Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Unopened Folder
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. Not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Upened Folder. Here we go. There's a folder sitting on a vice president's desk that has not been opened in three weeks. It holds the full performance numbers for the product line she launched two years ago, the one she still defends in every leadership meeting. She knows the quarter was soft. She's seen the summary slide, the one with the rounded numbers, and the hopeful arrow. What she hasn't done is open the actual file and read every line. Some part of her already suspects what's in there. That's exactly why it's still closed. She keeps finding other things to do first emails, a budget review, anything that isn't that folder. Here's the line that names what she's avoiding. It comes from Joseph Campbell. He said, The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you were looking for. Campbell spent most of his life studying myths from cultures that never spoke to each other, and he kept finding the same shape inside all of them. A hero gets called toward something hard. The hero refuses at first. Eventually the hero goes in anyway, usually into some place dark and literal, a cave, a forest, the belly of a whale. He named this pattern The Hero's Journey. It became the spine of his best known book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, published in 1949. Decades later, he sat for a series of televised conversations with Bill Moyers, taped not long before his death. He kept returning to this one image. Not the fight that follows, not the victory at the end, the cave itself and the refusal to walk into it. Bring that back to the folder on the desk. It isn't dramatic. Nobody's being asked to slay anything, but it's the same shape Campbell spent a career describing. Something waits behind a door she keeps choosing not to open, and the waiting is doing more damage than whatever is actually inside. Now here's where this gets misread. People hear face your fears and turn it into a general instruction to be braver about everything all the time. Take the scary trip, have the scary conversation, try the scary idea. That version is a poster. It treats fear as a category instead of a location. Campbell wasn't describing courage as a personality trait that you either have or you do not. He was pointing at one specific cave, the one you already know the entrance to, because you're the one who keeps walking a different way around it. The reframe is smaller and more exact than general bravery, which is what makes it harder to fake. It starts with a plain question. What is the one thing right now that you're organizing your schedule around not doing? Not a hypothetical fear, not fear in general. The actual folder, the actual conversation, the actual number you have not looked at closely. Most people, if they're honest, can name it in about five seconds. The hard part was never identifying the cave. The hard part is admitting you already know exactly where it is. So here's something that's worth naming pretty plainly. It's easier than ever to hand an AI tool that folder and ask for three bullet points back instead. The tool will read every line without flinching because it has nothing at stake in what the numbers say about the choice that she made two years ago. It can hand back a clean summary in seconds. No dread attached to any of it, no history weighing it down. That summary might even be accurate. But reading a summary of the cave is not the same as walking into it yourself. The discomfort was never a side effect to routaround. It was the signal telling her exactly where to look. Outsourcing the reading outsources the very moment that was supposed to teach her something. So here's what I want you to carry this week. Name the one thing you're currently avoiding, specifically, not in general terms. Then ask what you're actually afraid that you'll find if you go look directly. Set a real time to open it. Not someday, a specific day. Go back to that folder on the desk. Nothing about it gets less true by staying closed. She already knows, somewhere, roughly what it says. Campbell's whole point was never that the cave is safe. It's that the thing that she's actually looking for, the honest read on her own decision, was never anywhere else.