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Found, Not Searching

June 30, 2026/0 Comments/in Emotional Intelligence, EricPennington, SpiritofEQ /by Jim Vaive

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.

The Mug She Couldn’t Put Down

June 19, 2026/0 Comments/in Earth/Human relationships, Self Discovery /by Jim Vaive

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.