I Brought the Wrong Story to the Mountain

The mistake I made on day one of a six-day men's retreat in Guatemala — and why it's the same mistake we bring to most rooms.

The first night of the retreat we sat around a fire at Earth Lodge with the lights of Antigua a thousand feet below us and a pair of silent volcanoes silhouetted against the sky. Jamin asked us to introduce ourselves. Not the names. The real introduction.

What I gave was a memoir. Of all the hardships and challenges I had "endured."

My parents' broken marriage that lasted until I was five. My brother's disability. Being lonely as a young man. How I tried to be the goody two-shoes who did everything right. How that got me into Stanford. How I realized all of that trying was useless when my dad died when I was 23. How the most transformational decision I could muster around that time was to move out of Silicon Valley to Boulder, Colorado, and how I thought I'd stay for two years and have now stayed for thirty-three. How being an entrepreneur grew out of that hardship.

I sat down feeling like I'd been truthful. Honest.

It took me a full day to figure out what I'd actually done.

I had come to the fire to be soothed. I had not come to be changed, or to be accountable for the life I am building.  

The story you bring isn't usually the story that wants to be told

I've been in rooms designed for transformation for most of my adult life. A men's circle in my twenties. Vistage tables in my thirties. Bernoff retreats. I know the rhythms. I know what a facilitator wants. I know how to tell the story that lands as honest.

In Guatemala, I walked into the first night with my best version of that — not the polished CV version, but the polished wound version — and offered it to a fire that didn't need it.

There is a particular form of vulnerability that we’ve gotten very good at performing. You skip the résumé, which is supposed to be the brave move, and you go straight to the hardship instead. The losses. The childhood. The broken marriage of your parents. The dead father. The lonely years. The way the world has tested you. Done well, it lands as honest. It looks like you're being real. Everyone in the circle nods.

But what I noticed sometime around lunch on day two was that nothing in my memoir had been about what I came for. Nothing in it had been about what was next. Every chapter was a chapter about what had happened to me. I had performed the man who had survived something for a circle whose job it was to help me meet the man I am still becoming.

The wounded version and the wrong introduction are, in the end, the same mistake. Both are about the past. Both are written in the passive voice. Both are about a self that has already been constructed — by either success or suffering — rather than the self that is, today, choosing what to do next.

There is a particular kind of mistake that high-functioning people make. It is to confuse our survival story with the offering the room actually needs. To confuse the wound we have named with the work we came to do. To use the things life has done to us as a substitute for what we are doing about it.

I'm fifty-something years into this. I should have known better.

What changed the second night

There is a moment in any group working honestly together when one person says the thing they were planning not to say.

The second night, somebody — not me — went first. He didn't recite his memoir. He didn't list his wounds. He said what he was scared of, right now, at forty-something, with much of his life still in front of him and a few decisions in it that he had been quietly avoiding for a long time. He said the thing he had specifically rehearsed not to say in his head on the plane down.

The fire got very quiet.

Then it kept happening. One man, then another. Each one trading the survival story for the actual one. Each one quietly setting down whatever had been written to him and reaching for what he was planning to write next.

When my turn came around again, my mouth opened and a different sentence came out. I do not remember the exact words. I remember that they were short and that they were true and that they were not about anything that had ever happened to me. They were about what I wanted next. They were about a question I did not yet have the answer to. They were about a man I have not yet become and am responsible for becoming anyway.

That was the moment the retreat actually started for me.

It was also, in retrospect, the moment I stopped getting in my own way.

Why this matters past the fire

I keep noticing this pattern out in the world.

A leader walks into a difficult conversation with his team and spends the first ten minutes explaining the constraints and the headwinds and the unfair expectations he is operating under — and the team is already two steps ahead of him, just waiting for him to say what he is going to do.

A husband or wife sits across the kitchen table and lists, gently, the things that have been hard — as if the list itself were the answer to the question actually asked.

A man arrives at a six-day retreat in Guatemala and gives the wrong introduction.

In every one of those spaces the same mistake is happening. We are leading with what life has done to us because the alternative is to take accountability for what we are doing with what life has done to us. We are choosing the safer story — the one in which we are the survivor — because the harder story is the one in which we are the author.

I don't think this is a character flaw. I think it is a habit so deep that most of us, even those of us who have done years of work on ourselves, have not noticed we still have it.

But it has a cost. The cost is that we spend the early minutes of the most important conversations of our lives narrating a man who has already been formed, when the room is waiting for the one who is still forming.

What I'd do differently if I could land at Earth Lodge again tomorrow

I would tell the story of my future.  The future I want. The future I am working toward.  

I would skip my parents’ divorce. I would skip my brother's disability. I would skip the lonely years. I would skip the dead father. I would skip every chapter of the memoir.

Not because none of it mattered — it all mattered. It built me. It still moves through me. Some of it I am still healing.

But none of it was the reason I was sitting at that fire.

I would say what I came for.

And I would trust the men around me — most of whom I had met thirty-six hours earlier — to receive it.

A small invitation

If you're going into a room this week where you're tempted to lead with the past — the wins or the wounds, the credentials or the chapters that built you — try the opposite.

Say what you actually came for.

Then make yourself accountable for it.

The fire will do the rest.