The Conversation - How it happens in real life

If you grew up in a household with two parents who cared, you were lucky. Many of us weren't — or were, and carried something heavy anyway.

Some of us started working early to help support a family or younger siblings. Some of us never felt the warmth of a good home, where guidance and love were the dominant themes.

Regardless of where your story began, there's often a moment you can point to — a memory — when you stopped feeling the safety and covering of home, and began making decisions about your life for yourself. This is the first transition. A man's first crucible. The heat of it forges something in you, though you rarely see what until much later.

For me, that moment came after high school graduation. My friends were celebrating acceptances to the colleges of their dreams. I'd been accepted to a university program too, but something felt off. Inside, I knew college was the next step my parents had planned for me — maybe from the moment I was born. For them, education had been their escape from the American lower class, and they wanted that same escape for me. But I didn't want it. Surrounded by my motivated peers, I couldn't for the life of me make sense of why I needed it. There was no goal there for me, nothing waiting that fall that I actually wanted. I had a good job. I had close friends in Pittsburgh who'd come back and visit. There was no reason to leave all of that behind to chase a dream that — and this was the crux of it — was theirs, not mine.

That realization changed everything. My whole life up to that point had been carefully orchestrated by my caring parents. What once felt like a loving safety blanket now felt like shackles. How could I ever become myself if I was always living for them? A seed doesn't get to choose an easy season — only whether it grows. So I deferred college for a year to see what I could make of myself, on my own.

My work took me to Indiana, PA, recruiting students into the business of Vector Marketing — yes, selling Cutco knives to support myself. And not just as a seller: I climbed to Branch Manager of the Indiana office. I was seventeen. That was when I discovered my potential and my capacity to work hard. It was also when I first came face to face with what I'll call my Shadow.

The Shadow, which I think we all carry, is the antithesis of who I want to be. It surfaces in loneliness and stress, and it whispers for the easier path, the more comfortable one. It knew exactly where my wound was, and it offered me an exit from the ache of it — through substances, distractions, or plain avoidance, anything to quiet the voice that said I wasn't enough. What I didn't understand then was that every time I gave in, the harder it became to find and become my true self. And the more I gave in, the more everything began to feel the same — a numb place where nothing moved me, where the days blurred one into the next. The Shadow habits I formed that year have followed me ever since. They're battles I still fight today.

Could an older man have spared me some of this? Could he have come alongside me, shared his own journey, and inspired me to choose a different path?

Maybe you know this too — when something that seemed harmless becomes a trap. Something you lean on in the dark that only deepens the dark. Something that promises peace and leaves you emptier than before. Yeah. That thing you're thinking of right now — I've been there too.

In search of relief from that wound, I looked for comfort in places that only hurt me. My manager at the time, John, saw it — and decided to step in.

John was the kind of man you wanted to be. Charismatic, sharp, a natural leader. Married with two young kids, faithful, and introspective. He'd seen my numbers as an individual seller and made a way to promote me. He helped me plan toward my financial and business goals. He taught me to lead and motivate a small team, to book appointments through cold calls and door-to-door work. He saw potential in me and invested in it. He closed the deal on my first office and drove to Indiana himself to help me set it up.

And he noticed my Shadow. He coached me against it. He was honest with me about his own history with alcohol, and about the emptiness that being single and adrift had left in him — how all of it had made him want something more.

Then he gave me a framework. It came from a book he shared, and it had four parts: care for your body, care for your spirit, care for your mind, and care for your emotional world. Move, to keep your strength and balance. Pursue God — or your version of God — as a way to connect to something greater than yourself. Feed your curiosity, so that learning becomes second nature. And take responsibility for your emotional life, never swinging too high or too low. What he was handing me, I understand now, wasn't technique. It was the shape of a conviction he'd built slowly, over time — a bedrock formed from experiences that belonged to him alone.

I had never known support like that. Who was I to this man but another sales rep? Why did he dive in with me the way he did? I'll never know for certain. But he opened his life to me like it was its own universe — and let me see the constellation of choices that had made him who he was. For a season, John gave me what my father couldn't: the sense that I was worth investing in. Looking back, he was the first man whose quiet persistence I ever really witnessed up close. In a way, I've been looking for men like him ever since.

I ended that summer by moving back home. The Indiana business hadn't succeeded. The reps I'd hired and trained — save a few — didn't sell. I didn't place in the top third of branches. People were surprised; I'd been a strong rep, so why had I stumbled at this new level?

John and I both knew. The Shadow habits I'd built had driven my effort that summer, and the results showed it. It was my first real taste of failure — I had taken responsibility for a result and hadn't delivered it. And failure, for a man carrying my wound, is never just failure. It's proof. The heat of that crucible left a mark I still carry.

That failure sent me to school the following fall, hoping for a fresh start — one that wouldn't come. But that's a story for another day.

If you're a man with young ones, or with any charge or influence over young men: dive in with them. We need more men like John. This is how the conversation happens in real life. This is how we light a fire in the next generation and shield it from the wind until it can burn on its own. It's how a seed, tended by someone who cares, one day becomes a tree that stands.

It's because of men like John that I started this show. My Shadow still exists — it shadows nearly everything I do — and the wound my father left has never fully healed. But hearing other men tell me how they faced their own has given me hope when I needed it most. Because in the end, that may be the one extraordinary thing we can offer each other: the truth of how we made it through. As a fellow traveler, I hope these conversations can be a light on your path, too — whatever stage you're walking through — and that they move you to become a light for someone else when their moment comes.

Steve