It's Not About Me
COMING 2027
It’s Not About Me is fifty-two weekly reflections on leadership, written by someone still in the middle of learning it.
Each reflection begins with a real moment and a real person: a colleague, a soldier, a professor, a monk, a family member, a client. Almost none of them are famous. All of them taught me something about leading that I am still working out.
The book does not offer a system. It offers stories, reflection, and a small Intention at the end of each chapter to carry into the week ahead.
Why I Wrote It
The book began as a way of making sense of my own experience.
I was thinking about the years my wife, Susan, navigated breast cancer, the weight I was carrying at work, and the moment I realized I had to set some of it down so I could be fully present to her.
I wrote one reflection. Then another. Eventually I realized I was writing about something larger: pride, control, responsibility, relationships, loss, and the gap between the leader I wanted to be and the leader I actually was.
For a long time, I felt alone in that struggle. I suspected I was not the only one.
This book is for leaders who feel that tension too.
Who it is for
It is for leaders who are capable, responsible, and still asking hard questions about the way they lead.
It is for people stepping into greater responsibility, navigating change, or trying to lead without losing sight of the people affected by their decisions.
And it is for anyone who has learned that leadership does not stay at work. What we carry into organizations often follows us home.
What makes it different
Most leadership books are written after the lesson has been learned. This one was written during.
I am inside the work I am writing about. The stories are real. The people are real. The lessons are unfinished.
The book does not try to tie everything up neatly. Loss stays loss. Failure stays failure. My hope is not that you admire the person writing the stories, but that you recognize something of yourself in them.
About the format
The book includes fifty-two short reflections, one for each week of the year, organized into five parts.
Each reflection ends with an Intention: something small and specific to carry into the week ahead. It might be a conversation to have, a reaction to notice, a question to ask, or something to release.
You can read the book from beginning to end, start anywhere, or return to a reflection when it meets you at the right moment.
The Five Parts
The quiet pull of pride, recognition, and the need to be seen.
Learning to hear what we do not want to hear, and knowing when to stop talking long enough for someone else to find their own answer.
What leaders carry, what they refuse to hand off, and the difference between responsibility and control.
A question about the human impact of leadership: are the people we lead going home a little better than when they arrived?
The small adjustments, unseen choices, and ordinary moments that shape people and organizations over time.