Hi Reader,
I have been reading one of Les Brown's books lately, and it has stayed with me. A man who was born in an abandoned building and given up for adoption, labeled by others early on in ways that could have defined him, and still became one of the most sought-after voices on achievement in the world. Not because the label was wrong. Because he refused to let it be the final word. That is the thread running through what follows.
I filed for divorce on January 6th, 2020.
My lawyer looked at me across his desk and said:
For years I believed that if I were patient enough, present enough, strong enough, the chaos at home would eventually stabilize. I was still running a company doing tens of millions a year while all of it was happening. Nobody tells you that you do not get to pick one. You get both, whether you are ready or not.
There was a night that made the decision for me. I will not go into the details here. What I will say is that my kids were caught in the middle of something that should never have touched them, and I drove home after, and stood in their doorway watching them sleep, and something finalized inside me.
Silence is complicity. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind, where you keep telling yourself it will stabilize, and it does not.
I made a promise in that room, not out loud. I will be the father who protects you, not just the one who provides for you. Even when it costs me everything.
It cost me a few years to actually live it. I became CEO of the global business right after the divorce was final, and I ran into the work the way I had always run into everything. Thirty transatlantic flights in 18 months, two hundred employees depending on me. From the outside it looked like the story completing itself. What it actually was, was a more elegant prison. I had not healed. I had found a more prestigious escape.
So I got to work. Coaching. Reflection. The kind of investment I had always made in the business and never in the man running it.
I remember sitting in the Vienna, Austria office at nine at night, alone, on my weekly call with my coach Sarrah Rose. I did not want to miss that call. Not once. I have been listening to Les Brown's material lately, and one story stopped me: asked how he succeeded compared to classmates who were smarter, who made honor roll, who went to college when he did not, his mentor's answer wasn't talent. It was:
You can't see the picture when you're in the frame. I could not see my own patterns clearly from inside them, no matter how sharp I was at seeing everyone else's. Being coachable doesn't mean receiving advice politely and quietly ignoring it. Most people, when actually offered help, don't take it. Sitting in that Vienna office was the version of me finally taking it. Actually listening. Letting what Sarrah said land, even when it contradicted the story I'd been telling myself about who I was.
By the time I actually stepped down as CEO, the healing was not the reason I was stepping down. It was the reason I finally could.
Here is what I know now that I did not know then. The skill that built your success is not the skill that gets you through a crisis. Real strength is not the capacity to endure more than you should. It is the courage to stop enduring what you should not.
I am not telling you this from a place of struggle anymore. I get to be a present father to my kids now, not a managed version of one. I get to be a loving, caring partner to Doralicia. And most of what drives me these days is giving back, helping other men and women find their way to becoming the best version of themselves, the way I had to find mine.
Reflection questions
Where are you managing a situation and calling it commitment, when what it actually is, is fear?
What are you running from right now, if you are honest with yourself?
If you are holding it together while something underneath you is shifting, hear this: it is possible to come out the other side more whole than you went in. Not easier. Better.
Hit reply and tell me where you are at. I read every one.
P.S. This is the work behind The R.E.C.L.A.I.M. Code, built from walking this path myself, now used to help founders and executives rebuild their identity, their family, and their business after a crisis they did not see coming. If you are ready to stop carrying it alone, reply "REBUILD" and I will send you a link to grab 20 minutes with me. No pitch. Just a real conversation.
Mathias Ihlenfeld | Entrepreneur | Coach | Advisor