High Capacity Leadership
Can I tell you a story? It won’t take long.
In 2008, I graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point with 972 other cadets. The only difference between the majority of them and me was that while they all went off their assigned duty stations and would eventually find themselves in a foreign country—I went to the NFL.
My journey from West Point to the NFL quickly gained national coverage and with it came deep support but also immense criticism—and with that, came pressure that I didn’t know how to handle. As you might imagine, it didn’t take long for me to internalize this pressure and see that the NFL was my way of serving and my way of giving back.
But, despite being the biggest, fastest and strongest I’ve ever been, the pressurized ecosystem of the NFL begin to take an immense toll on my life—physically and emotionally. Every day I felt more and more like a fraud and every day was this inner battle to hang on and desperately try to hold it all together—but it was all coming undone.
I was coming undone.
I was terrified of being seen as someone that doesn’t have what it takes so I fought like hell to make my way through this. I doubled down on what I knew how to do—to work harder and ultimately work my way out of this place. So, I clenched my fists, I gritted my teeth, I focused on developing a positive mindset and I worked as hard as I could, for as long as I could.
But despite all the effort, I began to realize that there was no amount of external work that I could do that would help resolve the inner war that I was experiencing. That’s when I knew something had to change.
Shortly after being cut for the 3rd and final time, I walked away from not only the game, but a way of life. I moved to Canada, become a janitor of an organization and cleaned toilets in exchange for therapy so I could not only better understand what just happened in my life—but to resolve this internal war once and for all.
I’ve been doing this inner work for over a decade now and over time, it’s become a passion of mine to work alongside leaders and deliver a message that helps high performers and achievers build the internal capacity that’s needed to take their performance and leadership capabilities to the next level.
Because make no mistake, there is a direct correlation between the distance that you can go and the capacity that you can hold.
This is Leadership Expansion.