While I was in Chicago, I had lunch with a member of my “front row.” That’s what I call my advisory team. The people who sit closest to the stage of my life. The ones I can’t always see when the lights are blinding, but I know they’re there. The ones who clap the loudest and, when necessary, wind up and throw metaphorical rotten fruit when my performance drifts off course. Not actual fruit. That would be wasteful.
My front row is made up of my fiercest advocates and my most ruthless critics. The kind who love me enough to tell me when I’m full of it.
So I’m catching her up on everything. The speaking. The book. The rebrand. The coaching tiers. The bakery. The panels. The op-eds. The travel. I can hear myself talking faster and faster, stacking accomplishments like sandbags against some invisible flood.
She lets me finish. Then she says, “You don’t do retirement well.”
Duh.
I left policing after thirty years. That chapter closed. But I’m 52. Retirement is a technicality, not an identity. I have miles to go before I sleep. I’m not winding down. I’m winding up.
And if I’m honest, the recent health scare—the one where I was briefly convinced I was dying before learning that I am not (at least not imminently) didn’t slow me down. It accelerated me. You would think staring at mortality would make you retreat, savor, exhale. Instead, it lit a fuse. I want to live a thousand lives. I want to wring every drop out of this one. I want to be used up when it’s actually time.
There’s a line in the song “I Lived” by OneRepublic that says:
“I owned every second that this world could give…
Yeah, with every broken bone, I swear I lived.”
Play that at my funeral. [Front row, consider this your official instruction.]
So when my friend gently suggested that maybe I should take a breath, slow down, leave some white space in the margins, I felt defensive. The pragmatic part of me understands the wisdom. But the visceral part of me rejects it. I feel most alive when I’m building. Creating. Writing. Lifting. Leading. Launching.
Still, her words followed me onto the plane.
At 30,000 feet, I was scrolling through social media when I saw a post from Daniel Pink sharing a ChatGPT prompt: “What do you know about me that I don’t know about myself?”
I keep a running file in ChatGPT. Notes. Reflections. Frustrations. Drafts. I treat it like a digital whiteboard for my mind. I wasn’t convinced it knew me well enough to answer the question.
It did.
It told me I am driven by a need for control over chaos. That I refuse to let randomness win. That I’m not chasing visibility, I’m chasing impact. That I refine for rigor, not applause. That my through-line is discipline over drama.
I read it and thought, You little suck up. You get me.
Then it turned the mirror.
It pointed out the pace. Keynotes. New book. Rebrand. Coaching tiers. Bakery. Podcasts. Panels. Policy. Output layered upon output.
It said discipline builds confidence. True.
But constant output can quietly become armor. Ouch.
And then it asked: If everything stopped for six months—no talks, no publishing, no building—who are you?
That question landed harder than any rotten fruit.
Psychologists call it “contingent self-worth.” Research shows that when our identity becomes tethered to achievement, productivity, or external validation, our nervous system doesn’t know how to rest. We confuse motion with meaning. In fact, studies from Stanford and the University of California have linked chronic overachievement to elevated cortisol levels and reduced capacity for deep satisfaction. We adapt to accomplishment the way we adapt to a new house or a new car. It becomes baseline. So we chase the next thing.
There’s also something called “identity foreclosure,” a term from developmental psychology that describes prematurely committing to an identity without allowing space to evolve. You become the achiever. The leader. The builder. The disrupter. And you grip it so tightly that you don’t notice when you’ve outgrown parts of it.
So now I have two advisors saying the same thing. One made of flesh and bone. One made of circuits and code.
Slow down.
Not stop. Not shrink. Not dim.
Just slow down.
And here’s where I get defiant. Because I don’t actually want to exit the stage. I don’t want to sit in the audience. I like the lights. I like building. I like creating. I like being in motion. Motion feels like safety. Motion feels like control.
But if I’m honest, I’ve already been outgrowing things. The health scare sharpened my lens. It clarified who gets to sit in my front row and who no longer has a ticket. That was a quiet but seismic reckoning. Less access. More intention. Fewer voices. Deeper ones.
So maybe this isn’t about doing less. Maybe it’s about carrying less.
There’s a difference.
The research on high performers is clear: sustainable excellence requires oscillation. Intensity and recovery. Effort and stillness. Even elite athletes build rest into their programming because muscle doesn’t grow during the lift. It grows during recovery. The same is true for creativity and leadership. A study published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that leaders who engaged in deliberate recovery practices demonstrated higher long-term performance and lower burnout.
The irony? I teach this. Discipline over drama. Structure over chaos. Strategic restraint.
And yet here I am, resisting the one variable I can’t seem to structure: stillness.
So here’s the thesis I’m wrestling with, and I’ll hand it to you.
Maybe the next level of impact doesn’t come from adding more to the stage.
Maybe it comes from editing the script.
Maybe less is not less. Maybe less is focus. Maybe less is clarity. Maybe less is the kind of courage that doesn’t need applause.
I don’t have the tidy answer. I’m not going to wrap this in a bow.
What I do know is that this isn’t really about stages or spotlights. That’s just the metaphor I happen to live inside. But dear reader, you are performing in your own way. You are the reliable one. The competent one. The fixer. The achiever. The strong one. The one who handles it.
And if all of that paused for a season — not forever, just long enough to notice — who would you be without the roles?
So here’s the real reckoning I’m handing to you.
Where in your life has doing become a substitute for being? Where has productivity blurred into identity? And if you stripped away the titles, the obligations, the expectations — not permanently, but just long enough to see clearly — what would remain?
If that makes you slightly uncomfortable, you’re not broken. You’re human. And that discomfort might be pointing toward your next disruption.
