Prison Break

Photo by Hussain Badshah on Unsplash

I am never freer than when I’m coaching and training. For me, there is no more meaningful vocation than helping people work through the internal conflict between fear and purpose.

In my mid-20’s, I experienced that internal conflict. By that point, I had endured years of depression and anxiety. I felt driven to turn that experience into something meaningful that benefited others, so I volunteered as a suicide counselor. The decision required me to face my own fears – and do it anyway.

I eventually became the hotline trainer, teaching volunteers to counsel people during suicide crisis. Most of them experienced an understandable fear of failure. I realized then that I wasn’t just training, but coaching people as they pursued a deep sense of meaning in their own lives.

No matter what I did in my career after that point, it always returned to training and coaching. While working on health policy at the Capitol, I also taught policy at the University of Texas. I served as Field Instructor to scores of Social Work students, teaching them to navigate a complex policy arena and create positive change in the world.

The heart of that work was not just training, but coaching people as they struggled through imposter syndrome and self doubt.

Despite the successes of my early career, the mental illness returned with a ferocity I hadn’t experienced before. I started self-medicating to alleviate suicidal thoughts and near crippling anxiety. I marvel at what I was able to accomplish despite my deteriorating mental state; but, as the illness progressed, I turned to harder drugs. I began to lose all that I had worked for – career, family, dreams. At my lowest point, I committed robbery out of desperation for more drugs. I lost my freedom.

In prison, I assumed that all my dreams had died. I spent the early days adjusting to prison life and learning to live with mental illness without the temporary relief I had found through drugs and alcohol. Yet, I started to have recurring dreams of showing up at social work conferences – in my prison uniform - eager to contribute but having to hide behind potted plants to prevent people from seeing me.

The dreams relit a spark in me. It was the same spark that once gave me the courage to volunteer as a suicide counselor.

I made a decision to get into action. I volunteered to serve as a peer educator, teaching sexual assault prevention to fellow inmates. I remember training groups of 60 men in a dark humid southeast Texas prison at 6am. I had to echo my voice off the walls of the metal sided gymnasium to compete with the industrial fans. The audience had only just stepped off the bus from county jail the previous day. They were angry, scared, and heartbroken. And they were forced to listen to me - a fellow inmate - as I facilitated classes on sexual assault prevention.

I was back to training and coaching. Over time, I saw that things were changing. The number of prison rapes reported and investigated increased. Incarcerated people were courageously standing up for an environment that protected the most vulnerable.

I came to see freedom as the courage to move from fear to purpose. The other word for that is leadership.

After my release, I became a leader of a statewide coalition committed to ending mass incarceration in Texas. I returned to teaching policy at the University of Texas at Austin and developed an internship program to coach and train students from across the country, including Columbia and Yale.

Best of all, I started working with other formerly incarcerated people, helping them to shake off the stigma of their past mistakes and show up powerfully as leaders within their communities.

Leadership has an expansive quality. The time I spend coaching people through fear to purpose helps them to see themselves as the leaders they are, and they do the same for others. Today, I live by the words printed and taped below my computer screen:

“The time you spend investing in others is the best use of your time.”

That’s why I created D-Degree Coaching and Training. I help leaders experience the expansive quality of leadership. I work with people and organizations who know that leadership takes courage. I don’t see leadership as a set of skills. It is more like breaking out of prison and learning to trust yourself regardless of the challenge in front of you.