Not literally. To be fair, nobody handed 6yr old me a plan for saintly martyrdom, but somewhere in the architecture, “there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for others” got wired directly into my definition of a good life. Dying to yourself wasn’t a metaphor we used carefully, it was a tentpole of the whole curriculum.

My grandfather gave so much of his meager wealth away to the ‘less fortunate’ and his congregation, that while I never confirmed it, I imagine his humility came at a great unknown cost to his family’s ability to better themselves. Why live in more comfort when the goal of this life is to suffer for Christ?

My father once spent thousands of dollars buying new hymnals for our church. When the pastor asked where he wanted his name printed on each… he vehemently objected to any mention of his gift, written or otherwise. Anonymity was a necessary result of his humility.

I, in turn, spent years championing being the one behind the scenes, the skeleton supporting others. I even named my long-running consulting company Hailyard - the rope or wire that holds up a sailboat’s sail from inside the mast. Critically important, but never seen. And don’t you DARE call me out for my helpfulness in front of other people… you might stoke up that sin of pride.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that generational curriculum: it doesn’t teach you what I’d now call true humility. It teaches you a very specific, very effective way to disappear.

And the tool I eventually found for telling the two apart didn’t come from theology at all. It came from a life changing book I found along the way.

The Four Zones

Gay Hendricks, in The Big Leap, lays out four zones we all operate in:

Incompetence. Things you’re bad at. Nobody expects much from you here, including you. One of my zones of incompetence is pottery.

Competence. Things you can do fine, and so can plenty of other people. This is most of the labor market. I’m quite competent at fixing a broken toilet. Done it many times, but it’s not really… me.

Excellence. Things you’re genuinely good at. You get praised for this. You get paid for this. People come to rely on you specifically. This is where careers are built and where most people, Hendricks argues, quietly stop. I’m really excellent at data analytics. My nickname in the startup world was KPI Keith. Need a dashboard that shows you all the big important numbers at a glance? Come find me. (Same for financial modeling, by the way. Made plenty of money making really fun and informative spreadsheets… doesn’t that sound exciting?!).

Genius. The narrow, specific thing that’s… yours. The work only you do in exactly that way. The thing that makes time disappear, that doesn’t feel like effort even when it’s hard, that other people can’t quite replicate even when they copy the method. This is a core piece of that Japanese concept of Ikigai - the overlapping zone of what you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. One of my zones of genius? Group facilitation.

Hendricks’ whole thesis is that almost nobody lives in that fourth zone 100% of the time, and it’s not for lack of talent. It’s because Excellence is safe and Genius is exposed.

Excellence is provable, fundable, promotable. You can point to it, and everyone nods.

Genius requires you to say, out loud, this is a specific thing that I do better than almost anyone, and I know it. That sentence has a shape.

In my historical community, that was the shape of a sentence you get punished for.

One Word, Two Contexts.

Here’s the thing I got wrong for a long time: I thought humility and martyrdom were two different words describing the same thing. Setting yourself aside for the benefit of others.

Martyrdom is a topic we’ll come back to, but let’s focus on humility.

Be humble. Live those Christian virtues without public recognition.

Here’s the thing though: humility below the line and humility above the line will use the exact same sentences. It’s not about me. I don’t need credit. Let someone else go first.

Said by two different people (or by the same person on two different days) and meaning almost opposite things. We’ll get into context at a later date, but this is a great example. The words can be the same, but the meaning is drastically different.

Below the line, humility is a transaction wearing a monk’s robe. It says: I will erase myself. And in exchange, I will be granted something.

Meaning. Moral high ground. A story where I’m the one who suffered “correctly.”

This is where martyrdom lives: not as some separate darker cousin of humility, but as humility’s most committed below the line form. And below the line humility has a zone all to itself: Excellence.

You may be very good at something. You may even be praised for it. But whatever you do, never call it Genius. Because Genius requires ownership, and ownership is the one thing the framework of faith struggles to claim. Your humility, even the lessening of yourself, comes from God - not from your broken sinfulness.

Above the line, humility is just an accurate attribute. Same words, similar posture, but nothing is being extracted in exchange, and nothing is being capped.

It’s not about me is simply… true. It’s not a tool used for increasing your faithfulness or demonstrating your righteousness.

And crucially, it doesn’t require you to undersell what’s actually yours.

Above the line humility can say “I was wrong about that” and “this is my Genius“ in the same breath, because both are just accurate reports. Facts. Neither is a bid for anything, let alone salvation.

The framework I grew up in taught me the first kind of humility, but told me it was the second kind. For decades I couldn’t tell them apart, because from the outside they’re identical. You can’t spot the difference by watching someone’s behavior or listening to their sermons. You can only find it by asking about motivation: the WHY. What is this humility trying to achieve, if anything?

Excellence is an Upper Limit

Guess which zone that unconscious, below the line humility trains you to live in?

If the whole architecture of your worth runs on staying small, on not being the one who thinks too highly of himself, then Excellence is exactly where you’re supposed to stop.

You can be very good at something in that zone and still be functioning entirely below the line. Competent, praised, useful, and quietly making sure nobody mistakes you for someone who thinks he’s got a gift… or is using his God-given spiritual gift for anything other than subservient service.

Claiming Genius, out loud, on purpose, can feel like the one sin the whole system was built to prevent.

Who do you think you are, you boastful boy?! Shove that back down, now.

I lived an awful lot of my life in Excellence. Hell, I started this whole thing with the statement of: “I was very, very good at being Christian.” I was good at the job. Good at the role. Reliable, over-functioning, competent in six directions at once, and every ounce of it still ran through the old architecture.

Staying in Excellence let me keep being useful and keep being humble, because Genius, in that framework, was the thing you weren’t allowed to claim without it curdling into pride.

Hendricks has a name for the subtle mechanism that enforces this: the Upper Limit Problem. His observation is that people will unconsciously sabotage their own success the moment it exceeds what their nervous system has decided they’re allowed to have. A fight with a partner right after a big win, a missed deadline right after a promotion, a sudden illness right after things finally start working... He frames it as a thermostat.

Go too far above your internal setting, and something in you reaches over and turns the heat back down.

I didn’t need a thermostat metaphor to understand this. I had two decades of theological training in exactly this function. My upper limit wasn’t a vague nervous-system quirk: it had a name, and a Bible verse, a whole community reinforcing it, and even (for a time) one of my favorite songs:

Pride goeth before a fall. Every time something in my life started looking like Genius instead of Excellence, some old alarm went off: this is the part where you’re supposed to get small again.

Below-the-line humility isn’t just a distortion of sacrifice. It’s an Upper Limit Problem with theology built in.

What Martyrdom Is Actually Protecting

Notice something? Every one of those below the line humility thoughts is still “to me.” Something is being done to the person wearing that virtue.

• I don’t need anything, I’m fine. Said by someone who is very much not fine, and often furious that no one noticed. Villain mode.

• I’ll just do it myself! The sentence that births a hundred resentments before breakfast. Hero mode.

• This is my cross to bear. Used to justify staying somewhere that is actively harming you, because leaving would mean you weren’t chosen for the suffering. Gotta suffer for that salvation, right? Classic victim mode.

I am still the object of the sentence, not the author of it. The posture is smallness: the engine underneath is the exact same victim architecture built into the framework of faith.

Martyrdom? That’s just what you get when this version of humility is run at full volume, publicly, for an audience. And here’s the part I didn’t see for years: martyrdom is also a very effective way to never have to find out what your Genius actually is.

If your whole identity is organized around what’s being done to you, you never have to answer the much scarier question of what you’d build if nothing were.

I didn’t leave that pattern behind when I left the church. I just found new altars. New audiences to perform the smallness for. Leaders and teams are full of below the line humility dressed up as work ethic. Founder mode. Burnout worn like a merit badge. “I haven’t taken a vacation in three years!” said with pride instead of grief. Same architecture, same Upper Limit, different building.

Above the Line: Same Word, Different Context

Here’s the uncomfortable part of conscious reconstruction: once you take the transaction out of humility, there’s less of a story to tell about yourself. That’s the whole point, and it’s also why it’s really, really hard.

Above the line humility doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need a witness. It looks less like lay down your life and more like I can hold being wrong without it meaning I’m worthless. I can give something up because I chose to, not because giving things up is who I am. Or…

I’m really, really, really, (extraordinarily) good at this thing… and I know it. And that’s ok. It’s better than ok… it’s me. There is Genius in me. (and you too, btw)

The same instrument that can honestly say I was wrong about that can just as honestly say this specific thing, I do better than almost anyone, and hiding it doesn’t serve anyone.

Below the line, both of those sentences get distorted: the first into self-flagellation, the second into forbidden territory.

Above the line, they’re just two facts, held with the same open hand.

I didn’t find my way to ‘Coach Keith’ by getting more humble in the old sense. I found it by finally letting Competence and Excellence stop being a hiding place: by letting the thermostat go up to Genius and sitting in the room while it did.

(and trust me, it was freakin’ uncomfortable. it still is. again… living those questions…)

Where am I? (the question returns…)

When I catch myself reaching for the quiet self-erasure, the martyr’s little noose, I ask one question:

Am I doing this because I chose it?

…or because of some old chorus of ‘my life’s not a story about me.’

That question cuts both ways now: it applies to the sacrifice I’m about to make, and it applies to the gift I’m about to hide. If it’s got that twinge of shame or meek compliance, I’m not being humble - I’m just running the old path again, resetting the thermostat back down to where I learned it was supposed to sit.

Above the line humility has room in it for me to matter. That was the part I could never get the framework to admit: that the same word could hold both a context of erasure and of accuracy, and that claiming Genius honestly is not the opposite of humility, it’s humility finishing the job.

You can be small in the right ways: wrong sometimes, not the center of the universe, genuinely in service of something bigger than yourself, without disappearing.

In fact, you have to still be there, still authoring, still acting from presence and consciousness… or it isn’t humility at all. It’s just a more sanctified way of vanishing, at a very comfortable, very praised, very safe altitude.

I’m not interested in vanishing anymore.

I spent enough years being excellent at it.

Where did you learn your version of this? Was there a moment you realized the sacrifice you were so proud of was actually just a very effective way of staying in Excellence instead of claiming your Genius? I’d love to hear it. ❤️

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Sitting there by my bus-house in the sweltering evening sunlight, surrounded by the faint smell of diesel exhaust and distant rusty industry, I was about half an hour into our regular check-in conversation with Tina when, with her patented gritty candor, she dropped the bomb:

“My friend… I think it’s time… to stop isolating.”

That evening, on the banks of the Mississippi, I started my journey back to life.

Oh Brothers, Let’s Go Down…

Ten years after the framework exploded, I was done. I’d done the grad school thing. The lose your virginity thing. The ‘oh crap, I need therapy’ thing.

Blackout nights, shady girlfriends doing drugs (the hard ones…) on my living room floor, getting more into debt than I ever had been even while making more money than both my parents, combined.

Don’t get me wrong, just like the bus, it all depends on the lens of the story. Those ten years were also filled with wisdom, prestige, awards, amazing travels, and lots of hilarious nights spent around campfires in the mountains.

But if you really, really, really knew me? I had slowly become aware of my structureless agency. And it was exhausting.

It started as a whisper, but over the years had grown to be one of the loudest thoughts knocking at the back of my skull:

What’s the point?

If there’s no more cosmic architecture to explain the big questions of life, and it falls on me to just… decide why I’m here - then what the hell is the point of all of this?

The unconscious choice of “I’m in charge” left me standing in a vacuum, and my response to that void was to become a mental drifter.

See, I’m an Enneagram 9: the peacemaker type. And one of the evil superpowers of the peacemaker in my soul is an uncanny ability to appear present and engaged, but internally to disappear, to be either shut down or semi-disassociated. You could have a full conversation with me, and feel seen, heard, understood… but I’d be in another world.

And I had drifted into this whirlpool of a headspace without knowing it.

I was in full control of the sails, but rudderless. Drifting along with the currents that I thought mattered, or the ones easiest to slip into. It may have looked exciting from the outside, but slowly over a few years I had abandoned most of my friends, quit my job, lived semi-homeless in a parking lot, and given up on… well… really… being conscious.

But hey… at least I built this prison all by my mighty self, right?

Remember that point about the self being a small room? I’d locked myself in it.

The Limits of Unconscious “By Me”

In what felt like a herculean effort, I started to do inventory: In the last few years, what were the moments where I felt most alive? What were the common themes? Where did I find moments unburdened by that shadow of my upbringing that I’d spent years running from?

Turns out, the answers outlined a grand theme. They were all connected to… connection. The joy of being a team of four raising hundreds of thousands of dollars and building one of the fastest growing startups in Colorado. The quiet affection of buying therapeutic oxygen for one of my close friends when he couldn’t afford it after an unexpected quadruple bypass… at 40yrs old. The gentle unwrapping of the ‘me’ beneath all those personas and protections.

And at the top of the list: anything and everything to do with a reframe of “by me” that I’d found in a structure called Conscious Leadership. A way of thinking where yes - the choice was mine, good and bad outcomes were all my responsibility, but it went beyond just the outcome ranking. The biggest, first, and ongoing challenge of this work?

Do I know where I am?

Am I conscious of myself, my situation, and the choices I have? And what might be the benefits of operating from that “by me” mindset, but with an eye towards connection rather than isolation.

Connection with myself. Connection with my community. Connection with that bigger, more nebulous spirituality or god or source or whatever name you want to put on it. It’s not about a requirement to have all the answers, rather a willingness to see the questions as the important part.

And in that work, my slow road back to reconstruction found its first bit of pavement.

As Above, So Below.

The core foundational concept in conscious leadership is a horizontal line.

It represents our mindset at any given moment. We can exist, think, and act from above that line, or below.

Below the line? Everything is happening “to me” and there’s nothing I can do. Reactionary. Unconscious. At the affect of the world. Full of righteousness and binary answers. Judgmental. Architectural.

The world I grew up in was foundationally below the line. As a naturally born broken and sinful human, I started life on my back foot, and the entirety of salvation and eternal life was not in my hands, but at the whims of that big bearded white man in the sky.

Sure, it was my decision to pray for forgiveness and my future in heaven, but given the alternative… did 6yr old me really have a choice?

Deconstruction is also below the line. Dealing with the aftermath of what’s been given or forced upon us is fundamentally reactionary. Victim mode, pure and simple.

In contrast, above the line: Openness. Curiosity. Seeing the world as something I can impact. Choosing to take responsibility for the circumstances of my life. Recognizing myself as the source of security, control, and approval. Moving away from blame and apathy. Living in abundance and connection.

And it’s from that posture - one of true awareness-driven agency - where reconstruction is truly possible. Not the zero-sum-game of “look what’s been done to me that I now have to deal with…” but a win-for-all. A deep claim to my full responsibility over my life and spirituality. A path forward out of the rubble.

Here’s where I can reveal that I kinda tricked you: that unconscious “by me” mindset I adopted over that time in the wilderness? It’s actually still below the line. I was using my agency, but without awareness. Still in a reactionary posture. The “by me” and “through me” concepts we’ll talk more about can be found above the line.

Work Life Integration

One of the other outcomes of that inventory was a career change. I stopped being KPI Keith, working on operations, finance, people and culture, marketing analytics… and became Coach Keith.

I found success leveraging one of my Zones of Genius (more about that later), and today exist professionally as an Executive Coach and Master Facilitator - helping leaders and teams find higher efficiency and effectiveness through the regular practice of conscious leadership and other development modalities.

It was these concepts, this new framework, that transformed my professional world and leadership ability, and I’ve had the absolute pleasure of extending these insights to thousands of executives across the globe. Showing others the value of taking agency and responsibility for who they are and how they show up at work. Moving from victim and villain to creator and challenger.

And slowly, over time, it filtered into my personal life, too. And then… at an even more glacial speed, I started to see the friction and the fortune of analyzing my deconstructed, imploded faith through these new eyes. The process of conscious reconstruction.

I’m not a broken, born sinful, inherently evil little monster of a soul. My value does not come from an extrinsic source like the blood of a man born two thousand years ago and my ability to play by his rules.

What I am, in contrast to all of those stories, and belief structures, and lessons bricked in by my father and his friends, is a wholly-formed, intrinsically valuable thing of humanity.

Imperfect? Yes. But this kintsugi-cracked vessel is to be celebrated, not shunned. Gilded with gold, not ground down to dust.

I am good. I am whole. I am aware. I am… me.

And that, my friend, is the point.

Into the Future

This conscious reconstruction thing is not black and white. It’s not a switch we all get to flip and all the lights turn on. I was rationally and academically well-versed in conscious leadership for years before that moment on the riverbank… and had applied it to a wide variety of areas of my life. But in a way, I hadn’t done the hardest part. I hadn’t looked at one of the core scars I wear every day.

I was a good teacher. And a pretty bad integrator. I’m still learning. Still understanding where I have some deeply held unconscious commitments. There are stories from the last 18 months of my life (years past that pivotal riverside moment) that might have you second guessing my credibility on this whole topic.

All I can promise is that I’ll share with the hopes that something in here is of benefit.

Why I took so much intentional time to share all of this context can be summed up by a set of sticky notes pinned above my desk, always a quick glance away:

The more ‘me’ I have been over the years, the more I’ve shared my story, and the more honest I’ve been with myself and others… the ever more aliveness I’ve experienced.

So, what can you expect from me? From this space? From those who also want to share here?

We’ll talk tactical frameworks - ones absent a mythical master who controls the outcome even from within the cloak of free will.

We’ll share stories - the good days, the bad days, and everything in the messy gray. But stories by themselves are just entertainment - we’ll share the value, insight, and application.

We’ll consciously reconstruct together - some still in the faith, others about as far away as possible. All welcome, as long as there’s a desire for curiosity and connection.

Come along, my friends. ‘Cause the (lowercase) god I know today? It’s found in the magical sense we all feel when we are truly, authentically, and vulnerably in connection with ourselves and each other, grappling with the questions as if that effort itself is actually the answer we’ve been after.

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It was a hot, humid afternoon. He asked me to sit down, and with a heavy tone of resignation and a palpable dose of shame, sat down next to me, and told me who he had actually been the entire time I was alive. His childhood understanding of his sexuality. Cheating on my mom. Attending conversion therapy. Pretending he was a different person. Lying… to everyone.

I don’t remember what I said. I do remember the flaking paint under my thumbnail. I was present in body, and taking in the information, but my rational and emotional brain went into survival mode. I expected to feel… something…

…but nothing was there.

Cracks in the Foundation

Let’s talk about deconstruction. What actually… is it?

Most of us who have gone through this process fall into three camps, but generally it all starts from the same place: a triggering rupture that knocks a crack in your belief system.

You experience trauma, maybe, but sometimes its more simple. Encountering someone or something that starts to chip away at that foundational wall. A nasty breakup. A divorce. An unexpected death. The downfall of a leader. An unexplained disaster. Recognizing the level of poverty and evil in the world. Meeting someone so different, but so similar to your own humanity… that doesn’t believe.

From there, the three typical paths follow:

1. The Grief-Stages Model1. This is most common amongst the modern exvangelical community, characterized loosely by those world famous Kübler-Ross stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.

2. The Therapy Model2. Similar, but with some tweaks. This includes doubt and questioning, intensifying our lens and research into the church, separation or rejection of theological principles, followed by a final acceptance or exit.

3. The Logical, or Rhetorical Model3. A much harder-edged approach, focused on rejection of the church, rejection of the word of god, and finally the rejection of god itself on mostly logical and scientific grounds.

Structurally, each of these is founded in either grief (endured pain we did not bring on ourselves) or analysis (subtractive, a destruction of what we were taught), and each is a to-me posture. Something is happening to me, or something is being removed without my consent. None of them supplies agency, or anything we could do about it. We just get to take it, and respond.

What happens next? Research psychologist Daryl Van Tongeren4 and his colleagues have identified three outcomes:

1. Building a modified Christian faith. Finding homes in the more progressive or emerging christian church movements. Walking back through the door, with a different perspective.

2. Religious modularity. Entering into and incorporating broader ‘spirituality,’ naturalism, and other historical faith traditions. Expanding the universe of faith.

3. Deidentification, or becoming a ‘Done.’ This includes the four D's: disbelief in core tenets, disengagement from emotional connection with the divine, discontinuance of religious rules, and disaffiliation from religious communities.

Me? With the sudden lack of firm foundation, the whole building imploded. I unconsciously became a Done.

Back to the Bench

Here is what I didn’t immediately understand, sitting on that bench: I thought a belief had broken.

A belief breaking is survivable. Beliefs break all the time. You lose one and the others hold you up while you find a replacement. That’s how a healthy structure is supposed to work.

But I didn’t have beliefs. I had an architecture. And in that architecture, every answer was critically load-bearing for every other answer. Remember the list?

• Why do bad things happen? Answer.

• What is my purpose? Answer.

• Who am I? Answer.

• What happens when I die? Answer.

• Why do I feel this way? Answer.

Pull one brick and you don’t get a hole in a wall. You get the whole thing coming down on your head, because the answers were holding each other up.

Every single one of them ran through the same structural beam: my father, the church, my culture, and the God they gifted me as identity, are trustworthy. They are TRUE.

Unconscious Deconstruction

I want to be precise about the word unconscious, because people hear “deconstruction” and picture a guy with a journal and a reading list, thoughtfully dismantling his theology. Probably sporting a rockin’ man-bun.

That was not me. I did not initially consciously deconstruct anything. Deconstruction implies a deconstructor. I didn’t have that capacity. I was in unconscious survival mode.

And in the cloud of dust, standing in the rubble, in what we in rehab would describe as existing outside of our window of tolerance5, I ran.

I spent the majority of the next decade being pretty much the opposite of that first quarter-of-my-life-Keith. I developed the mindset of total control. Absolute independence. Being told what to do didn’t work out so well… so let’s just reject all authority.

I moved across the country. I shared my past with noone, at least not the deep parts. Definitely not the painful parts. I shifted into “by me” mode, hard.

I’m in charge. I will make my own way. Family? eh. Old friends? who needs ‘em. Any level of support: community, emotional, spiritual, or financial? nah, I’m good. I’m a self-made MANNN.

The pendulum swung hard the other way. What was a culture of sobriety, humility, prudence, joy… became a life of tequila, silent judgement, strippers, and depression.

Down by the River

The turn wasn’t a revelation. Sure, it was fun. But I don’t want to skip over how unglamorous it was, because everyone’s story does the mountaintop thing here and I don’t have one.

Yes, I have a fun story about building my own self-sustaining tiny home in a school bus (with full solar, hot water, internet, everything the modern vanlifer would love to have!)… but the honest version?

I spent a few years stopping at WalMarts in small towns across the midwest and deep south buying booze for the week before I disappeared back into the woods in drunken self-isolation and insomnia.

I had action. I could do things… but no motivation. No more reason to exist. And it was awful.

Here’s what nobody tells you about agency: in that mode, it arrives as a bill, not a gift.

In the last part, I told you the certainty was the most secure I’ve ever felt in my life, and that it was not a burden, it was a gift. I meant it.

Somebody else answered all the questions and I got to spend my energy on execution and compliance. Do you understand what a subsidy that is? I got twenty-two years of free rent on the hardest questions a human being faces.

“By me” is where the rent comes due.

Why do bad things happen? You tell me. What’s your purpose? You tell me. Who are you? You tell me — and you no longer get to say “a sinner saved by grace,” so what’s left? What happens when you die? You tell me, and you have to actually mean it, at 3am, alone.

And the big summary question at the core: What’s... the point?

Not in a self-harm way, but in a deeply, terrifyingly existential “holy crap, if I’m really a human being… why am I here?” way.

That’s the part I didn’t expect. I’d been a straight-A student of a very demanding faith, and it turned out I had no idea how to answer a question. I’d only ever learned to recite one.

And there’s nobody to blame. That’s the real cost. In the old system, my failures were sin and my successes were grace, and either way I was off the hook. “By me” repossesses both. Every bad call is mine. Every good one is mine. It’s the loneliest accounting I’ve ever done.

But I was doing it. Me. Not being done to.

For a while, that felt like the end of the story. It wasn’t.

The Sun Also Rises.

Because that unconscious version of “by me” has its own trap, and I walked straight into it, at speed, with the same gusto.

If you white-knuckle authorship long enough, and if you are the sole author of your meaning, your morality, your worth, all of it… you eventually discover that the self is a small room.

You built the floor yourself, so you know exactly how thin it is. And the certainty you thought you’d escaped comes back in through the side door, wearing your own face this time, which makes it much harder to see.

I had traded a God who had all the answers for a self who had to have all the answers. Turns out that’s the same architecture. I just moved into the penthouse.

There’s a third state. It’s not “to me,” and it’s not that absentminded “by me.”

Up next: hitting the ceiling of self-authorship, what actually lives on the other side of it, and how conscious reconstruction differs from just building the same building again with better materials.

Come along, my friend. ‘Cause I can’t muscle my way through this next part alone… and that’s kinda the point.

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Did any of this land for you? The unconscious part especially: the stretch where you kept doing the thing long after you had a reason to. I'd love to hear your story. ❤️

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Two decades later, he sat beside me on a cast-iron bench and revealed that he had been committing the most heinous of sins in our framework of faith… since before I was born.

It broke me.

Now, I need you to understand something before I share more about this thing called conscious reconstruction. You have to know who and what was sitting there, otherwise my collapse is just another story about a dude who lost his religion, and there are thousands of those. So hear this context:

This is about what it costs when you were very, very good at it, and absolutely nothing could EVER rock your foundation.

When you’re a fish, all the ocean is air.

If you really knew me, you would know that the first 20+ years of my life were, honestly, pretty great. I grew up in a semi-affluent area, had a loving, caring, and complete family, and never really wanted for anything.

One major reason for my positive childhood? The church.

My parents were both born-again, evangelical Christians. My dad’s family grew up in the charismatic tradition of Assemblies of God (yep, no smoking, drinking, dancing, playing cards, etc… and yes. before you ask… speaking in tongues was common in that church).

Growing up, we found a wonderful community in our local nondenominational church, and that community became my world. Sunday school. Youth group(s). Heading to Chili’s or The Old Country Buffet with several other families after sunday services, game night at the Gruen’s.

My world, excepting the time I spent at public school, was church. By the time I was a senior in high school, I was attending some form of church-related activity 5-6 times a week. And I loved it.

Because of my early aptitude for music, that became my gift. I sang in choir. My dad played piano and organ, and I eagerly followed in his footsteps. I helped run the worship band, and we toured around New England supporting church camps and retreats. In college, I lead 1,300 students in worship twice a week for four years. I was the one welcoming my peers into communion with the Holy Spirit from the stage.

I also took to heart one of the great commandments of our community: being Christian yourself wasn’t enough - we needed to be constantly on the lookout for non-believers to save. So, I prayed at the flagpole every year. I led a very visible bible study in our high school hallways. I helped found and run an evangelical outreach concert series every summer, capped off by an altar call. I invited my friends to youth group, and was overwhelmed with pride when the first one of them accepted Jesus. I was GOOD at this.

If you grew up like me, you know the feeling: this wasn’t a choice - and when it was presented as one, there was really only one right answer - keep the faith. As a naturally non-conflict human who also had a strongly held sense of perfectionism, any deviation from the common path of this faith community felt impossible and destructive.

Then, there was the foundational truth underpinning everything: from the moment I was conceived, I was broken. A sinner. A heavy dose of the original sin coursed thru my veins. I had no choice but to rely on the grace of God if I wanted to experience anything other than eternal hell and damnation.

And so that’s what I did… with gusto! A good Christian boy. Doing good Christian things. Relying on the cross to save me from my terrible innate nature.

By the time I was old enough to ask whether any of it was true, I already knew every answer. That is how it works: the answers arrive first.

You just get to react and repent, you dirty sinner…

Life in the Ocean

Here is the thing about that framework: it worked.

Not in a vague, comforting way: it worked like the machine it was designed to be.

Every question had an unbreakable answer, and all the answers connected to each other, and the whole structure held.

• Why do bad things happen? Answer.

• What is my purpose? Answer.

• Who am I? Answer.

• What happens when I die? Answer.

• Why do I feel this way? Answer.

How should I approach this funny feeling I have about that girl in class?

Well, God has set aside a perfect partner for you. She’ll be the answer to all your hopes and dreams - and of course, she’ll be smokin’ hot too. So, until you find her and God confirms it (somehow you’ll know!), you’d better go right ahead and kiss dating goodbye. (My parents gave me that book shortly before a 6th grade dance. It became a second bible to me.)

What about my secular friends?

Well, just know that you need to be really, really careful around them. Don’t get too close, or else they’ll use Satan’s power to lead you astray into things like sex, drugs, or (gasp) rock and roll… or emo music, as was the day’s trap. Listen to more Switchfoot or Stephen Curtis Chapman instead.

And ohhh lord. You can forgive most sins… but what about being anything other than a straight man, waiting patiently for that God-fearing housewife and 2.5 kids?

That’s excommunicable.

How are we supposed to multiply the kingdom of God if the world becomes overrun by Adams and Steves?

There was a gay kid in my class, and not only did I actively avoid him… I eviscerated him among friends behind his back. Real Housewives style. My 11th grade brain saw him as anathema.

To be clear: I’m not confessing this so you will absolve me. I’m telling you because you can’t understand what exploded my faith unless you know that I had already answered the question. Years before it was ever asked…

The framework had a verdict. And I had delivered it. Out loud. More than once.

You’re gay? Fuck you.

Life is actually pretty simple when you only take what’s been preached to you and never take agency or need to make an important choice. Everything about the hard questions in life was already solved! All I needed to do was just… go along. And going along in that ‘to me’ mindset was amazing.

I have never since had that… certainty. And let’s be brutally honest: it was not a burden. It was a gift.

It was the most secure I have ever felt in my life.

Waves on the Surface

Of course, there were moments that defied the structure.

The porn I downloaded (line by excruciating line) over dial-up on the living room computer was… awesome.

Those kids in youth group who smoked weed behind the sanctuary? They were the funniest, most popular guys in the crew.

The creeping sense of deep sadness late at night - that I would later understand as major depressive disorder - shouldn’t be there if we were made in the image of God, right? Must be just another instance of my natural-born sin-ness breaking through. Time to pray…

So sure, I bumped into issues with the framework. But I didn’t do anything with any of them. Just keep swimming…

When the structure is holding, why make waves? A hairline crack in a wall you are standing inside of is not important. Its still just a wall.

Then came… The Kraken

And with that depth of life and belief surrounding me, there I was:

Fresh college graduate. Embarking on my adult mission for Christ. I had a stage, an answer for everything, and a framework that had never once failed me.

I had never been wrong about anything that mattered.

And then, I was.

The person, the program, and the structure that underpinned the entirety of my life and identity… imploded.

Up next? The wreckage, unconscious deconstruction, and moving from a “to me” to “by me” state of being.

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I was the kid who led the Bible study. I was the guy leading thousands in worship every week.

Middle school, high school, college. I ran the small groups. I ran the worship bands. I was the one leading those ‘sinners’ to Jesus.

Evangelicalism was not something I inherited and tolerated. I was fluent in it. I was good at it.

I didn't drift into evangelicalism. I was a believer with a stage.

Then, the earthquake:

“I’m… gay.”

My dad came out when I was twenty-three, and the faith I had built my whole identity on could not survive those two simple words.

Everything I had been handed told me what that meant, and what I was supposed to do with it: run away!

And in the space of one conversation none of it worked anymore. The framework that had explained everything about my life could not hold the one thing that mattered most. It did not crack... it exploded.

Our culture has a tidy word for what comes after that:

Deconstruction.

It is a genre now. It has hosts and hashtags and a whole shared language for pulling the old structure down beam by beam.

Don’t get me wrong, the taking-apart is real, life-altering work. But… notice where almost every version of that story ends: in the rubble.

Walls down, human standing in the wreckage, map blank, identity stripped. Everyone claps for the demolition, but nobody talks about the morning after.

For me, deconstruction was never the hard part. Anyone can burn a house down. The question is whether you can live in what you build next. What, I mean, really… what’s the point?!

Inbetween bouts of deep introspection and absolute tequila-rejection after that moment, I’ve spent decades coaching executives, teams, and startup leaders. And kept encountering this nagging pattern…

Same core beliefs, but different contexts. People with every marker of control who still felt life was something being done to them. And what moved them was never a better plan, it was one brutal little shift: From “this is happening to me” to “I am choosing what to do here. Choosing how I want to respond.”

It worked for me here, too. Not the negative, house-burning sensation of deconstruction, but a grounded, whole-ness. Agency. Tools. Ways of thinking.

It turned my bitter deconstruction into a conscious reconstruction. A win-for-all. A deep claim to my full responsibility over my life and spirituality. A path forward out of the rubble.

What I learned in this work forms this foundation: Three shifts.

To Me.

The faith failed me. The church hurt me. God went silent. Sometimes every word of it is true… but you still can’t build a life from that seat, because the power always sits somewhere you are not.

You’re the victim, at the whim of everything else. You only have the ability to react to the things you experience from a back foot.

By me.

You take the control back. You decide what you believe, what you keep, what was never yours to carry. Core to this is that shift: moving from obedience to agency. You have the ability to create the story. Your story.

Rather than responding blindly or reacting from long-held patterns and motivations, you’re aware of the choices you have. It’s not “I SHOULD” but “I COULD” - making choices without all that shame and blame.

Through me.

You hold your spiritual identity with open hands and your own authority. You create the reality you desire. You approach life and your place in it with conscious choice.

For some, that is something new from the ground up. For some, it’s exploring new faith traditions or combinations of shared pathways. For others, it is walking back through that old door as a person who chose it for themselves this time.

Beyond Deconstruction

Now hear the uncomfortable part:

This is not a movement to get you out of the church.

It is not a movement to drag you back in.

Both roads are open.

I care about exactly one thing: whether you are moving on in conscious purpose, or just reacting blindly to the last thing that hurt you.

Most of the deconstruction conversation never gets there. It hands you a crowbar and calls it freedom. But…

A crowbar is not a life.

Conscious Reconstruction is for the people standing in the cleared space who know there is a next step and cannot find it.

For anyone done with a conversation that only knows how to tear down.

For the ones ready to move from a faith that happened to them into beliefs they build with their own hands.

There is no finished map. This thing barely has a name. So we draw it as we go, with real tools, not a pep talk.

If that is where you are, come with me.

Subscribe, and let’s build.