You Can Do Leadership. Or You Can Thrive in It. Most People Don’t Know There’s a Difference.

These days I do a good amount of reflection - what’s working, what’s not working, what’s really going on in and around me. What’s am I failing to see and what are the possibilities beyond that? 

Something struck me the other day as I was contemplating why I always seem to opt for the word ‘thrive’ in leadership (insert ‘wellness’, ‘life’, etc…) versus the idea of just ‘doing’ leadership.

I’ve been called a cancer ‘survivor’ more times than I can count. And every time it comes up, something inside me cringes as I resist that word.

Don’t get me wrong. I understand what it means. I made it through. I’m here. That matters enormously, because there are too many people who do not.

But surviving always felt like the minimum. Like I just held on long enough for it to pass.

And that’s not what happened.

During treatment, I made choices that were deliberate, intentional, and sometimes really (choose your favorite expletive that starts with the letter ‘F’ here) hard. I built a meditation practice not because someone told me to but because I knew intuitively that my nervous system needed it to get through each day. I completed two Cornell programs while in radiation and chemotherapy because I wanted my brain to keep expanding. I rebuilt my movement practice with intelligence and to match what my body needed at the time. I put dry ice on my head for 11 hours on chemo days in effort to save most of my hair and decided that looking good was not going to be my priority that year. I stayed curious about connection and growth even when everything hurt and I was far from presentable.

I didn’t just endure. I engaged. I showed up for my own recovery the way I would show up for anything that mattered to me: with intention, with curiosity, and with the belief that the choices I made inside the hardest season of my life would determine how I walked out the other side.

Survivor suggests I made it out.

Warrior suggests I fought my way through with everything I had and built something stronger in the process. And I built something that will allow me to thrive for the long term. And something that didn’t get tossed the moment the ‘project’ (in this case cancer treatment) was over. Because that’s what we tend to do, in life and in work. We push through to the finish line, declare victory, and we move on. The experience closes and the lessons don’t stick. What I chose instead was to stay intentional about what was important to me throughout, notice what the choices were actually producing, and to let the ones that mattered embed deeply enough to become part of how I operate permanently. Not a project with an end date. A foundation with a long arc.

And one thing I’ll add because I think it’s important.  5 years later, do I still have a daily meditation practice that looks exactly as it did back than? No, I do not.  BUT I know that I can tap into it whenever I notice my nervous system needs it in order to thrive.  AND I actively choose other small moves daily to activate that muscle.

I am a warrior. And I am proud of that.

This distinction matters beyond semantics. Because the same choices I made during that season, domain by domain, one small step at a time, are the same choices I now help leaders make before a health crisis forces the conversation. Before the body sends an alarm that can no longer be ignored.

And that’s exactly why I use the word ‘thrive’ rather than ‘do’ when I talk about leadership. Because doing leadership is surviving it. Thriving in it means showing up with everything you’ve built underneath you, with intention, with presence, and with the capacity to sustain it for the long haul.

You don’t have to wait for a hard season to start building that foundation.

That’s exactly why I do this work.

And before I close this week’s article, I want to be clear about something. This isn’t a post about cancer. Cancer was my hard season. Yours might look completely different.

This is a post about the way you approach work, life, and whatever is truly important to you. You can go through the motions and wish for a different outcome. Or you can get intentional about the choices that shape the one you really want.

The difference between surviving something and thriving through it has very little to do with the circumstances. It has everything to do with the choices you make inside them, and how you feel on the other end.

Hey, if we’ve had a conversation in recent years you might know that I stopped in my tracks one day during chemo and wondered why I felt more alive fighting for my life than I had in the previous 3 years of my corporate career. What I just shared has a lot to do with it.

What would it mean to stop surviving your leadership and start thriving in it, starting today?