When Your Life Feels Like It’s Running You
How to stay connected to yourself when life gets messy and asks more of you.
Dear friend,
August has a way of changing shape before the season does.
The light is still long. The heat still gathers against the windows. Summer is still very much here. And yet, somewhere beneath it all, life has begun turning toward what comes next.
Maybe there is a backpack spilling open on your kitchen counter, a school calendar held to the refrigerator by a magnet from a vacation you can barely believe is already over.
Maybe—for the first time in years—there isn't.
The backpack has gone with the student who carried it. The school calendar belongs to someone else's house now. A rhythm that once organized entire decades of your life is changing, and you are learning the shape of August without it.
Or maybe this particular rhythm has never belonged to your life at all.
Still, you know it.
You walk past towers of notebooks and boxes of sharpened pencils at the store. The roads begin filling differently in the morning. Colleagues return from vacation. September begins claiming the empty squares on your calendar. The meeting that could have been an email is back on Tuesday at two.
The season hasn't changed.
The rhythm has—and something in us feels it.
Maybe something in your life is gathering too. A company you are building, a career you can feel yourself outgrowing, a relationship asking for a more true conversation, a parent who needs you differently now, a home that suddenly holds less people, a decision that keeps following you from room to room, space to space.
You can feel what is coming.
So you do what capable people do. You begin preparing to carry it.
And somewhere between the calendar and the grocery list and the meeting and the person calling your name—or the quiet space where a voice used to be—I wonder:
As life asks more of you, can more of you remain present alongside it?
I've been thinking about capacity.
About the way we commonly measure it by how much we can carry, how many moving pieces we can keep moving, how much life can be stacked into the finite architecture of a Thursday before something falls off the edge.
I am interested in the capacity that lives much closer to the bone.
How much of yourself can remain present alongside the life you are carrying?
Can you drive the school run and still notice your own hand wrapped around the steering wheel? Sit inside the meeting while your stomach is telling you something and remain connected to both the conversation around you and the one happening within you? Stand at the kitchen counter while someone you love asks a question and feel the moment when the easy answer arrives before the true one?
Can you stand within a life that looks different than it did a year ago and recognize yourself there?
This is capacity, friend.
The practiced ability to remain with yourself as life changes shape.
And life will change shape.
Children grow. Bodies change. Careers turn. Relationships deepen, fracture, heal, end, begin again. The work that once fit becomes too small. The dream you spent years reaching for arrives and asks you to become capable of receiving it.
Grief rearranges the furniture. Joy can too.
I think I first began to understand this in my twenties while I was caring for both of my parents.
My mother was living with late-stage cancer. My father had just come home from an emergency triple bypass, his chest still healing, his body painfully limited, his reserves nearly gone. They were both living inside bodies that required care and, for a season, much of this care belonged to me.
One day I found myself on my hands and knees on their kitchen floor cleaning up after my mother had been sick. I had gotten her cleaned up and back into bed. My father was settled and sleeping. Then I returned to the kitchen and started scrubbing.
There on the floor, I remember thinking:
This is life.
This is life right now.
There was no timetable for this season. The fact that I was kneeling there with an old rag in my hand was evidence enough that I couldn't know what any particular day would ask of me. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, another question began forming.
Am I an object inside of these circumstances, or can I remain a living participant in my own life?
I couldn't make my mother's cancer disappear. I couldn't hurry my father's healing or make the season ask less of me.
What I could begin to explore—right there on the floor—was my relationship with the person living it.
Could I stay with her? Hear her? Let this season move through me without disappearing inside it? I didn't have language then for what I was beginning to practice.
I do now. Capacity.
Sometimes life becomes a series of things arriving and we become extraordinarily good at responding. We get everyone where they need to go. We absorb what no one else knows how to hold. We remember what the doctor said, what the accountant said, when the deadline moved, which bill is due, who we need to call back.
Sometimes this is exactly what the season requires of us.
And still, you remain a living participant in your own life.
For nearly twenty-five years, I have had the extraordinary privilege of walking with people at the intersection of clarity, capacity, and courage—the place where knowing what is true meets our ability to remain with what we know long enough for courage to become something we can practice.
I've watched this intersection appear in boardrooms and bedrooms, career changes and kitchen table conversations, beginnings and endings, tremendous grief and exhilarating joy.
Again and again, the deepest shifts begin somewhere almost no one else can see.
A sensation is noticed. A truth is allowed. A full exhale before answering. A moment of remaining with yourself when every practiced instinct says to disappear or perform.
Something shifts beneath the surface. And suddenly, a choice that wasn’t available before becomes possible. What begins invisibly eventually changes the way we live visibly.
The visible grows from the invisible.
Maybe this is why I have always loved trees.
I look up at a magnificent canopy and immediately think about everything I cannot see. All that reaching toward the sky held by roots moving through dark earth—finding water, taking nourishment, holding fast through weather, quietly creating the capacity for another branch, another season, another ring of growth.
The roots make the reaching possible. So do ours.
Every place you want to stretch further into your life asks something of the life underneath it. Your leadership grows from there. Your relationships grow from there. Your ability to mend the deepest fractures grows from there. Your capacity to meet uncertainty, tell the truth, receive joy, make the difficult choice, begin again—all of it has roots.
For years, we have been encouraged to become more self-aware. To recognize our patterns, understand our histories, name what happens inside us and why. This awareness has given many of us language for things we once only knew as a feeling, a reaction, a familiar ache we couldn’t quite name.
This awareness is rich ground. Self-leadership invites us to grow roots there.
To stay with the person we have learned to recognize. To hear ourselves while other voices are in the room. To feel what is true before rushing toward what is expected. To remain close enough to our own pulse that it has a place in what happens next.
Even when we find ourselves on the kitchen floor.
Self-leadership restores our participation in our own lives. Perhaps this is what it means to truly inhabit one:
To become spacious enough to hold its fullness.
The responsibility and delight. The uncertainty and desire. The agony and, yes, the ecstasy. The people we love and the person doing the loving. What we are reaching toward and what is already resting in our hands. To become a living vessel for our own lives—strong enough to hold, open enough to receive, rooted enough to remain, alive enough to let life course through us.
What if abundance is also the capacity to be here for what is already here?
Presence enough to receive our own lives.
There are seasons when the day-to-day fullness of life becomes the vessel and we begin experiencing ourselves somewhere inside it—its schedules, its needs, responsibiities, and demands defining the edges of where we get to exist.
There is another orientation.
You can grow the capacity to hold the fullness of your life.
Your circumstances can remain real. Life can remain messy. Some seasons will ask things of you that you would never have chosen and cannot simply change.
Your presence still matters within them.
Your pulse has a place there. Your knowing has a place there. Your aliveness has a place there.
You have a place there.
The more capacity you build to remain with yourself, the more life can course through you without carrying you away from yourself.
August will keep turning, friend.
September will arrive soon with its crowded calendars and sharpened pencils. Dinner will need making. Someone will need an answer you aren't ready to give. Something you care about will ask you to stretch beyond where you have stood before.
And underneath all of it, your roots will still be growing every time you listen, tell yourself the truth, receive what is here, and allow your own life to actually include you.
Perhaps this is how we prepare for what comes next. By tending the part of us that will meet it.
Trees teach us this beautifully: the higher the reach, the deeper the rooting required to sustain it.
So it is with us.
We root deeply enough to reach.
We grow our capacity to hold the lives we are asking to live. And little by little, what has been growing where no one can see it begins appearing everywhere.
The visible grows from the invisible.
From my roots to yours,
Practice Postscript
Where the letter stops being read and starts being lived.
This week, choose one ordinary moment that already belongs to your life.
The drive to school. The Monday meeting. Making dinner. Answering email. Sitting across from someone you love. You don't need to create more space on the calendar for this practice.
Practice inside the life you already have.
While you are doing whatever the moment asks of you, let a small part of your attention find its way home.
Feel your feet against the floor. Notice the weight of your body being held by the chair. Feel your fingers around the steering wheel. Experience one complete breath. Then quietly ask:
Am I still here?
Keep listening. Keep driving. Keep cooking. Keep leading. Stay with the life in front of you while staying with yourself for ten seconds too.
That’s all. Tomorrow, try again.
There is nothing you need to accomplish in these ten seconds. You aren't trying to become more calm, clear, or better at anything. You are giving your nervous system the lived experience of holding both:
I can be here for my life and here with myself—at the same time.
Ten seconds of practice. Then another. This is how capacity grows.
This is how we practice remaining with ourselves as life changes shape.
Another root beneath the life everyone else can see.
The Invitation
There are seasons we can meet on our own.
And there are seasons when something changes because another person is walking alongside us—someone who can hear what we are saying and what we haven't quite found words for yet. Someone who can challenge us without asking us to abandon ourselves in the process. Someone who can help us stay close to what is true while we build the capacity and courage to live from it.
This is the kind of work we do here.
People arrive at The Courage Practice carrying all kinds of things: a company they are building, a leadership role they are growing into, a career they are reconsidering, a relationship they want to deepen or understand differently, a body or health transition changing the shape of their days, a loss they are learning to live alongside, a decision they cannot quite make, a version of themselves they can feel becoming too small.
Often, they arrive with more than one. Our lives don't organize themselves into coaching categories.
Neither do we. We work with the human underneath all of it.
The person leading the company is also the person going home to a relationship. The person changing careers is carrying a history into the decision. The person learning to trust themselves again may also be leading a team, raising a family, grieving someone they love, building something meaningful, or standing at the beginning of a life they can feel asking to be lived differently.
You don't have to decide which part of yourself belongs here.
Bring your life. We'll begin where you are.
And from there, we'll practice building the clarity to recognize what is true, the capacity to remain with yourself as life changes shape, and the courage to let what you know become part of how you live.
If something in you has been asking for a different kind of support—one that can hold your complexity and your multitudes without losing sight of the person living them—there is a place for you here.
