Never In A Million Years

The life we never imagine living often begins just beyond the edge of what we've decided is possible.

In my lifetime, I have had the opportunity to do many things. I've climbed the crow's nest of an old Navy ship anchored in Puget Sound. I've been scuba diving in Hawaii, snorkeling in the Caribbean, and whitewater rafting in Colorado. I've climbed the Sydney Harbour Bridge, ridden a motorcycle halfway across the United States, ziplined in Mexico, and jumped out of an airplane in Illinois.

When I read a list like that, I imagine someone fearless. Someone adventurous. Someone who has never met a risk she didn't want to take.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every single one of those experiences began with terror.

Not excitement.

Not confidence.

Terror.

When I was growing up, I wasn't allowed to go skiing. I could get hurt. I wasn't allowed to take dancing lessons. Dancing was evil. Somewhere along the way, I learned two powerful lessons.

The world was a dangerous place.

And my desires weren't trustworthy.

Looking back, I can trace a line through every one of those adventures. It doesn't begin with an airplane, a bridge, or a parachute.

It begins with a little girl who learned that the safest answer was almost always “No.”

I had learned how to survive.

I hadn't yet learned how to live.

• • •

September 1997

I was in Kona, Hawaii, attending the final day of Tony Robbins' nine-day Life Mastery program.

The week had been exhilarating, exhausting, inspiring, heartbreaking, and unlike anything I had ever experienced. For nine days, my world had grown larger. I had begun to imagine possibilities I had never dared consider before.

The grand finale was a forty-foot fire walk.

Earlier that afternoon, we had gone out to see the enormous fire that would eventually become the bed of glowing coals we were expected to cross barefoot later that evening. It was an impressive sight.

But it was nothing compared to what I saw that night.

As the sun disappeared into the Pacific Ocean, two thousand participants made their way toward the beach. Native drums echoed through the warm Hawaiian air, matching the pounding of my heart.

We rounded the corner.

My stomach dropped.

Line after line of glowing red-hot coals stretched across the sand, waiting for my bare feet.

The crowd slowly carried me closer and closer to the blazing lanes of fire.

I could feel the heat.

Nine days of Tony's teachings couldn't override an entire childhood of messages.

I ran.

My husband walked the fire. So did my seventeen-year-old daughter.

When we met afterward, she looked at me with excitement.

“Did you do it?”

I couldn't lie. I had to tell her no.

I'll never forget the look on her face.

Hundreds of people left that beach experiencing breakthroughs that had come because they walked across those coals.

My breakthrough began because I didn't.

For the first few hours of the flight home, I felt utterly defeated.

Another experience missed.

Another opportunity surrendered to fear.

It wasn't really about a fire walk.

The fire walk simply exposed something I had been unwilling to admit.

Fear had been making my decisions for years.

Somewhere over the Pacific, something inside me shifted. I realized I was tired of constantly being afraid.

For the first time in my life, I decided that I would be the one who got to make the decisions about how I would live.

Before that plane landed, I made myself a promise.

I would be back in Hawaii the following year.

And I would walk that damn fire.

I had no idea how. At that moment, it seemed impossible. Tony Robbins events were not cheap, and I was not rich.

But for the first time, I realized something important.

I didn't need to know how.

I only needed to decide.

• • •

Tony had challenged us to make a list of one hundred things we wanted to do, learn, have, become, or experience before we died. Three months later, in December, I sat down to do it.

It sounded easy.

It wasn't.

By the time I reached number fifteen, I had exhausted everything that seemed even remotely realistic.

That's when the list became interesting.

If I was going to write one hundred things, I would have to stop thinking about what seemed possible and start writing what I actually wanted, even if it sounded impossible.

Number 18 read “Work for Tony Robbins.”

I sat and stared at those words for a few moments.

Ridiculous. Absurd.

Impossible.

I almost crossed it off.

Then another thought occurred to me.

Why not?

People do.

• • •

A few months later, I was sitting at my computer when I decided to look at Tony's website.

And there it was.

Tony Robbins was hiring salespeople for his international sales team.

My heart started pounding.

What on earth made me think I could ever work for Tony Robbins?

I had spent the previous sixteen years mostly as a wife and mother.

I wasn't qualified.

Tony received about four thousand applications per month.

Hell, they would probably laugh at mine.

Then I remembered the promise I had made somewhere over the Pacific.

And I applied anyway.

I don't think I ever really believed I would hear from them. But two weeks later, I was doing a phone interview with Human Resources. I was very disappointed to learn that I didn't have the qualifications to join the international sales team I really wanted to join. I thought that was it, interview over. But then I was told they were going to be starting a new domestic sales team. Would I be interested in that?

Of course I would!

She said they'd get back to me.

Three more weeks passed.

Nothing.

I assumed that was my answer.

My husband asked if I'd heard anything.

I hadn't.

He looked at me and said, “You've come this far. I think you should just call them.”

So I did.

The woman who answered sounded shocked.

“What? You don't have your flight information? You should have received it last week. You're supposed to be in San Diego next week!”

Years later, I learned something else.

Tony Robbins didn't pay airfare and hotel expenses for candidates.

Somehow...they had paid for mine. That was critical, because at that time in my life, I didn't know how I could have gone otherwise.

• • •

I don't remember much about the flight to San Diego.

I do remember wondering, over and over again, what on earth I had gotten myself into.

Just a few months earlier, I had been sitting on an airplane somewhere over the Pacific, promising myself I would stop letting fear make my

decisions.

Now I was flying to California to interview for a job I wasn't remotely qualified to do.

Or so I believed.

The interview wasn't an interview in the traditional sense.

It was an entire week.

Candidates from all over the country gathered for training, observation, role-playing, and evaluation. Every day felt like another opportunity to discover I didn't belong there.

Everyone else seemed more experienced.

More polished.

More confident.

I kept waiting for someone to realize they had made a mistake inviting me.

Instead, they kept inviting me back the next day.

At the end of the week, I was called in for my final interview.

I knew exactly what I wanted to hear.

“We'd like to offer you a position on our new sales team.”

Instead, I heard something completely different.

“We'd like to offer you the position of Administrative Manager for our new

domestic sales team.”

I smiled.

I thanked them.

I accepted the position.

Inside, it felt like another failure.

Apparently, I wasn't good enough to do the job I had actually wanted.

Sometimes life answers the question you asked. Sometimes it answers the question you should have asked. Frequently it answers the question in a completely different way from what you'd expect.

I had asked for an opportunity.

I assumed it had to look a certain way.

Life had other plans.

Our first assignment was Atlanta.

The team was brand new.

So was I.

We spent six weeks together learning our jobs, finding our rhythm, and figuring out how to work as a team.

Then we all went home for a short break before our next assignment in Philadelphia.

Or at least, that was the plan.

As the departure date got closer, something felt odd.

No one had received flight information.

No hotel confirmations.

No itinerary.

Nothing.

Then we found out why.

Our team had been canceled.

It had taken only one event for Tony's company to realize the numbers weren't going to work.

Just like that...

Everyone on the team lost their jobs.

Everyone except me.

Instead, I received a phone call.

They wanted me to join the international sales team.

The very team I hadn't been “qualified” for just a few weeks earlier.

If someone had tried to explain my life to me at that point, I wouldn't have believed them.

The rejection that had hurt the most had quietly become the doorway to exactly what I wanted.

• • •

A short time later, I flew to Chicago to join the international team.

The first thing I asked was simple.

“So...what exactly am I going to be doing?”

The answer still makes me laugh.

“We don't know.”

“We'll figure it out.”

That became my job description.

For the first several days, I worked alongside Karen, the Administrative Manager already assigned to the team.

She was organized.

Efficient.

Experienced.

But the office felt lifeless.

There was no music.

No laughter.

Very little conversation.

Team members would drop off their paperwork and leave as quickly as they could. The people working in the office did the same. No one lingered. No one wanted to be there.

The office wasn't part of the team.

It was simply where the paperwork happened.

The longer I watched, the more discouraged I became.

I remember thinking,

If this is what it means to work for Tony Robbins...I'm not sure I want to.

Then something unexpected happened.

Karen was taking two weeks off halfway through the event to attend a wedding.

Which meant...I would be left in charge.

I could barely sleep the night before.

I wasn't worried about making mistakes. I expected to make mistakes.

I was worried about trying to remember all of Karen's rules.

Sometime during the night, another decision quietly emerged.

I wasn't going to.

I wasn't going to spend the next two weeks trying to be Karen.

I was going to be myself.

I was going to lead the team the way I believed a team should be led.

I was going to treat people the way I believed people should be treated.

I didn't know much about managing an office.

But I knew a lot about creating a place where people wanted to be.

The worst thing that could happen was that I would discover this wasn't where I belonged.

I could live with that.

The next morning, I opened the office.

I rearranged the furniture.

Then I turned on the music.

At first, my admin team just stood there, looking around the room. Then they started smiling.

Little by little, the team stopped dropping off their paperwork and hurrying away. They pulled up a chair. They told stories about their day. They teased each other. Before long, the office was the place where the team gathered.

Without ever planning it, the office became the heart of the team.

What I didn't know was that something else had been happening behind the scenes.

The team had been watching too.

When Karen returned two weeks later, they approached Deb, the vice president in charge of our team.

They knew Karen had planned to resign after three more events.

They didn't want to wait.

They asked Deb to accept Karen's resignation immediately.

Then they said something that still humbles me.

“We want Suzie.”

They promised they would do everything they could to help me succeed.

Not because I had learned to lead like Karen.

Because I hadn't.

• • •

The following September, I was back in Kona.

Exactly where I had promised myself I would be.

Earlier that week, I sat down with Deb. Officially, for the first time.

She offered me the job.

Not the vague promise from a phone call in Chicago. A real title. A real team.

My first event on my own would be in Sydney, Australia. Forty-five hundred participants. A team of twenty-five, split across three cities.

I could hardly believe it.

But that night, none of it mattered yet.

There was still a promise to keep.

The beach looked the same.

The Pacific still stretched endlessly toward the horizon.

The native drums still echoed through the warm Hawaiian air.

And when we rounded the corner...

My stomach still dropped.

The coals hadn't gotten any cooler.

Fear hadn't gotten any smaller.

For just a moment, I almost laughed.

Somehow I had expected courage to feel different.

It didn't.

I was just as afraid as I had been the year before.

Maybe more so.

Then another thought quietly interrupted my panic.

You've been walking toward this moment for an entire year.

Not just toward the fire.

Toward the woman you had decided to become.

The fire walk hadn't begun on the beach.

It had begun on an airplane somewhere over the Pacific.

It had continued every time I wrote down something that seemed impossible.

Every time I picked up the phone instead of assuming the answer was no.

Every time I boarded another airplane without knowing exactly where it would lead.

Every time I decided to be myself instead of trying to become someone else.

By the time I stepped to the edge of the coals, I suddenly realized something.

I wasn't trying to prove I was brave.

I wasn't trying to impress anyone.

Not Tony.

Not my husband.

Not even my daughter.

I was simply keeping a promise.

I looked up.

Took a deep breath.

And stepped forward.

• • •

The walk itself lasted only seconds.

The promise had taken a year.

Looking back, I don't think the fire changed me.

The decisions leading up to it did.

The fire simply gave me a place to notice it.

That realization stayed with me.

I would go on to walk across hot coals more than forty times. Eventually, I would run a fire lane myself.

I watched thousands of people arrive believing they were there to conquer a bed of hot coals.

Most of them did.

But many discovered something much deeper.

The fire wasn't the obstacle.

The stories they had believed about themselves were.

I knew.

Because I had once believed those stories too.

From there, my life began filling with things I once would have answered with an immediate “No.”

A Harley-Davidson.

The Sydney Harbour Bridge.

Whitewater rafting.

Scuba diving.

Riding an elephant in Thailand.

Skydiving.

Hang gliding.

People will sometimes say I must be a little bit of an adrenaline junkie.

I always laugh.

If they only knew.

Every one of those adventures began exactly the same way.

With fear.

The difference was that fear no longer got to make the decision.

It would take me decades to understand, but the greatest lesson I learned as a child wasn't really fear. It was safety. I learned that safety came from saying no, following the rules, staying within the lines, and fitting in. My own desires became something to question rather than something to trust. I wasn't just afraid of what might happen if I took a chance. I wasn't convinced I could handle it if it didn't go as planned. So I built my life around avoiding risk instead of trusting my ability to meet it.

Looking back now, I can finally see what changed.

As a little girl, I believed I needed certainty before I could begin.

Life taught me something entirely different.

I often tell my clients that life is like driving through dense fog at night. Your headlights only illuminate the next stretch of road. You can't see the destination. You can't see what's around the next bend. But you don't pull over and wait for the fog to lift. You keep driving.

For years, I thought the lesson was about trusting the headlights.

It isn’t.

It's about trusting the driver.

The headlights only show you what's immediately in front of you. The reason you keep moving isn't because you know the road will stay smooth.

It's because you trust that whatever appears in those headlights next...you'll know what to do when you get there.

Somewhere over the Pacific, nothing about the road ahead became clearer.

I still couldn't see Hawaii the following year.

I couldn't see San Diego or Chicago or Australia.

I couldn't see more than forty fire walks or motorcycles or airplanes.

The fog never lifted.

What changed was something much more important.

I was learning to trust the woman behind the wheel.