56 Degrees - Alive and Free
Today is my 56th Birthday. Not a bad accomplishment for someone who tried very hard to cut life short at 40. Between 40 and 56, I’ve never lost the overwhelming conviction that I’m lucky to be alive.
It’s also been 14 months since I completed my entire sentence of incarceration and parole. The defining feature of my middle age is in now in the past.
I’m alive and free. The best I could do between now and the end - aside from hiking every five star trail in the world - would be to share this living freedom with others.
For the first five months of 2024, however, I squandered it. I experienced an overwhelming feeling of dread, a near constant worry about cash flow and repeat business. It dominated my thoughts. I started living on auto-pilot, not connecting with my wife and friends, exhausted by my work, and taking naps when I should have been making progress.
David Mensah, my mentor and colleague in leadership development, suggested that, rather than trying to fix something that’s not broken, I simply experience the feeling of dread. Always open to trying something different, I decided to search for the wisdom of dread rather than its cure.
I sat with the feeling, which was existentially uncomfortable. Wrapped up in the feeling of dread was a fear of rejection, financial ruin, and failure. In short, I was plagued by the same worries I had self-medicated years before, leading to my near destruction. Isn’t it confounding how we return to the same mental states that have harmed us in the past?
In feeling it, however, I began to see how dread was impacting my body. I could feel its icy cold touch on my heart, and its nauseating weight in my stomach. I could smell it in the air, like the unwashed homelessness I experienced before committing felony robbery more than a decade and a half in the past. No wonder I wanted to be rid of it.
As I sat with it, however, the feeling of dread evolved. It was like traveling through a dark tunnel at the moment when natural light appears on other side. I heard a voice inside my head say to me, “Write his story. Do justice to your younger self.” That young guy was also plagued by worries of rejection and abandonment. He also flirted with self-destruction
And so I decided to write a book. At first, it was a leadership book, but I’m allergic to giving advice, so nothing I wrote felt authentic. Instead, I simply told the story of an ambitious and driven man who was crushed by the weight of dread, leading to a nightmare of career destruction, psychiatric hospitals, divorce, and then prison.
The theme of the book became clear. You don’t “overcome” your fear. Instead, you move through it to find the wisdom on the other side of it. Being in prison is like a journey through hell. The route to higher ground goes down, not up. In the deepest ring of hell, you find a pathway back to yourself. You might call it growth. I call it transformation. The only thing that changes is resilience.
In the book, I share how I found a natural expression of leadership, working with people with lived experience of trauma, substance use disorder, mental illness, and incarceration. I didn’t need a leadership book. I just needed to be myself, someone thoroughly committed to helping people experience living freedom. As I watched them succeed, I was keenly aware that they weren’t changing. Instead, they were finding the resilience and confidence that already existed inside themselves.
Today, I get to watch their achievements from a distance, rooting them on, grateful for any role I might have played in their development as leaders. If there is a lesson from the book, it’s that. You invest in people, giving them the confidence to move through their own fear and self-doubt, and they excel by being themselves. In effect, you cultivate transformation.
It would be such an honor for you to pre-order the book. The funds help with the publication costs. Better yet, you could sign up for the Transformational Leaders Author Community to receive advance chapters, engage in monthly discussions, and receive 1:1 coaching with me.
Here’s the link to pre-order: https://douglas-smith.presale.manuscripts.com/