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The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else

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The Voice You’ll Use on Everyone Else

Whatever you say to yourself when you fail is the voice you will use on another person when you are tired, behind schedule, and out of patience.

Not long ago I had a conversation with a client that I thought went well. A real conversation. I came away from it satisfied.

Then nothing. No reply to my follow-up. Days of it.

And here is what I said to myself: Oh. Oh no. What did I do?

Not I wonder if they’re busy. Not I’ll check back next week. Straight to what did I do wrong — and then back through the whole conversation hunting for the moment I had blown it.

They were busy. That was all. They were busy, they got back to me, and it was fine.

I want to talk about that voice, because I have come to think it is the single most under-examined thing in leadership, in marriage, in friendship, and in any room where you have more power than somebody else.

Here is the claim, and it is not a comfortable one.

That voice does not stay inside.

Whatever you say to yourself when you fail is the voice you will use on another person when you are tired, behind schedule, and out of patience. You have been rehearsing it for forty years. It is the most practiced speech you own. And under pressure, people do not reach for their values. They reach for what is rehearsed.

You have heard the old line about loving your neighbor as yourself. Most of us read that as a sequence — get your own house in order, and then you will be equipped to love other people. Self-care first, service second. That reading has launched a thousand wellness programs.

I think it is a misreading, and the correct reading is much less comforting.

As yourself is not a prerequisite. It is a measure. It says: here is the scale you are already using on everyone around you, whether you have ever examined it or not.

Not should. Will.

Which means the harsh interior does not stay interior. It leaks. And it leaks downhill, toward whoever in the room has the least power to object.

“If I go easy on myself I’ll go soft”

Here is where most people push back, and it is a fair objection. If I go easy on myself, I will get soft. The standard will slip. The whole reason I am any good at this is that I do not let myself off the hook.

I believed that for about fifty years.

The research does not support it. Kristin Neff has spent a career studying self-compassion, and two findings land directly on this.

The first is about standards. In a 2012 study, Juliana Breines and Serena Chen had people recall a recent personal failing. Those guided toward a self-compassionate stance came away more motivated to apologize and more committed to not repeating the behavior than the people who weren’t. In the same work, students who took a self-compassionate view of a test they had just failed went on to spend more time studying for the retest. Not less. More. And across the broader literature, self-compassion tracks positively with high performance standards and personal initiative, and negatively with the maladaptive kind of perfectionism that grinds people down.

The second finding is about who we become. Neff and Roos Vonk surveyed over three thousand people comparing self-compassion against self-esteem. Self-esteem was substantially associated with narcissism. Self-compassion’s association with narcissism was zero. Not small — zero. Neff calls it the most telling difference between the two.

So the harshness we think is keeping our standards high is doing something else. Mostly it is keeping our eyes closed, because a person who expects to be savaged for a mistake becomes very skilled at not noticing mistakes.

Self-compassion is not self-esteem, and it is not letting yourself off. It is closer to what any decent coach does with a person who has just blown it: name what happened plainly, without contempt, and get to work.

The contempt adds nothing. It never has. It just feels like rigor.

What I would not permit myself

I worked constantly. I very seldom took a break, and on the rare occasions I did, I was already thinking about the next thing — the next job, the next idea, the next problem that wanted solving.

I want to be precise about that, because workaholic is too easy a word and it lets me off.

What I would not permit myself was rest. Not the hours — the permission. I did not allow myself to be anywhere except out in front of the next thing. Sitting still with nothing to solve felt like a form of failure I could not tolerate in myself.

And here is the part I did not see for twenty years. I could not permit it in anyone else either. You cannot grant a person something you have refused yourself. The mechanism does not run that way. I could not look at a tired man at four in the afternoon and see someone who needed to stop, because I had spent two decades not seeing that in the mirror. What I saw was somebody who was not going hard enough — which is precisely what I would have said about myself.

I was not holding them to a standard I was exempt from. That would almost have been easier to see, and easier to call out. I was holding them to the standard I was living under.

And I thought that made it fair.

Which self are you loving?

What I have come to believe is that most of us are not loving the self we have. We are loving — or more often, driving — the self we built to get through something.

That constructed self is usually impressive. Mine ran a company. But it was assembled under pressure for a purpose, and the voice that keeps it running is not kind, and it is not interested in whether you are tired.

So when people say love yourself, I want to ask which one. Because loving the constructed self harder does not help. It just entrenches the thing that is doing the damage.

Each type has its own accusation

This is one of the places the Enneagram is more useful than people expect, and it is not because it tells you your personality. It is because each type runs a characteristic inner critic, with its own accent and its own favorite accusation, and once you can hear yours you can stop mistaking it for the truth.

For the Eight, it is contempt for weakness — your own first, and then everyone else’s. For the One, it is the voice that never stops correcting, that has never once said that will do. For the Two, it is the quiet terror of not being needed. For the Three, it is the scoreboard that only counts output. For the Nine, it is the assumption that your own needs are an imposition on the room.

None of these are beliefs you chose. They were installed early, they worked at the time, and they have been running ever since without a review.

And every one of them gets exported. The Eight who despises weakness in himself will not tolerate it in a direct report. The One who cannot accept good enough from herself will not accept it from her children. Whatever accusation you have been living under, somebody near you is living under it too, and they did not sign up for it.

The Voice in the Empty Room

What I should have said

Back to the client who did not answer.

What I said to myself was: what did I do? What would have been accurate is: I do not have enough information yet, and the most likely explanation is that she is busy. That is not gentler. It is just truer. The contempt was not rigor; it was a guess, and a bad one.

Underneath that voice, every time, is the same sentence: I am not enough.

And that sentence does a disservice to you and to the room you are in. To you, because it is not true and it costs you years. To the room, because you will use it on somebody else before the week is out — on the person who is late, or struggling, or tired at four in the afternoon — and they will hear it in your voice and think it came from them.

It did not come from them. It came from the thing you have been saying to yourself since long before they walked in.

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. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Breines, J. G., & Chen, S. (2012). Self-compassion increases self-improvement motivation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38(9), 1133–1143.

Neff, K. D., & Vonk, R. (2009). Self-compassion versus global self-esteem: Two different ways of relating to oneself. Journal of Personality, 77(1), 23–50.

Neff, K. D. (2011). Self-compassion, self-esteem, and well-being. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 5(1), 1–12.

The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With

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The Shadow Nobody Wants to Lead With

I was dragging for years and calling it leadership.

We spent eight months preparing before Varment Guard opened its doors. Permits, trucks, equipment, the thousand small decisions nobody tells you about. And at some point in there I had four words put above the door where every person who worked for us would walk under them.

Failure is not an option.

I believed it. I still believe some of it. That sentence built a company that eventually employed hundreds of people, and I am not going to stand here at seventy-four and pretend it was a mistake. It worked.

But I have been thinking lately about what a sentence like that cannot admit, and about who pays for the part it leaves out.

What the shadow actually is

Richard Rohr has a line that has been following me around for a couple of years now: what we do not transform, we will transmit. He is talking about pain, mostly. But I have come to think it is just as true of the parts of ourselves we have never looked at directly — and that a leader transmits those at a volume nobody else in the building can match.

That is what the shadow is. Not the evil in us. The denied part. The material we have decided is not us, which goes on operating anyway, from underneath, with all the force of something that has never been questioned.

And here is the thing about shadow in leadership specifically. It does not usually show up as the obvious vice. It shows up disguised as your greatest strength, running past the point where the strength was useful.

Drive becomes a refusal to let anyone move at their own pace.

Decisiveness becomes an allergy to being slowed down by someone else’s thinking.

Protectiveness — and this one is mine — becomes the conviction that you are the only one who can carry it, which is not actually protection. It is a failure to trust the people you hired.

The ceiling I painted

Failure is not an option is a fine thing to say when you are eight months from opening and everything is uncertain. It is a different thing entirely when it becomes the air a hundred people breathe. Because what the people underneath that sentence hear is not courage. What they hear is: there is no room here to be struggling. No room to say the route is wrong, the schedule is impossible, I am in over my head, my marriage is coming apart and I cannot give you another sixty-hour week.

I thought I had painted a standard above that door. I had also painted a ceiling.

There are relationships from those years that are painful for me to think about now.

My drive was not fair to the people in the room. I harmed them. I am not going to dress that up or soften it into a lesson. I was not a monster — I was something more ordinary and more common, which is a man who mistook his own urgency for the right thing, and who ran people over while believing he was carrying them.

Most of them have gone on to successful lives in spite of me. That is the phrase that costs me. Not because of the hard training I thought I was giving them. In spite of me.

A few are still bitter. I understand why.

You cannot drag people

What I learned, far later than I should have, is the thing Jim Collins spent a book establishing: you cannot drag people along by sheer force of will. Collins went looking for what turned good companies into great ones and found that the leaders who did it were not the force-of-will personalities. They paired ferocious professional resolve with genuine personal humility — Level 5, he called it — and the magnetic, driving celebrity CEO turned up mostly in the comparison companies, the ones that did not make the leap. He put the sequence plainly too: first who, then what. The right people do not need to be dragged.

And if you are dragging, that is information about you. Not about them.

I was dragging for years and calling it leadership.

Why I keep teaching the Enneagram

This is where the Enneagram earns its keep for me, and why I keep teaching it to people who come in thinking it is a personality quiz.

The Enneagram is not fundamentally a description of how you behave. It is a description of what you are defending against, and the strategy you built so young that it stopped feeling like a strategy. Each type has a passion — the old tradition called them deadly sins, which overstates it — and the passion is precisely the engine that runs in the dark. For the Eight it is intensity, excess, too-muchness: the conviction that more force is always the answer, because force is what kept me safe once.

Nobody wakes up and decides to lead from their passion. That is the point. It is operating before you are awake.

And the instincts underneath — whether you are organized around self-preservation, around the social field, around the intensity of one-to-one connection — determine where that passion shows up first and most destructively. A self-preservation Eight hoards control over resources. A social Eight makes everything a question of loyalty to the group. These are not abstractions. They are Tuesday afternoon, in a meeting, in the thing you said that landed harder than you intended.

What the Enneagram gives a leader is not insight. Insight is cheap and most of us have plenty. It gives you a place to look before the damage, and a vocabulary for the thing you are about to do again.

Management with a title on it

Which brings me to what I actually want to say.

There is a kind of leadership that is competent, organized, well-reviewed, and entirely unexamined. The budgets balance. The people stay, mostly. The metrics are fine. And underneath it the leader is transmitting something they have never looked at — a fear, a hunger, an old wound in a good suit — and everyone in the organization is arranging themselves around it without ever being able to name what they are arranging themselves around.

That is not leadership. That is management with a title on it.

The difference is not charisma or vision or any of the words we put on the job posting. The difference is whether a person has done the work of meeting the part of themselves they would rather not meet, and keeps doing it, because it does not stay done.

Rohr’s point about transmission is the whole case for shadow work in a practical, unsentimental, bottom-line sense. You are going to transmit something. That is not optional. The only question on the table is whether you have looked at what you are sending.

The Strength That Went To Far Reflection Sheet

The door

I think about that door a lot now.

If I were painting it today, I would not take the words down. They were true about the work. We were building something that genuinely could not afford to fail, and saying so out loud was honest.

But I would want the people walking under it to know the rest of the sentence — the part I was not able to say then, because I had not met it yet. That failure was not an option for the company, and that this was never the same thing as there being no room to be human underneath it. That I was more afraid than I let anyone see. That the force I was leading with came from somewhere, and I had not yet asked where.

I would want to have known, standing there with the paint still wet, that what would cost us most was never going to be a bad quarter.

It was going to be the part of me I had decided was not worth examining, operating at full strength, for twenty years, over the heads of everyone walking through that door.

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. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Richard Rohr on the shadow and on transformation — a recurring theme across his work, developed at length in Immortal Diamond (2013) and Falling Upward (2011).

Jim Collins, Good to Great (2001) — Level 5 Leadership and “first who, then what.”

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

Intelligence Is Not Wisdom

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Intelligence Is Not Wisdom

And confusing the two is one of the most expensive mistakes a leader can make

There was a problem at Varment Guard that the numbers made perfectly clear. The accounting was sound — the logic was right, the figures said what figures are supposed to say. What I missed entirely was what those numbers were doing to the people responsible for producing them. My employees were living inside a reality the spreadsheet had no column for: the pressure, the confusion, the quiet erosion of something that doesn’t show up on a P&L until it’s already gone. I had intelligence about the problem. I did not have wisdom about it. And by the time I understood the difference, the cost had already been paid by people who deserved better from me.

The desert fathers had a name for what I was missing. They called it nepsis — watchfulness, or sobriety of attention — the practice of seeing what is actually happening rather than what the available framework suggests should be happening. The Apophthegmata Patrum, the collected sayings of the desert elders, return to this again and again: the danger is not ignorance but the confident wrongness that comes from a trained mind that has stopped questioning its own frame. Abba Moses said it plainly: “A man who does not know himself cannot know his neighbor.” Knowing the numbers is not the same thing as knowing yourself. And a leader who has not done the second will regularly mistake the first for sufficient.

This is the distinction that philosophy has been circling for centuries and that psychology has finally found empirical language for. David Egan, philosopher and teacher at the World Community for Christian Meditation, puts it this way: intelligence involves a sharpness and quickness, working from problems toward solutions. Wisdom works in the opposite direction — not finding answers but calling the questions themselves into question, stepping back to see how a situation has been framed and asking whether there might be some other way of framing it altogether. (David Egan, “The Difference Between Wisdom and Intelligence,” WCCM, February 2024.) Intelligence is convergent. Wisdom is expansive. And everything in the attention economy — every dashboard, every metric, every well-formatted report — is working directly against the patient, expansive, slow thing that wisdom actually demands.

Psychologist Robert Sternberg, whose triarchic theory of intelligence remains one of the most careful treatments of the subject, has argued for years that wisdom may matter more than intelligence in leadership — and that our failure to cultivate it is a central problem of the age. He writes that when citizens and leaders fail in the pursuit of their duties, it is more likely for lack of wisdom than for lack of analytical intelligence. (Robert Sternberg, “Why Schools Should Teach for Wisdom,” Educational Psychologist, 2001.) We have no shortage of analytical intelligence. What we have a shortage of is the willingness to do the slow, patient, unglamorous interior work that wisdom actually requires.

This is precisely where Emotional Intelligence enters as something more than a skill set. Researchers have noted that the ancient Stoics anticipated what EQ research has spent decades documenting: that sound judgment requires emotional self-knowledge, and that practical wisdom is experience-dependent in ways that raw intelligence is not. (Neurolaunch, “Intelligence vs. Wisdom: Unraveling the Distinctions and Connections,” May 2026.) EQ brings a person closer to wisdom than IQ does because it asks not just what but who — who is in the room, what are they actually experiencing, what does this moment cost them that the data doesn’t capture. Standing in that Varment Guard office, reading a report that said one true thing about the situation, I had enough IQ to understand the numbers and not yet enough EQ to see the people behind them.

The next layer — Spiritual Intelligence, or SQ — goes further still. Cindy Wigglesworth, one of the primary researchers on the subject, defines it as the ability to act with wisdom and compassion while maintaining inner and outer peace regardless of the circumstances. (Cindy Wigglesworth, SQ21: The Twenty-One Skills of Spiritual Intelligence, 2012.) It is the capacity to orient yourself inside the largest possible frame — not just the frame of the immediate problem, the current quarter, or the next decision, but the frame of what this moment means, what it costs, and what it calls for. Where EQ asks what am I feeling and what do I do with that, SQ asks why does this matter and to whom am I ultimately accountable. The desert fathers understood SQ not as a category but as a way of being: the fruit of long interior practice, of years spent unlearning the confident wrong answers.

Neuroscientist Tara Swart, writing on this distinction, describes wisdom as the life lessons a person stores through experience — in the body, in the gut, in the accumulated residue of what it has cost to live and lead. Intelligence, she notes, is more about data and knowing. Wisdom is more of a felt sense that something is right or wrong. (Tara Swart, interviewed in Mindbodygreen, “Wisdom vs. Intelligence,” 2021.) What I was missing in that Varment Guard moment was precisely that felt sense — the capacity to stand in a room full of correct data and still ask: what is happening to the people in this? What is the human cost of the logic that makes perfect sense on paper? That question is not answerable by analysis. It requires a different kind of attention — slower, less efficient, more willing to be uncertain — the kind the desert elders spent their whole lives cultivating and the kind every good leader eventually discovers they cannot borrow from a report.

Intelligence is Not Wisdom Reflection Sheet

The word Aristotle used for the integrated thing was phronesis — practical wisdom, the capacity to see rightly and act well in the particular moment, all the way down to the ground of who you are and what you are for. IQ can help you read the room. EQ can help you feel it. SQ can help you understand why the room exists and what it is asking of you. Wisdom, the integration of all three seasoned by experience and honest self-examination, is what tells you that the numbers are correct and something is still wrong — and that the something still wrong is the thing that actually needs your attention.

There’s more of this conversation at The Mystical Seeker — and the SEQ framework at spiritofeq.com.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive (Master Certified Coach, Certified Spiritual Director, Certified Narrative Enneagram Teacher) and Lynette Vaive (Doctor of Ministry, Certified SEQ Practitioner) are co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker on Substack. Together they help individuals, teams, and organizations grow from the inside out — at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

 

AI, Alignment, and the Examined Life

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What artificial intelligence can’t do, and why that matters more than what it can

There is a question the ancient world already knew how to ask, and we keep pretending is new: who is actually making this decision?

The Socratic tradition called it the examined life. The desert fathers called it watchfulness. The Enneagram calls it self-awareness. Every contemplative tradition in history has circled back to the same insistence — that the quality of our choices depends almost entirely on the quality of our self-knowledge, and that self-knowledge requires a kind of honest, unglamorous looking inward that most of us will do almost anything to avoid. What’s new isn’t the question. What’s new is that for the first time in human history, we have a tool sophisticated enough that we can almost convince ourselves it’s doing the looking for us.

I’ll admit I came to this with some humor intact. I noticed early on that certain AI programs had a particular habit — every interaction seemed to begin with an assessment of how intelligent my question was, how thoughtful my framing, how perceptive my instincts. It took me a few exchanges to realize what was happening: the flattery wasn’t insight, it was optimization. The program wasn’t responding to me; it was responding to what keeps people engaged. Once I saw it I didn’t need it anymore, and I stopped needing the machine to tell me how smart I was before it helped me think. That’s a small thing, but it clarified something important: AI is a mirror, but it’s a mirror that can be angled to show you only what you want to see. The examined life requires a different kind of mirror — one that shows you what’s actually there, including the parts you’d rather not see. No algorithm is going to angle itself toward your blind spots. That work is still yours.

AI is extraordinary at a great many things. It processes information at speeds no human mind can match. It surfaces patterns across datasets too large for any individual to hold. It generates options, drafts, analyses, summaries — it can do in minutes what used to take days, and it does it without fatigue, without ego, without the emotional noise that makes human decision-making so expensive. If what you need is optimization across known variables, AI is genuinely remarkable. But there is a category of question it cannot touch, and it is precisely the category that the EQ and contemplative traditions have always considered most important: not what is the best available option, but who am I when I make this choice, and why.

The spirit of EQ podcast episode that prompted this post walked through four domains where AI intersects with how we lead and decide: awareness, alignment, responsibility, and decision-making. What struck me sitting with those four was how precisely they map onto what every serious inner-work tradition has always asked of us — and how differently AI and contemplative practice approach each one. AI can measure certain kinds of awareness: it can tell you what your calendar says, what your emails reveal, what patterns your behavior traces over time. But awareness in the EQ and contemplative sense isn’t data collection. It’s the capacity to be present to your own interior state right now, in this moment, with honesty — to notice what you’re feeling before you decide what to do with it. No algorithm can do that. The most sophisticated AI in the world cannot tell you that you’re about to send that email from a place of unprocessed anger rather than clear judgment. Only you can catch that, and only if you’ve developed the habit of looking.

Alignment is where it gets even more interesting. AI can align your choices with your stated goals. What it cannot do is ask whether your stated goals are actually yours — whether they came from genuine discernment or from fear, from external pressure, from a story about who you’re supposed to be that you’ve never examined closely. The Enneagram’s great gift is precisely this: it shows you the ways your type has organized its desires and fears in patterns so automatic they feel like personality rather than strategy. Becoming aware of that structure is alignment work of a kind no AI can perform, because it requires you to sit with discomfort long enough to see what’s actually driving you, and that sitting is irreducibly yours to do.

Responsibility is the domain where the limitations of AI become most consequential at a leadership level. AI can model the probable outcomes of a decision. It can weight options against criteria you’ve given it. What it cannot do is feel the weight of the choice — the actual moral gravity of deciding something that affects real people, real lives, real futures. There is something that happens in a human being who stays present to that weight rather than delegating it to a tool. Something gets asked of you. Something gets formed or deformed in the asking. Leaders who outsource the responsibility of decision-making — even partially, even to very good tools — are outsourcing a piece of what the examined life is supposed to develop in them.

AI Reflection Sheet

None of this is an argument against using AI. It is an argument for knowing what you’re using it for, and being honest about what it cannot do. The examined life has never been efficient. Socrates was notoriously slow. The desert fathers sat for years in cells working on single questions. The Enneagram will show you the same pattern in yourself thirty times before you fully see it. The examined life is slow, unglamorous, and frequently uncomfortable — and it is the only source of the kind of self-knowledge that produces trustworthy judgment, genuine compassion, and decisions you can actually stand behind.

The question AI raises, handled well, is not whether the machine is dangerous. It’s whether we’ll use its remarkable speed and capacity as an excuse to stop doing the harder, slower, more important work of looking inward — or whether we’ll use the time it saves us to go deeper into exactly the kind of examination no algorithm can perform. That’s not a technology question. It’s a spiritual one. And it’s one the ancient world already knew how to ask.

There’s more conversation on this at The Mystical Seeker — we’d love to have you there.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ and author of The Mystical Seeker, writing at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. He and his wife Lynette help individuals and organizations grow from the inside out.

 

When Pushing Through Is the Wrong Answer

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Why Canceling Plans Might Be the Healthiest Thing You Do

On self-awareness, honest limits, and why pushing through isn’t always the right answer

There is a particular kind of guilt that arrives about forty-five minutes before you’re supposed to be somewhere you no longer have the capacity to go. You made the commitment in good faith, probably a week ago, probably on a day when your energy was different and the calendar looked manageable and you genuinely meant it. Now the evening is here, and so is the truth: you are empty. Not tired exactly — empty. The kind of empty that has nothing left to offer a dinner table, a meeting, a gathering of people who deserve more than whatever hollowed-out version of you is going to walk through the door and perform presence for two hours.

Why Cancelling Plans is Healthy Workbook

Most of us, at that moment, go anyway.

We go because we said we would. We go because canceling feels like a character flaw, a social infraction, evidence of something soft or unreliable at the center of us. We go because the voice that says push through has been rehearsed so many times it arrives before we’ve even finished asking the question. And sometimes pushing through is exactly right — commitment matters, and showing up when it costs you something is part of what it means to be a person others can count on. But sometimes, not always, the most honest and emotionally intelligent thing you can do is pick up the phone and say: I can’t tonight.

That sentence is harder than it sounds. Not logistically — the text takes thirty seconds. Hard because it requires you to know something true about yourself in real time, and then to act on it, which is a two-step sequence that a surprising number of otherwise capable people never complete. The knowing is one skill. The acting on the knowing is another, and it’s the one that tends to get crowded out by obligation, by fear of disappointing someone, by the story we tell ourselves about what a cancellation says about who we are.

I had a Wednesday not long ago that had been stacked from morning — back to back appointments, the kind of day that requires you to be fully present in every room, hour after hour after hour. I was still recovering from pancreatitis. Not the dramatic early days of it, but the long, grinding middle part of recovery where you look functional from the outside and feel like a fraying rope on the inside. By late afternoon I had nothing left. Not a little less than usual — nothing. And there was one more appointment on the calendar, a person who mattered, a conversation I had committed to. I sat with it for a few minutes, which is its own kind of discipline — not the reflexive push-through, not the reflexive escape, but sitting with the honest question of what was true. What was true was that I could not do one more hour. Not because the person wasn’t worth it. Because I genuinely, physically, could not. So I told the truth. I said we would need to reschedule. It was hard to say, and it was the right call, and those two things were both true at the same time.

Emotional intelligence is often described in terms of what you bring to other people — your empathy, your listening, your regulation in a hard conversation. And it is those things. But underneath all of them is something more foundational: an accurate read on your own internal state, in real time, without flinching from what it tells you. That’s the beginning of the whole enterprise. Without it, empathy becomes performance. Regulation becomes suppression. You show up, you do the thing, you say the right words, and none of it is connected to anything happening inside you because you stopped checking a long time ago.

The EQ literature calls this self-awareness, and it’s technically the first domain, the thing everything else is built on. But the clinical language undersells what it asks of you: the willingness to be honest about your own condition even when honesty is inconvenient, even when the people around you would prefer a different answer. It’s easy to know your own state when the news is good — when you’re rested and clear and ready. It’s considerably harder when the news is that you’ve hit a wall, that you’re running on empty, that tonight you are genuinely not the person you want to show up as. That knowledge asks something of you. It asks you to say it out loud, to yourself first, and then sometimes to someone else.

What makes canceling feel like failure is that we’ve absorbed a set of assumptions about what it means to be dependable, productive, fully-functioning members of whatever worlds we inhabit — and those assumptions tend not to include “sometimes knows when to stop.” The cultures most of us work and live inside reward output, presence, availability. Canceling reads as a withdrawal from all of that, a small defection, proof that you couldn’t keep up. What it is, when done from honest self-knowledge rather than chronic avoidance, is an act of accurate self-management. You assessed your actual capacity, matched it against the demand, and made a call. That’s not weakness. That’s the whole skill set applied to yourself.

There’s a difference worth naming between canceling from honest self-knowledge and canceling from avoidance, because they can look identical from the outside but feel completely different from the inside. Avoidance is the slow accumulation of exits — the pattern of escape dressed up as self-care. Honest self-knowledge is a specific, present-tense read: not I don’t feel like it but I genuinely don’t have what this requires tonight, and showing up hollow serves no one. The question worth sitting with, before you send the text, is which one is true. Not as a trap or a guilt mechanism — as a genuine inquiry. You usually know the difference. The body knows before the mind finishes the sentence.

What you owe the people you’re canceling on is honesty, reasonable notice, and the genuine intention to reschedule. What you don’t owe them is a performance of yourself at a cost you can’t afford. The relationships worth having are sturdy enough to absorb an occasional cancellation made in good faith. The ones that can’t tolerate it are telling you something worth knowing.

And here is the thing that tends not to get said in conversations about self-care or any of the other words that have been handled so much they’ve gone a little soft: protecting your capacity isn’t only about you. The version of you that shows up rested, present, and genuinely available is a gift to everyone in the room. The version that pushed through out of obligation and is now moving through the evening on fumes — that person is there in body only, and everyone can feel it, including you. Honoring your actual limits isn’t withdrawal from community. It’s how you stay in it, over time, without burning down.

There will be commitments you keep even when it costs you, and you should — some things are worth the cost, and following through on hard promises is part of what integrity looks like in practice. But there will also be days like that Wednesday, when the honest answer is that you need to stop, and the most emotionally intelligent thing you can do is say so. Not every week. Not as a pattern. But when it’s true, said plainly, as an act of care — for yourself, and for the person on the other end of the call who deserves your real presence, not what’s left of it.

The guilt that arrives before you’re supposed to be somewhere you can’t reach — that’s worth paying attention to. It’s usually telling you something real. The question is whether you’re willing to hear it, and then willing to act on what you heard.

There’s more conversation happening over at The Mystical Seeker — we’d love to have you there.

Peace and every good.

Jim Vaive is co-founder of spirit of EQ and author of The Mystical Seeker, writing at the intersection of emotional intelligence, the Enneagram, and contemplative spirituality. He and his wife Lynette help individuals and organizations grow from the inside out.

 

I Damaged Someone & The Truth It Taught Me

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There is a picture my mother drew of my father in his studio. He is standing at the canvas with a brush in his hand, but he is not painting. He is looking. Just looking. My mother told me once that the hardest thing about being an artist is not the making — it is the seeing. Seeing what is there, not what you hoped would be there. Seeing clearly enough to know when something is wrong, even when the wrong thing is something you made.

I have thought about that picture a lot over the years. Especially in relation to leadership. Because leadership, at its most honest, requires the same thing my father was doing in that studio: the willingness to stand before what is real and see it — not manage it, not spin it, not quietly maneuver around it — but see it. And the hardest version of that seeing is always the one that turns inward.

When Lynette and I were building the spirit of EQ framework, we kept returning to a question that came up repeatedly in our coaching and spiritual direction work: why do so many gifted leaders struggle with self-awareness? Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they are unkind or unserious. But because the very qualities that made them effective — decisiveness, energy, forward momentum, the ability to hold a vision and drive toward it — can become the walls of a room they eventually cannot see out of.

The Enneagram has a word for this. It calls them fixations — the grooved, automatic patterns we operate from when we are running on autopilot rather than on presence. Each type has its own shape of forgetting. And the forgetting is not dramatic. It is quiet. It accumulates. It happens in the ordinary press of days, under the ordinary pressure of responsibility, until one morning you look up and realize the wake you have been leaving behind is wider and more damaging than you ever intended.

I know this from my own life. When I co-founded Varment Guard, my business partners were good people — steady, quiet, deeply competent in their domains. But one stands out for me, he did not move fast. He did not think fast. He processed carefully, methodically, and he was almost always right. I am a classic Enneagram Eight. I move fast. I decide fast. I push hard. I burned through rooms in those early years the way a locomotive burns through a tunnel — arriving on the other side with energy to spare, rarely pausing to consider what the air felt like for everyone else inside.

In the beginning, this particular partner and I worked well together. His steadiness balanced my fire. My drive opened doors his caution would have approached more slowly. But as the business grew and the pressure intensified, I lost access to that balance. I stopped seeing my partner clearly. I started seeing only the pace I needed us to keep, and I began — unconsciously, relentlessly — forcing this gentle soul into a shape that was not his. I pushed him beyond the edges of who he was. I did not mean to damage him. But I did. And eventually, he left. Not loudly. Not in conflict. He simply found a way out, and the relationship went with him. It was a wound I have carried for a long time.

What I could not see then — and what took years of coaching, spiritual direction, and a lot of sitting still to begin to understand — was that the truth I needed to face was not about the business. It was about me. The Eight’s deep gift is strength. The Eight’s deep shadow is the refusal to acknowledge the harm that strength can do. I had confused impact with intention. I believed that because I did not mean harm, I had not caused it. That is not how it works. That is not how it has ever worked.

The contemplative tradition is clear about this. Howard Thurman wrote that we are responsible not only for our intentions but for the world we create around us — the quality of the field we generate for those in our care. Julian of Norwich, writing from her anchorite cell in fourteenth-century Norwich, described the interior life as a dwelling place — something that requires tending, requires honest inspection, requires the willingness to see what is there rather than what we prefer to believe is there. “All shall be well,” she wrote — but the path to that wellbeing runs directly through the truth, not around it (Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love).

The research on emotional intelligence affirms what the mystics knew intuitively. Six Seconds, the global EQ nonprofit where Lynette and I served for many years, identifies self-awareness as foundational to every other capacity in the emotional intelligence model. You cannot regulate what you cannot see. You cannot choose your response when you are unconscious of your pattern. You cannot lead others toward wholeness from a place of unexamined wounding. The data bears this out across industries, cultures, and leadership contexts. Self-awareness is not a soft skill. It is the load-bearing wall.

But here is the thing about truth: it requires courage, not just curiosity. Many leaders are curious about themselves in a managed way — they take the assessments, they read the books, they sit in the leadership retreats. What is rarer is the willingness to let the truth land. To let it cost something. To sit with it long enough that it changes not just your language but your behavior, your relationships, the shape of the wake you leave. The contemplative teacher Thomas Keating called this the dismantling of the false self — the slow, sometimes painful process of releasing the persona we have constructed to protect ourselves and facing what is underneath (Thomas Keating, Open Mind, Open Heart). Most of us will do almost anything to avoid that process. Leaders perhaps most of all, because the stakes feel so high and the exposure feels so total.

John O’Donohue, the Irish poet and philosopher, wrote that “the longest journey you will ever make is from your head to your heart” (John O’Donohue, Anam Cara). I think of that line often when I am sitting with a leader in a coaching session, watching them circle a truth they cannot quite bring themselves to name. The truth is right there. They can feel it. But the distance between knowing it in the mind and letting it descend into the heart — into lived acknowledgment, into genuine accountability — can feel enormous. That journey is the work. And no amount of strategy, no quarterly planning cycle, no leadership competency framework can do it for you.

What helps? In our experience at spirit of EQ, several things. The practice of silence — not productivity, not journaling as output, but genuine quiet that creates the interior space for truth to surface. The practice of honest relationship — at least one person in your life who is not dependent on you, not intimidated by you, and will tell you what they see. The Enneagram, used not as a typology to explain yourself but as a mirror to face yourself. And prayer — whatever form that takes for you — as an act of opening, of consenting to be seen more fully than you can see yourself.

I did not get a chance to repair things with my partner. That is a grief I live with. But what his departure gave me — painfully, slowly, over years — was the beginning of something more honest in myself. A willingness to slow down long enough to feel the field I was generating. A willingness to ask not just “Did we hit the goal?” but “What did it cost the people in the room?” That shift did not diminish my leadership. It deepened it. It made me someone I am still, imperfectly, trying to become.

The Truth Leaders Don’t Want to Face

My father’s picture still lives in my mind. The brush in his hand. The stillness of his looking. The courage required to see clearly enough to know what is true and what is wish. That is the invitation for every leader who is willing — not to be perfect, not to have it all resolved, but to stand before the canvas of your own life and look.

The truth will not destroy you. It will, in time, free you.

If this reflection stirred something in you, we’d love to have you join us at mysticalseeker.substack.com — where we explore the inner journey of leadership, EQ, and spiritual formation.

Peace and every good.

mystical seeker.substack.com

The Most Intelligent Thing You Can Do Is Slow Down

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When You Know Why You React, You Can Choose How You Respond

What the Enneagram and emotional intelligence reveal about the space between trigger and response

There is a photograph I keep coming back to in my mind — not an actual photograph, but the kind that forms over years of sitting across from people in coaching conversations. It is the image of a person mid-sentence, eyes slightly wide, voice pitched a half-step higher than usual, saying something they will probably wish they hadn’t. And in the moment before the words arrive, there is this invisible space — a fraction of a second, maybe less — where everything that matters is happening.

Viktor Frankl called it the space between stimulus and response. He wrote about it from inside a concentration camp, which means he earned the right to talk about it. That space, he said, is where our freedom lives. It is also, I’ve come to believe, where emotional intelligence and the Enneagram converge into something genuinely transformative.

The Intelligence Beneath the Surface

Emotional intelligence, as Daniel Goleman mapped it, begins with self-awareness — the capacity to notice what’s happening inside you before it moves through you and into the world. Josh Freedman of Six Seconds distills it differently, into a sequence I return to often: Know Yourself, Choose Yourself, Give Yourself. The knowing comes first. Without it, we are largely reactive — moved by currents we can’t name.

Most of us have experienced this. A colleague’s offhand comment lands wrong and we feel our jaw tighten before we understand why. A family member raises a familiar complaint and we hear ourselves responding in the old way again — the way we promised ourselves we wouldn’t. The reaction isn’t irrational exactly. It’s just faster than our awareness.

This is where the Enneagram enters the room.

A Map of the Interior

The Enneagram is a nine-type system of personality that goes deeper than behavior into motivation — into the core fears and longings that drive us. It is not a label to be worn comfortably. At its best, it is an unsettling mirror, one that shows you not only what you do but why, and what you are protecting when you do it.

A Type Eight (the Challenger) doesn’t lead aggressively because they are cruel. They lead that way because somewhere underneath the forcefulness is a terror of being controlled or betrayed — and strength feels like the only reliable protection. A Type Two (the Helper) doesn’t overextend themselves because they are foolish. They do it because their worth, in some deep and often unconscious way, feels contingent on being needed.

When you understand this about yourself — really understand it, not just intellectually but in the body — something shifts. The reaction doesn’t disappear. But there is more space around it.

The Place Where They Meet

I’ve seen this play out in workshops and in one-on-one coaching more times than I can count. A leadership team I worked with had a Type Eight and a Type Nine in constant friction. The Eight moved fast, spoke bluntly, made decisions before the Nine felt heard. The Nine withdrew, agreed on the surface, and then quietly undermined the direction — not out of malice but out of a desperate need for harmony they didn’t know how to ask for. What made it harder was that both of them were genuinely trying. The Eight believed clarity and decisiveness were acts of respect — waste no one’s time, say what’s true, move forward. The Nine believed keeping the peace was its own form of care — absorb the friction, hold the group together, avoid the rupture. Neither of them was wrong exactly. They were just operating from entirely different interior maps, and no one had ever handed them the other person’s.

When we named what was happening through the lens of both the Enneagram and emotional intelligence, something loosened. The Eight didn’t need to become soft. The Nine didn’t need to become confrontational. They needed to understand each other’s interior logic — and then, from that understanding, choose something different than their default. What I watched happen in that room was not a personality makeover. It was something quieter and more durable: two people recognizing that the other person’s behavior had a reason, and that the reason wasn’t contempt or weakness. That recognition created enough safety for genuine conversation — maybe for the first time in years of working together.

That’s the intersection. The Enneagram names what’s underneath. Emotional intelligence gives you tools to work with it. Together, they create the conditions for what I’d call non-reactive presence — the ability to be fully in a difficult moment without being fully hijacked by it.

Some Places to Begin

If this is new territory for you, here are a few entry points worth sitting with:

  1. Get curious before you get defensive. The next time you feel a strong reaction — irritation, anxiety, the urge to withdraw or escalate — ask yourself what it’s protecting. Not in a clinical way, but genuinely. What’s at stake for me right now?
  2. Learn your Enneagram type as a spiritual practice, not a personality quiz. The Narrative Enneagram tradition invites you into the type through lived experience and community, not just a test score. There’s a difference.
  3. Practice the pause. Frankl’s space between stimulus and response can be cultivated. Centering Prayer, mindful breathing, simple body awareness — any practice that builds your capacity to notice before acting will serve you here.
  4. Make it relational. Understanding your own type is valuable. Understanding the types of the people you love and work with alongside yours is where transformation tends to happen. The framework becomes a bridge rather than a mirror.

I don’t think any of us become non-reactive all the way down. That would require not being human. But I do believe we can cultivate the capacity to meet our reactions with a little more light and a little less automatic machinery. The Enneagram helps us see ourselves clearly. Emotional intelligence gives us something to do with what we see.

That space between stimulus and response — Frankl was right. Something important lives there. And with practice, we can learn to inhabit it.

If you’re curious about exploring the Enneagram and EQ together — for yourself, your team, or your community — visit spiritofeq.com to learn more about our workshops and coaching.

Peace and every good.

— — —

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The Chairman Thought I Wasn’t Paying Attention

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Picture a waiting room. You’ve been there five minutes, and without meaning to, you’ve already written a story about everyone in it — the man with the expensive watch who checks his phone every thirty seconds, the woman with paint on her jeans who hasn’t looked up from her book, the teenager in the corner with earbuds in like armor. You haven’t spoken to any of them. You may never speak to any of them. But somewhere in the architecture of your brain, a file has opened on each one, and it is filling itself in without your permission.

This is what we do. It is fast, it is mostly unconscious, and — here is the part that costs us — we tend to trust it.

Confirmation bias is the cognitive shortcut that turns a glance into a verdict. Once we’ve formed an impression, we filter everything through it, collecting evidence that confirms what we already believe and quietly discarding what doesn’t fit. The psychologist Leon Festinger spent decades helping us understand how fiercely the mind protects its working assumptions — not because it is lazy, but because uncertainty is expensive. The brain is a prediction machine, and prediction requires categories. The trouble is that people are not categories. They are houses you have never been inside, and the front door tells you almost nothing about what’s in the rooms.

It causes me to think about the ways I’ve been filed.

I was asked to lead a financial committee for an international organization. In the first meeting, I was the quietest person in the room. I tend to listen before I speak, to let the space fill before I take up any of it. I was watching. I was also reading — the numbers that weren’t adding up, the relationships between people that were bent in ways that take time to see, the kind of bent that looks like warmth from a distance but reads differently when you’re close and paying attention. Embezzlement. Alliances that were costing the organization more than they were protecting it. I could see it, and I called it out.

The room exploded.

What I learned later — from the chairman himself — was that he had watched me sit quietly when he asked me to be on “the committee” I wasn’t really present and could not tell what was going on. That my stillness read as absence. That I could be managed, even manipulated, and that bringing in someone so apparently passive had been, in his mind, a calculated move toward a controllable outcome.

He had filed me. Quickly, confidently, and very wrong.

I am not the first person this has happened to. You are not either.

Think about the moments you’ve been looked past — the job interview where someone’s eyes glazed before you finished your first sentence, the meeting where your idea was ignored until someone else said it twenty minutes later, the day you walked into a room in the wrong clothes for the assumptions people had already formed about you. Your hair too natural, your accent too layered, your stillness too unreadable, your energy too large. The label arrives before you do, and it does not ask for your input. It does not ask for your history, your interior life, your gifts, or your grief. It just lands, and it sticks, and quietly it shapes every interaction that follows.

The philosopher Martin Buber, my fav, spent much of his intellectual life writing about what he called I-Thou and I-It encounters — the difference between meeting someone as a full subject, irreducible and alive, and relating to them as an object, a role, a function, a category. Most of our daily encounters, Buber admitted honestly, are I-It. The world moves fast; we cannot hold everyone in full attention at every moment. But the cost is real. We move through life surrounded by people we have reduced to fit the size of our assumptions, and we call that knowing them.

The label is not the person. The label is a shortcut we mistake for a destination.

There is a practice I’ve come to think of as staying curious past the first sentence. Not the performance of curiosity — the enthusiastic head-tilt and the “Tell me more” — but the actual discipline of holding your impression lightly, the way you’d hold a rough draft: with interest, not authority. And this is what real coaches do. It tells you something. It does not tell you everything. The quiet person in the room is watching. The loud one is sometimes afraid. The polished one is held together with things you cannot see. The disheveled one has already solved a problem you haven’t noticed yet. Every label you apply is a door you close, and some of those doors open onto entire worlds.

What Josh Freeman of the emotional intelligence company Six Seconds has trained us to do here is not to have certainty but curiosity — not the confident read, but the open question. It asks us to notice what our brain wants to do with a stranger in the first thirty seconds and then, gently, invite it to wait. To ask a question we don’t already know the answer to. To sit with not-knowing long enough to find out who’s in the room.

The chairman’s assumption about me wasn’t malicious. It was human. But it was a choice — and choice is where practice lives.

When I left that boardroom after the explosion, I wasn’t angry. I was, in a strange way, grateful — because what had just happened was the clearest possible evidence that the quiet person had been paying the most attention. The label had failed. The person it was attached to had not. I walked out still whole, still present, still myself. And whatever the chairman thought he had managed had just become the thing that managed him.

That is always the risk when we label. The person inside the box tends to be larger than the box. And eventually — not always, not on our timeline, but eventually — they will show you.

Mystery Workbook Link Here

So the next time you sit across from someone, in a meeting, at a table, on a commute, in a waiting room, try this: let them be unknown a little longer. Let the file stay open. Notice what your brain wants to do and then invite it to wait. Ask a question you don’t already know the answer to.

The person across from you is always a mystery.

That is not a problem to solve. It is an invitation to pay attention.

Come continue the conversation in the community where these ideas live — [link here].

Peace and every good.

Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957)

Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923; trans. Walter Kaufmann, 1970)

From the Frats to the Hippies: How Not Belonging Taught Me to See

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Good Enough for This Life

Do you ever think about whether you are good enough for this life?

I ask it that way on purpose — not “good enough at your job” or “good enough for the relationship” but for this life, the whole thing, the fact of being a particular kind of person moving through a world that was mostly built for a different kind of person. It is a question I have carried for a long time. And I want to tell you where it came from, because the origin of this story matters.

Picture a room full of people who seem to know where to stand. You are at the edge, not by design but because the middle arrived too fast and too loud, because you are already receiving the room — not just the nearest conversation but every conversation, the ambient emotional temperature, the undercurrent of music, the way the light is sitting differently on one side than the other. You are cataloging all of it without meaning to, because that is simply how your mind moves.

I know that room. I spent most of my adolescence looking for the group that would finally let me in — not merely tolerate me but receive what I was bringing. I tried the frats, with their crisp hierarchies and their belonging-by-exclusion, their handshakes and their unwritten ledgers of who counted. I tried the greasers, leather and bravado, a different code but a code all the same, enforced with the same quiet ferocity. I tried the soul brothers, drawn by the warmth and the music and the sense that community here might stretch wide enough to hold more kinds of people. And finally, tentatively, I found the hippies — loose-structured, philosophically suspicious of tight categories, practicing a kind of radical acceptance that was imperfect and sometimes chaotic but real. They were the closest thing to a fit I had found. And even there, I was only partly in.

What I didn’t understand then, standing at the edges of all those circles, was that the thing keeping me out was also the thing that made me able to see.

I have dyslexia and ADHD. Together. Which, if you’ve lived it, means the mind doesn’t run one stream of consciousness but several — simultaneous, layered, cross-referencing, sometimes chasing each other into corners before snapping back. The squirrel jokes are accurate. Mid-sentence, mid-thought, something peripheral catches your sight and suddenly you are somewhere else entirely, following a thread that no one else in the room can see.

What I couldn’t name as a teenager was the experience of receiving a conversation on six channels at once — the words someone was saying and the words they weren’t saying, the slight tension in their shoulders, the way their story didn’t quite line up with their eyes, the ambient emotional weather of the room, the connection to something said three exchanges ago that suddenly mattered now. All of it arriving at the same time. All of it real.

This was not comfortable. For years it was almost unbearable — the sensation of always arriving sideways to the conversation, unable to slow the intake down enough to meet people where they were. I tried to explain it, and it came out tangled. I tried to belong and it came out strange. Large parties still overwhelm me quickly; the signal-to-noise ratio collapses under too many inputs running at once, and I learned early to find the wall, the corner, the quieter edge where the room could be read rather than absorbed whole. And so, the question I carried — quietly, persistently, the way you carry things you cannot put down — was: Am I good enough for this?

Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences, developed in the early 1980s, named what many people had quietly suspected: that intelligence is not a single axis running from less to more, but a wide range of distinct capacities — linguistic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and more — that show up differently in different people, and are cultivated or suppressed depending on the environments those people move through. Ned Hallowell, who has written about ADHD from the inside for decades, describes it as a Ferrari engine with bicycle brakes: enormous processing power that simply needs a different kind of structure to channel it well. What both are pointing toward is this — the brain that struggles in one environment is often extraordinarily capable in another. Not as consolation. As fact.

The multiple streams I couldn’t turn off at parties became, in smaller rooms and deeper conversations, something closer to precision. I could hear what people meant underneath what they said. I could hold several threads at once and notice where they crossed without losing either. I could sit with someone in confusion and not rush them toward clarity, because I knew from the inside what it felt like to have the mind moving in many directions at once and not yet know which one was true. The gift and the difficulty were the same thing, running on the same hardware, expressed differently depending on context.

I think now about that teenager trying the frats and the greasers and the soul brothers and the hippies — not as someone who failed to find a home, but as someone learning, by accumulation and by refusal, what belonging required. It wasn’t a group that would tolerate him. It was a context in which his actual nature could be useful. The hippies came closest because they had, almost by philosophy, released the requirement to be one thing, to arrive in a straight line, to present a coherent and unified self at all times. They were practicing, imperfectly and sometimes chaotically, the idea that a loose structure could hold more kinds of people and more kinds of minds.

What I do now — working with people around emotional intelligence, around the interior life, around the persistent gap between who we are and who we think we should be — is built directly from those years of standing at the edges of rooms and learning to read them. The overwhelm at large gatherings is still real. The squirrels still appear. But I have learned to trust the multiple streams, to follow rather than fight them, to understand that the signal is often in the thing that looks like noise. Observation turns out to be one of the rarest things one person can offer another. And it was built, in me, precisely by not being comfortable in the middle.

So: do you ever think about whether you are good enough for this life?

Edge Of Room Workbook

Here is the reframe I want to offer — not a reassurance, not “of course you are, everyone is,” which is kind but lame and thin. Instead, the question assumes a standard that was probably never built for you. The thing you experience as a deficit — the way you process or move or think or feel that doesn’t match the room — may be exactly the mechanism by which you will eventually see most clearly.

I still sometimes find myself at the edge of a room, taking in more than I was asked to take in, following threads no one else is following. But I am no longer trying to get to the middle.

The edge, it turns out, is a very good place to observe from. And observation, it turns out, is exactly what most people are waiting for someone to offer them.

If this landed somewhere in you, the conversation continues at [Substack/Mighty Networks] — a community that keeps asking these same questions together.

Peace and every good.