What Are You Preparing For?
Years ago, in the very first coaching conversation I had with someone who would eventually become one of the most important people in my life, I asked a question: What are you preparing for? I didn’t know then how significant that question would become. I certainly didn’t know that years later, after one of the hardest seasons of my life, I would find myself asking an even bigger question: What has my life been preparing me for?
For the last 15 years, I’ve done a lot of things that, at the time, seemed completely separate. I wrote my first 10-Year Letter. I’ve spent thousands of hours coaching people. I learned to lead others and, more importantly, myself. I ran marathons, completed a 70.3 Ironman, did Murph Challenges, and ran at least one mile outside every single day for 631 consecutive days. I built things, lost things, and rebuilt things. I raised kids. Loved my bride. Made mistakes. Faced fears. Wrote a book. Learned to trust, surrender, let go, and let other people lead. I thought I was living my life. Maybe I was preparing.
None of those things happened because I knew what was coming. I didn’t. And then life called.
A few weeks ago, I learned that the cancer in my throat had survived radiation and chemotherapy and was progressing aggressively. My airway was closing, and a surgery we thought was still weeks away suddenly needed to happen immediately. Five days later, I walked into the hospital for an 11.5-hour surgery. When I woke up, my larynx was gone, my neck had been reconstructed using tissue and blood vessels from my legs, I couldn’t speak, and I was breathing through a permanent opening in my neck. But I was breathing. I was alive.
Fourteen days later, I walked out of the hospital. The next day, we received the final pathology report. The cancer is gone. I still have months of healing in front of me and another 70 days before I get my prosthetic voice. My body is rebuilding, I’m learning how to live and communicate differently, and somewhere in all of this, those five words came back to me: What are you preparing for?
Were those 631 consecutive days preparing my body for an 11.5-hour surgery? Were the marathons, the 70.3 Ironman, and the Murph Challenges preparing me to walk hospital laps when my legs had been cut open and used to help rebuild me? Were 15 years of writing about my future preparing me to fight this hard for the opportunity to keep living it? Was learning to lead preparing me for a season when I would have to surrender, trust, and let other people lead?
I don’t know. Maybe that’s the point. You don’t prepare by knowing what’s coming. You prepare by becoming.
We spend so much of our lives preparing for things we can see: the meeting, the race, the promotion, the next goal, retirement. But some of the most significant moments of our lives will never make it onto a calendar. The phone will ring. The doctor will walk into the room. An opportunity will appear. Someone you love will need you. Something will end. Something will begin. Life will call. We don’t always get to choose when or how. We do get to choose who answers.
I understand that differently today. Every hard thing you choose to do matters. Every promise you keep to yourself matters. Every time you choose courage over comfort matters. Every time you love someone well matters. Every time you face something head on matters. Every day you spend becoming stronger, wiser, kinder, healthier, more faithful, more disciplined, more present, more you…it matters.
You may think you’re training for a race, building a business, raising a family, writing a letter, getting healthy, or doing something hard simply because you told yourself you would. Maybe you are. Maybe you’re also becoming the person you’ll need to be for a moment you can’t see yet.
Years ago, I asked someone a question I thought was for them. Today, I think I finally understand my own answer: Become the person who’s ready when life calls.
I have no idea what life will ask of me next, and I don’t need to. I just want to keep becoming. So I’ll leave you with the same question: What are you preparing for? You don’t have to know the answer. Pay attention to who you’re becoming. Because someday, life will call. Be ready.
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