Becoming the Person Who Can Hold the Life You Want
In August of 2014, I flew to San Diego for my first week of Vistage Chair Academy training.
I was terrified. But the good kind of terrified — the kind that means you're finally doing the thing.
And then I got in the registration line.
There were eighty other Chair candidates. I had the registration list in my hand — because of course I did, I'm a preparer — and I started reading through the bios.
Stanford. Harvard. Notre Dame. Former CEOs of companies I recognized. People with track records that read like case studies.
And I stood there in that line, holding my list, with my one-year business degree and my thirty years of being somebody else's number two, and I panicked.
Who did I think I was?
I stayed in that panic longer than I care to admit. But I kept putting one foot in front of the other. And five months later, I launched my first Vistage group.
The little voice, though — that one took longer to fade.
Here's what nobody tells you about finally choosing the life you want:
Wanting it and being able to hold it are two entirely different things.
I had spent three decades learning how to serve someone else's vision. I was exceptional at it. But owning my own business? Running toward my own vision with no one else's structure to operate inside? The disciplines are completely different. And I didn't know what I didn't know until I was already in it.
To become the CEO of my own life, I had a tremendous amount of unbecoming to do first.
The doubt that had been living in me so long it felt like personality. The old habits that had kept me safe in roles that were never fully mine. The stories — oh, the stories — about who I was and wasn't, what I deserved and didn't, what kind of person gets to build something of their own.
And then there were the incongruencies. The gaps between the life I claimed to want and the life I was actually living. An unhappy marriage. My health. Places where I said one thing and lived another. You cannot hold a new life while the old one is pulling at your ankles. I had to get honest about what was out of alignment — not just professionally, but all of it. Values. Choices. The whole picture.
Unbecoming is not comfortable work.
But it's the only way through.
After the unbecoming comes the becoming.
And becoming, I've learned, is not a destination. It's not a moment where you arrive and finally feel ready and the doubt disappears and everything clicks into place.
It's a constant. A direction more than a place.
Becoming more of who you were meant to be. Becoming more you and less the accumulated weight of everyone else's expectations. Becoming someone whose insides and outsides actually match.
I'm still in it. I expect I always will be.
The life I have now — the work, the people I get to sit with, the freedom to lead in a way that's entirely mine — it's everything that burning in my soul was pointing toward for thirty years.
But I couldn't have held it in 2004. Or 2009. Or honestly, even the day I got in that registration line in San Diego.
I had to grow into it. Had to shed some things first. Had to become someone whose capacity matched her ambition.
That's the work nobody puts on the vision board.
But it might be the most important work there is.
So if you're standing in your own registration line right now — reading the bios, wondering who you think you are to be in this room — I want you to know something.
The doubt in your chest is not a sign you're in the wrong place.
It might just be the sound of becoming.
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She's still becoming — and she works with leaders who are ready to do the same.