The First Call

In my early twenties, I had two settings. Work or workout.

I didn’t know many people in the area. I wasn’t dating anyone. So I built my whole identity around what my body could do and what my paycheck said. I got the strongest, leanest, fittest I had ever been.

I figured if the outside was tight enough, the inside would catch up.

I met my wife. I got married. The routine continued. And it took me years to admit something simple. I was using the gym to hide. I wasn’t proving I was disciplined. I was proving I was worth something to someone.

The body looked great. The belief underneath was rotting.

Nicole Ward knows that math from a different angle. She was a Senior VP at a multi-billion dollar firm. She had the title, the calendar, the airline status, and the pantyhose-and-pearls polish. Until the day she rolled her Land Rover between meetings in the Bay Area.

When she crawled out in her suit, the first call she made was not to her husband. It was not to 911. It was to her boss.

“I’m not going to make the meeting.”

That was the moment she knew something was wrong.

The Things We Hide — Moment

In The Things We Hide, I talk about the four walls leaders build to protect themselves. Intensity. Inactivity. Insensitivity. Isolation.

Intensity was my wall. It is the wall that most of the leaders I talk to are hiding behind right now.

Here is how it works. The belief is simple. I am only as valuable as what I produce. That belief drives a thought. If I just go harder, I will prove I am enough. That thought drives an action. Push. Push. Push. And then the results come.

For a while.

Then the results stop. Or the body stops. Or the marriage stops. Or you wake up one day with bloodwork that does not match your calendar age. And the only thing left to push harder on is the very thing breaking you.

That is the trap of the Intensity wall. The harder you push, the less you can hear the message your life is trying to send you. The performance is the camouflage. The drive is the disguise.

You do not fix that by changing your supplements. You fix it by asking the question you have been outrunning.

What am I trying to prove? And to whom?

When you can answer that honestly, the wall does not just crack. It comes down. And you finally get to see who you are without the noise.

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Podcast

Nicole Ward is the Senior Vice President of Sales at Aon, a biohacker, an executive coach, and the author of Biohacking for the Sales Athlete: Optimize Your Health to Transform the Results. She built her career inside some of the highest-pressure rooms in corporate America and broke her body trying to keep up with them. Her work now is helping high performers stop confusing drive with destruction.

Here are three takeaways from my conversation with Nicole.

1. The Wake-Up Call Is the Gift, Not the Wreck

When Nicole rolled her Land Rover, she did not need anyone to interpret it for her. She told me the moment she crawled out of that vehicle, the call was internal:

“What am I doing?”

The wake-up was not the crash. The wake-up was who she became in the seconds after, when she finally heard the voice she had been silencing for years. Most of us get the same kind of wake-up call long before we ever have to roll a vehicle. We just do not pick up the phone.

2. The External Work Is the Easy Part

Nicole was direct. The supplements, the trainer, the calorie book, the sleep stack. Those are the easy levers to pull. The hard work sits underneath them.

“Behavioral change is a challenge. We’ve got the rational mind, we’ve got the irrational emotions, and then it’s creating the environmental context.”

You can build the perfect routine and still be running from yourself. Until the inner work is done, the outer work is just a louder version of the same story.

3. You Are the Constant in the Equation

Nicole’s most quotable line is also her most practical. You can change your job. You can change your team. You can change your city. None of it works if you do not change the person who keeps showing up in every one of those rooms.

That is not shame. That is agency. Sleep is a controllable. Breath is a controllable. The story you tell yourself between meetings is controllable. The reps compound. So does the avoidance.

Do the Work — IDL Workshop, May 19–21, Live on Zoom

The reason this episode hits so hard is because the answer Nicole found is the same answer this book and this newsletter keep circling back to. The work is on the inside.

Last week in Spokane was the third IDL Summit. It is also the last in this form.

What those three speakers brought to that room is too good to be confined to one room with the leaders who could be there. So I am extending it. A virtual workshop, three sessions over three days, on May 19, 20, and 21. One hour each, live on Zoom, 8 a.m. Pacific, 11 a.m. Eastern.

I will walk through the core frameworks from The Things We Hide. Then we go deeper into what Nikki Barua, Joe Delagrave, and Dr. Abbie Maroñó brought to Spokane. Reinvention. Identity beyond the platform. What the science actually says about how we hide and why it stops working.

Every attendee gets a copy of The Things We Hide and digital access to each speaker’s full presentation.

If the Summit was on your list and the year got away from you, this is the way in. Consider it the final harvest from this season of the Summit.

Did you catch this podcast? If not, listen to it here.