My success created my leadership
I grew up around things most people do not say out loud. My mom owned a strip club. My dad sold drugs. There was a lot of brokenness in that house and most of it followed me out.
I decided early that I was not going to end up there. I would outwork it. I would go get what I wanted and I did not think much about who I had to climb over to do it. That was the plan and the plan worked.
I had the house. I had the cars. I had the money. I had the marriage. From the outside I was winning, and I let people believe that was the whole picture.
Then I would come home and feel like I did not have what it took. Not as a father. Not as a husband. Not as a man. So I went looking for something that would answer that question for me. More wins. More success. Being the guy who walks into the room already holding the answer. And pornography, which I hid for most of my life.
There was something else I learned young. I could become whatever the person across from me needed me to be. I was good at it. But I was not doing it for them. I was doing it to get what I wanted.
Then it came apart all at once. My wife found out about the pornography. We went through bankruptcy. We lost the house. I had no degree, no plan, and no idea what came next.
That is where I found my faith and my real identity. I went to a camp built on three things. Walk with God. Engage in the larger story. Live out of freedom. That is where my story got unearthed and I started becoming who I was actually made to be instead of who the world told me I needed to be.
Here is what I understand now that I could not see then. My leadership did not give me my success. My success gave me my leadership. The world hands you a title when you produce and then tells you that title makes you a leader. A lot of us are leading out of what the world said instead of what God called us to.
That is why this show exists. There are leaders sitting in rooms right now winning publicly and losing privately, and nobody around them is saying it out loud. So I will.