When Your Soul Sends You a Memo
My soul had been sending me memos for years.
I just kept filing them under someday.
For thirty years I was a number two. A really good one. I served three different CEOs, helped them build their visions, their companies, their legacies. And I told myself a story the whole time — that this was my lane. That I was built for this role. That the people out front were a different kind of person, and I was the kind who made them better.
The story wasn't entirely wrong. I am good at that.
But it was incomplete. And somewhere underneath it, I knew.
There was this restlessness I couldn't quite explain. A burning. A quiet, persistent knowing that I was made for something more — something of my own. I'd feel it and then talk myself out of it. Convince myself I was being ungrateful, unrealistic, too much. That wanting more than what I had was somehow a character flaw instead of a calling.
The memo kept coming. I kept not reading it.
And then, in the span of twenty-four hours, the universe apparently got tired of being subtle.
It started with a Facebook post. I don't even remember whose it was — but I remember the way it landed. Something about it cracked something open. One of those moments where words find the exact bruise you didn't know you had.
Then a friend called. He'd gotten a recruiting letter from Vistage — an organization that places experienced leaders as executive coaches and peer group chairs. He wasn't interested. But he said: This isn't for me. But you? You would be awesome at this.
And then Sally.
Sally looked at me — the way only a real friend looks at you, the kind who has no reason to lie — and said: I would bet my own 401K on your success.
Boom.
Three conversations. Twenty-four hours. Thirty years of memos finally delivered all at once.
I made the call to a Vistage recruiter. I threw my hat in the ring. And in 2014, I became a Vistage Chair — doing work I genuinely believe I was built for, in a way that is entirely, finally, mine.
I think about those thirty years a lot. I don't regret them — they made me who I am and gave me everything I bring to the work I do now. But I do think about all the memos I received and quietly set aside. All the restlessness I explained away. All the times the knowing showed up and I chose the comfortable story instead.
Here's what I've learned, sitting with leaders who are in their own version of what I was in:
The soul doesn't send one memo and give up. It's remarkably patient. It will keep sending the signal — quietly at first, then less quietly, then in the form of three conversations in twenty-four hours because apparently that's what it takes.
The question is never whether the memo arrives.
The question is how long you're willing to make it wait.
What's yours saying right now?
And how long have you been filing it under someday?
Nancy Girres is an executive coach and Vistage Chair based in Fort Collins, Colorado. She spent thirty years as a number two before finally reading her own memo. She works with leaders who are ready to read theirs.