I’ve met many leaders who quietly believe the same about themselves. They don’t say it out loud. They just live it. They think things like: “I’ve messed up too many times.” Or, “I’ve become someone I don’t recognize.” Or even, “I’ve been in this place so long I don’t know how to get back.”

They feel lost in their own version of the Upside Down.

That’s where the distinction matters.

When I’m at my best, I understand something simple and grounding. I can’t do it all alone. I don’t have to. Leadership was never meant to be a solo sport.

When I’m in my shadow, though, I lean hard into independence. I tell myself I should be able to handle it. That asking for help would slow things down. It’s easier to do it myself.

What actually happens is something else entirely.

I learned a lot about leadership in conference rooms, board meetings, and classrooms as an adult.

But some of the most important leadership lessons I ever received happened much earlier — in the office of Sister Kenneth Regan, my principal and religion teacher at St. Mary’s Catholic School in Waco, Texas.

Sister M. Kenneth Regan CSC passed away on December 24, 2025, at 99. Even writing that feels surreal. She lived a long, faithful life, and she shaped more people than she likely ever knew — myself very much included.

Most years, when I write goals or priorities, I’m tempted to make them bigger. More ambitious. More impressive. This year, I resisted that urge. I went back to basics. And I realized something that probably won’t surprise anyone who knows me well.

Most of these didn’t originate with me. They came from my Dad.

Every year I can remember, my Dad had the same steady set of priorities. They didn’t change much. He didn’t reinvent them every January. He just kept showing up and working them.

This is the season when my work as a consultant is less about solving problems and more about helping leaders slow down long enough to see themselves clearly. Planning is hopeful work. But it’s also honest work. And most leaders are good at the hope part. It’s the honesty that’s harder.

Because planning requires something uncomfortable: The willingness to look back.

Not with excuses. Not with defensiveness. And not with selective memory.

With reality.

Wicked: For Good hit me differently than Wicked last year or even from the musical that I have seen many times.

It wasn’t the flying or the magic. It wasn’t even Defying Gravity, which isn’t really in this film but Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande’s version is still stuck in my head.

It was the slow, painful slide into darkness that happens when a leader starts believing the noise.

And that landed a little too close to home.

Deliver Me From Nowhere and the Darkness Leaders Know Too Well