Tracing forward from these remembrances of things past gives us the chance to re-experience and reframe these beliefs. Doing so liberates us from the confounding forces we label as fate, destiny, or—even more frequently—the other person’s “fault.” We will never sort through them all, of course, but what we don’t sort through impedes our happiness. It tricks us into using the rest of our lives—and the people we love, the professions we choose, the organizations we lead—to try to close the gaping wounds from childhood.

My friend, the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, says, “To live well is to see wisely and to see wisely is to tell stories.” I’ll go further; telling stories helps us live well. Telling the stories of our lives, telling the stories of the lives around us, helps us make sense of the world and, in the end, be wise.

Wise and sacred. Years ago, as I was beginning to distance myself more fully from that day, in 2002, when I teetered on the edge of my own Ground Zero, I was alone, naked, in a desert in southern Utah. On the second day of a three-night water-only fast, as part of a fourteen-day quest, I settled into the meaning of the true name I’d be given: Holder. Holder of Stories of the Heart. Holder of my stories. Holder of the stories of those I love. Holder of the stories of the brokenhearted leaders who come to me.

For many, that place where we’ve come to think we belong has become stultifying; it’s where we are small, unseen, unsure, and unwilling to claim our strengths, our capacities, our courage, our leadership. We are frozen by the belief that it’s just too dangerous to reach into the black bag and grab hold of the disowned, dismembered parts of ourselves.

All Loyal Soldiers then have one basic task: to keep us safe from the wars that raged in our childhood. No matter how awful these strategies have come to make us feel as adults, they were brilliant in their own ways.

So much of what I’ve learned about growing up came from learning to lead.

In fact, the process of becoming me made me a better leader. The two processes, becoming a leader and becoming ourselves, are intertwined and interdependent; better leaders are better humans and better humans are better leaders. Leadership lessons, then, are, at their core, lessons in humanity.

Sometimes the belief systems that are most difficult to overcome aren’t the ghosts in the machine of our childhood. Sometimes the most difficult belief systems fall under the rubric of “conventional wisdom.” Conventional wisdom, for example, dictates that, in our process of becoming warrior-leaders, we focus on the hard things. Big rocks, folks say knowingly. ‘Break down the big rocks and then focus on the little rocks.’ But how do you discern a big rock from a little rock?

Here’s to the imperfection of memory. Here’s to the way we ‘fiction and fable our lives,’ as the poet Pádraig Ó Tuama, says, ‘in order to tell of things that are more than true.