Nobody Asked If I Wanted to Lead

The first time leadership landed on me, it was because someone else left without telling anybody. The guy who started our little group with the dance and fire work disappeared to Nevada overnight, no calls, no explanation, gone. Everybody on the team turned and looked at me like I was next in line. I wasn't trying to be next in line. I already had a business running full time and told them as much. We took baby steps anyway, and that first summer we did a hundred and ten shows in Utah, small thirty and forty minute performances, all of it improvised leadership nobody asked me to sign up for.

I was already stretched thin running both things at once. Up at five thirty for the gym, in the office by nine, working straight through the day so I could be home by three when the kids got out of school, then switching gears into entertainer mode most nights and weekends. Something had to give, so I moved my marketing clients over to friends running similar businesses and put everything into the entertainment side, which by then had turned into a real studio.

That studio taught me a different kind of math. We had a beautiful space to train in and a six thousand dollar monthly overhead to go with it. Recurring student payments topped out around thirty two hundred a month at best. I made up the gap by taking outside CMO work for other companies, piecing the whole thing together month to month. If you'd asked me back then whether I saw myself as a leader, the honest answer was reluctantly, yes, and only because nobody else was standing where I was standing.

About a year into that studio, my business partner at the time left to do his own thing. He didn't want circus style work mixed into what we were building, and he'd also been the one running the microphone at every show. So the team looked at me again, same question as before, what are you going to do about this. I wasn't him. I'd spoken on a stage a little before, different topic, different world entirely, and none of it prepared me for holding a live show together in real time.

I sucked at it. Bad, for something like thirty of the next hundred and ten shows. Hot mic moments would rattle me completely. I'd get off stage and not remember a single thing I'd said. I started needing five or ten quiet minutes alone before any show just to keep from walking out scattered, which wasn't a luxury I always had between setup and showtime.

It took roughly half of those first thirty shows before I stopped fighting the discomfort and just let it be part of the process. Somewhere past that point, years actually, I understood what holding a microphone in front of a room actually means. You can stand up there and let people admire what you built, or you can use the two minutes you have to hand somebody something real. Nobody made me pick up that mic. I picked it up because there was nobody else standing there. I never got permission to be great, and I never really believed I was. I just kept putting one foot in front of the other and doing what I do, and it turned into the part of this work I never saw coming.