04/06/2026
WORD!... get busy living
There is a word for what happens when a man’s biology finally comes back online. It isn’t recovery. It’s recognition.
Three weeks into working with a man who had lost his edge, lost what he described as his maleness, he sat across from me and said two words: “I’m back.”
No fanfare. He just sat differently in the chair.
He’d come in believing he was failing. That the instinct to lead from the front : the thing that defined him for twenty years : had quietly left. He’d been calling it stress. Calling it age.
It was neither. His biology had been working against him. The cortisol load was so high, for so long, that his body made a rational decision: divert resources away from drive and clarity to manage the pressure. His biology wasn't broken. It was doing exactly what it was designed to do under sustained stress.
We corrected the mechanism. Three weeks later, he recognised himself.
I’ve watched this for thirty years : with elite athletes and executives running global organisations. The men who struggle most are not the weakest. They are the ones who built the most and paid for it biologically, without ever knowing the price was being charged.
What does it cost when the man running the room can't find himself in it?
