Which is strange, given what I do for a living.

After working as a maître d’ in a restaurant for many years, I made a shift. I finished my degree in psychology and changed my career path. I’ve been facilitating and coaching people in how to lead themselves and others for over fifteen years. I’ve given keynotes to hundreds. I’ve facilitated workshops to thousands more.

I know the literature. I know the material. Not just from a book, but from standing in front of rooms. Watching it work. For others. And for myself, in many areas of life.

And yet, I couldn’t get myself to post a personal essay online. I’ve tried some short posts, but the real thoughts were always saved for later. For those specific moments. Those perfect written ideas.

What I forgot

One thing has stayed with me since childhood. I specifically remember one of my father’s birthday celebrations. I must have been around 10 years old. The week before, my father bought one of the first surround sound systems. I wanted to show it to family and friends. With my enthusiasm I gathered everyone in the living room. Turned on the TV. Pushed “play” to start the opening scene of The Lion King. Then I started looking at another scene: the guests’ faces. Their wonder from experiencing something they hadn’t before.

I was thrilled. Not by the setup itself, not to boost my ego or show off what we had, but by their reactions. Please feel this, I kept thinking. I want you to feel what I feel. Not because I wanted praise, but because the sharing itself was the point. When their faces lit up, when the experience landed. That was the thing I was looking for.

I became a maître d’ for that reason. Please taste this, please share this experience with me. I became a facilitator and a coach for that reason. A host, to create a space where something could be felt, shared, leading towards an opening up to the world.

But I forgot, at times.

A couple of things that kept the folder closed.

The first is fear. Probably what you expected. To publish is to be seen. To be seen is to open yourself up to the possibility of being misunderstood, or comments that confirm you’re not good enough. And it’s real. At least to me it is.

The second is more interesting. It’s my own foolishness.

I spent years studying exactly why and how people avoid what matters to them. I can teach the frameworks. I can name the mechanisms in three different languages. I’ve applied them in my own life. To my relationships. To how I run my practice. To how I show up for a client on the morning I’d rather not.

And then, on a Tuesday morning, I decide that today is not the day. On Wednesday, again. In itself, not a big deal. We all have those moments of avoidance.

But this one was not something I could reason my way out of.

The frameworks are not theory to me. They are how I live. Or that’s what I kept telling myself. They became a tool for avoidance, especially in the one place where my work becomes visible to people who didn’t ask for it.

That one place where I feel I have something worth sharing, but then think it’s what everybody already knows, or that the ideas are not yet good enough to be seen. That place where you open yourself up to mistakes and failure.

There’s a difference between a room that invited you in and a blank page that didn’t. My own ideas, out in the open, online, have none of that. So I kept choosing the familiar work. The rooms that already knew they wanted me. And I called it being busy.

I’ve walked around it for years. Let me rephrase that: I’ve been avoiding it for years. With real sophistication. With all the subtle excuses I made.

Perfection over progress. The constant question of whether you’re good enough. Reading that extra book to feel more knowledgeable. I fought myself to stay away from what I most wanted, and kept myself from stepping over that one threshold.

I knew enough to know I was avoiding it. That made it worse, not better. I had the language to describe my own stuckness, which was its own kind of trap.

Doubts got bigger, the burden grew heavier and the inner conflict deepened. My solution for a way out was my problem. The diagnosis became a substitute for “the cure.”

What I want to do

When I work with others, I come alive. The faces, the thing landing, learning from them in the moment. That never left. But I forgot it at times.

And now, years later, I’m starting to remember what was always there. What kept calling me back. I want to share because I want to learn, but moreover, I want to see if something lands. Not because I have answers, but because the sharing itself is the point.

I am, in other words, exactly the person this work is for.

This is what I want to do. I am going to publish my way out of my own folder. I am going to do it in public, because doing it in private is the thing that has not worked for going on a decade. I will bring everything I know to bear on the one situation in my life where everything I know has not, so far, been enough.

And, important, I do not claim to know it all. I am not going to pretend to be further along than I am. The more I dive in, the more humbling it gets. I am also not going to pretend to be more lost than I am. I have knowledge, ideas and experience to share.

I’m a host. I love to welcome others, to make a space where something can be shared. But I’ve been a poor host to myself. I didn’t invite the fear and frustration in. I worked my way around it. I left my own work standing at the door.

If you have your own folder, your own course you took with notes you made and posts you drafted and never sent, or you feel you have more to give, then you are the reason this exists. To learn together. To remember, to share with each other, and bring back that meaning in our lives.

You’re Invited.

Antoon