic Living launched, it launched half on conviction and half on that old appetite still looking for its next hit. And for a while, neither Eric nor anyone watching from outside could have told you which half was driving.

Years went by. The corporate playbook — work hard, deliver, get promoted — simply stopped working in his own business. “All of a sudden I’m, boy, I’m in a desert,” he said, “because nothing I’m trying is working. It’s not like my corporate life.” We’ll walk that desert with him fully in Part Three. For now, what matters is what was waiting on the other side of it — or, more accurately, who.

A banker named Rick Maddox kept telling Eric over coffee that he needed to meet someone. He has the same view on things you do. You two will hit it off. The someone turned out to run a pest-control company, which did not, on paper, sound like Eric’s people. He took the meeting anyway — “I’m gonna take every meeting I can, because you never know” — but he told me plainly that his guard was up. He’d been burned before by collaboration talk that turned into asking for money and then quietly going a different direction. He and Jim Vaive shared a panel at Franklin University on employee engagement, enjoyed it, and Eric still didn’t trust it. Coffee got suggested. He said sure, sure, while privately thinking maybe, I don’t know.

Then Jim said, wait — I want you to meet my wife, Lynette.

“I turned around,” Eric said. “You introduced me. I looked Lynette in the eyes. And that’s how I got found.” Not “found it.” Found. He’s specific about the word, because at the time he wasn’t thinking emotional intelligence, I see the light. It felt more like being stopped. “It was like God was saying, don’t go anywhere. Don’t go anywhere.” One conversation led to another, and somewhere in the accumulation of them, he started to understand what emotional intelligence actually was and what it could touch — not as a concept he went looking for, but as something that had apparently been looking for him.

I asked him what that reframe — emotions as a form of data, rather than a threat to manage — actually unlocked in him. His answer was simple enough to sit with for a while: “I could give my emotions the mic. I didn’t need to run the other way.” For a man who’d spent his life managing, controlling, deciding what to keep and what to give away, that was a different operating system entirely. The early going was hard, he admitted, because some of what surfaced was tied to things from a long way back. But what he found, eventually, was that none of it was trying to hurt him. “Even anger and frustration — all the ones we consider negative — they weren’t trying to hurt me. They were just trying to get my attention. To give me some good data about what was going on inside my head.”

That shift shows up now in a quieter, daily place: a practice of prayer first thing in the morning, before email, before the day gets its hooks in — asking, in his words, for the wisdom and understanding to show up in the world the way he’s meant to. He told me that in recent years the prayer has changed shape. It used to be oriented around having the answer — for his son, for his friends, here’s what I think you should do. Now it’s oriented toward something closer to surrender: I want to play the role God has intended me to play in their lives, not the role he’d assign himself if left to his own certainty.

He admitted that takes courage, because it means his ego has to sit down. He gave me an example without my having to dig for it — a moment at a coffee shop with Chamber of Commerce leaders, where Jim offered six months of free work on the spot. Eric sat next to him doing the math in his head, screaming internally: we are not in a position to be doing things for free. He didn’t say it out loud. He let it ride. Jim told him afterward, trust me, this will produce later. It turned out to be one of the best decisions the partnership made — the relationship eventually returned far more than the free months had cost. “That’s a long way of saying yeah, it did take courage,” Eric said, “because the courage is — I’m going to align myself with what God wants to accomplish in that relationship, versus my own certainty about what I thought was right.”

Before Eric became part of spirit of EQ, he’d already put two books into the world — Waking Up in Corporate Americaand The Well-Being Guide — each written from inside the decade of searching and rebuilding that preceded this partnership. They mark the distance he’d already traveled before any of us started walking together. One names the realization. The other hands someone a map. I asked him what changed in between. “I started discovering that leadership wasn’t just confined to inside the walls of corporate America,” he said. “In order to be the kind of leader people want to follow, you have to be healthy in a multitude of areas.” He’d lived that before he ever wrote it down.

And then there’s the podcast — seven seasons now, co-hosted with Jeff, conversations with corporate leaders, a police chief, an AI researcher, a sabbatical coach, even an episode where Eric talked openly about his son’s accident. I asked what a recurring, public practice of talking about emotional intelligence has done to him that private coaching never could. “I feel like I’m at home with me,” he said. “I’m closest to who I truly am when I’m doing it.” That public practice, he said, has been part of what gave him the courage to talk about harder things out loud — and it’s sharpened something else in him too: a hunger for other people’s stories, not just his own.

Found not Searching Reflection Sheet

What strikes me, sitting with all of this, is how little of it Eric went looking for on purpose. The company name arrived as a thought in a boring meeting. The marriage of emotional intelligence and faith arrived through a banker’s hunch and a held gaze across a room. Even the humility cost him something he didn’t choose to lose — it was stripped, not surrendered willingly, the way most real growth seems to be. He spent years thinking he was building a career. It turns out he was being found.

Where this meets you: somewhere in your own life, the thing you needed most probably didn’t arrive because you went searching for it — it arrived because you finally stopped running fast enough to miss it.

Next time, in Part Three: the ten-year desert Eric calls the crucible — what it stripped away, what it left behind, and what he’s discovered about the things that will hold weight in eternity.

Peace and every good.

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.

Jesus and the Gift of Music

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Part One of a Three-Part Conversation with Eric Pennington

There’s a particular kind of loneliness in watching your own life happen to you. Eric Pennington knows it from the inside. As a boy, he remembers feeling almost outside himself — like he could watch young Eric move through his days, present in his own body but somehow also a few feet to the side of it, observing. Not constantly. Not dramatically. Just enough, and just often enough, that he noticed.

He doesn’t call it an out-of-body experience, exactly, though he understands why that’s the word people reach for. It’s closer to a kind of early vigilance — the watchfulness of a kid trying to make sense of a house that didn’t explain itself.

 

His parents, he suspects — though neither ever sat for a formal assessment — were both Nines on the Enneagram. The Peacemakers. Which meant, in practice, a house full of quiet. Not unkind quiet. Just unexplained quiet. “They’re just not talking,” he told me, “and you’re kind of left with — as a kid, I felt like I was left with question marks.” There was dysfunction underneath that silence, but a child doesn’t have the architecture yet to name it. He just keeps moving. Survives the day. Doesn’t ask why.

Then he turned twelve, then thirteen, and the questions he didn’t have language for started arriving anyway. Something cracked open in his family that year — the kind of rupture that becomes public in a way a kid never asked for, the kind that follows you into a new school year whether you’re ready or not. What matters for where we’re going today is what happened underneath it, at the same time, almost on top of it.

Eric gave his life to Christ in that window.

And within the same season — maybe eight months, maybe a year on either side — music became something more than background noise. “Jesus and the music was like a lifeline,” he told me. “The hope. The belief that I could navigate life in a way where I wouldn’t necessarily fall into the traps of a lot of my family — drugs, alcohol, prison. That’s kind of how I anchored myself. In those two things.”

Not one. Two. Faith and music, arriving together, doing something neither could have done alone.

I asked him about an archetype he’s mentioned to me more than once — Miles Davis. Not as a musician he simply admired, but as something closer to a mirror. His answer surprised me a little. “I really found Miles Davis’s music to be rather boring,” he said. It wasn’t the sound that hooked him. It was the shape of the career underneath it. Davis spent years doing it one way, then reinvented the whole thing and spent the next stretch doing it completely differently. A chameleon. Restless. Unwilling to stay put in a style just because it had worked.

“I think my attractiveness to that was just my hyper-creativity,” Eric said. “My desire to find things that were unique and different.” But there was something more functional happening too, something that only makes sense once you know what twelve-and-thirteen-year-old Eric was living through. “I think some of that connected to the trauma that was happening — like protection. If I could find something that set me apart, that would be sort of a protective barrier from just going along with the herd.” Because the herd, as he put it, was the thing pointing. Whispering. Making him the kid everyone already had a story about.

Difference, for Eric, wasn’t a personality trait he discovered later in a workshop. It was armor he built at thirteen, tuned to the rhythm of a man who refused to keep playing the same five years on repeat.

“Jesus and the Gift of Music”Reflection Sheet

I think about that often — how the things that save us early rarely look like salvation at the time. Music didn’t feel like a rescue plan to a thirteen-year-old. It felt like the only thing that made sense to do with his hands and his attention while everything else in his house was unreadable. Faith didn’t feel like doctrine. It felt like the only voice in the room that wasn’t asking him to pretend he understood something he didn’t.

What I find myself sitting with now, decades later, talking to the man that boy became, is how much of Eric’s whole posture toward emotional intelligence — the listening, the curiosity, the refusal to let people stay invisible to him — traces back to a kid who learned to watch closely because nobody was explaining anything out loud. He learned to read a room before he could read a textbook. He learned that silence isn’t the absence of information; it’s information you have to go looking for. And he learned, at thirteen, that you can be carried by two things showing up at once that have no business needing each other — a hope you can’t see and a sound you can hold in your hands.

He doesn’t watch himself from the outside anymore. Not the way he used to. But I’d guess some of that boy is still in there, still paying close attention, still listening for the note that doesn’t sound like everyone else’s.

Where this meets you: somewhere in your own story, two unlikely things probably arrived together and held you up when you couldn’t yet name what either one was doing.

Next time: how a bored afternoon in a corporate conference room turned into a company called Epic Living — and how emotional intelligence found Eric before he ever went looking for it.

Peace and every good.

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.