I’d feel seen not for being good—quiet, compliant, a “good boy”—but for being me—a good person who was also smart and skillful.

The magic, the alchemy, occurs when what we do mixes with who we are and is cooked by the heat of what we believe.

Listening, I’ve come to understand, is bearing witness to lives unfolding, to lives being discovered. Deep listening, listening compassionately, means guiding, gently nudging, or sometimes shoving people down the path of radical self-inquiry so they can make their way to their own truest selves. Then, and only then, can they lead with the dignity a

Keep opening. Stand still. Keep opening and stand still. Open up, get curious, and inquire within.

Our lives are twenty-four frames per second, with each frame a set piece of feeling, belief, obsession about the past, and anxiety about the future. Neither good nor bad, these frames form us.

“What would Obama do?” we took to asking each other in moments when his heart flagged. How do you handle yourself on the way out, regardless of whether you were given the respect you deserved?

Success and money—and even more important, the busyness needed to create those—became proof of my worth as a human.

“not the story of the wreck but the wreck itself.”

His body unfolds, and we all bear witness to his taking his seat not merely as a CEO but as a man, capable of providing for the boy under the overpass.