Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Missing Year
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. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled The Missing Year. Here we go. Let's take a look at a specific afternoon. A woman gets promoted to vice president. The communications team sends over a short bio for her to approve. Two paragraphs. Her degree, her steady rise through three companies, the product launch that made her name inside the industry. It reads clean, reads impressive. One year is missing from it entirely. That's the year her first startup ran out of money and she was laid off along with everyone else. Nobody asked her if it was fine to leave that out. It's just gone. Folded into a phrase like before joining, as if the year never happened. She reads the bio twice, then she approves it anyway. It's easier that way. And a professional bio isn't supposed to have a rough patch running through the middle of it anyway. Every other bio she's ever read looks the same way, clean from start to finish. Here's a line that names what just happened to her story. Comes from Michelle Obama. She wrote, Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It's something to own. She wrote that in the introduction to our memoir, Becoming, which was published in 2018. For years before that book, as one of the most photographed people on earth, other people had a hand in shaping her story. Campaigns simplified it, coverage flattened it into a few reliable angles. By the time she sat down to write her own account, she made a specific choice. She would tell the whole thing. An ordinary childhood on Chicago's South Side, her father's illness, her own doubts. Not just the highlight reel a campaign might have chosen for her. Bring that back to the new vice president in her two paragraphs. She isn't a public figure with a press team managing her image, but the instinct underneath both stories is the same one Obama was pushing against. Smooth the account until it's safe to hand to a stranger. Cut whatever doesn't fit the shape of a success story. Let the tidy version Stand in for the real one. It's easy to get wrong in a one particular way. People here own your own story and assume it means picking your best chapters and telling them with more confidence. Tell the launch story again, a little louder this time. That's not ownership. That's a highlight reel with better lighting. Whatever gets left out doesn't disappear just because it's off the page. It sits there, unexamined, and unexamined things have a way of quietly running a leader anyway. The harder version of owning a story means going back to the part you'd normally trim. Ask what actually happened there, plainly, before you dress it up as a lesson. The year her startup failed was not a gap in her career. It was the year she found out exactly what she does when a company she believed in runs out of runway. That's a not a flaw to write around. That's information nobody else in the room has access to. It's worth being direct about something here. Hand an AI tool a rough list of jobs and dates, and it will turn that into a tight, confident bio in under a minute. It will use phrases like proven track record that sound official the moment they're printed. It will leave out the hard year without even being told to, simply because that year never made it into the prompt. What the tool cannot do is tell you the missing year was the one actually worth keeping. It has no way of knowing what a failure taught you. Because it never once ran out of money or watched a team clear out their desks on a Friday. Deciding which chapters belong in your story is still a decision only you can make, and it takes more judgment than writing a smoother paragraph. Here's something to carry with you this week. Look at whatever version of your story you currently hand to other people. Whether it's a bio, an interview answer, the way you introduce yourself at the start of a conference talk. Find the year or the chapter you've quietly smoothed over. Ask what it would cost to put even one honest sentence about it back in. Go back to the vice president and her two clean paragraphs. The bio and file will probably stay exactly as written, and that's fine. The real work was never really about the document. It's knowing for herself what actually happened during the year she left out, and refusing to let a tidy paragraph talk her out of the fact that it counted. Obama was not telling people to publish every detail of their lives for an audience. She was pointing at something quieter than that. The story belongs to you, whether or not you ever say all of it out loud. Owning it starts with refusing to lie to yourself about which parts are true.