We love to talk about transformation after it happens, whether it’s the bell ringing after the last chemo treatment, the boundary finally set after years of silence, or the career rebuilt from scratch. We tell those stories in the past tense with the clarity that only hindsight provides. We know how they end, which makes them easier to shape into something legible and inspiring and also easier to inhabit.
There is another moment in the transformation story that we rarely talk about: the moment just before. It’s the instant when the old version of you becomes untenable, when something cracks open, when the ground beneath a decision you’ve been avoiding starts to shift. In the moment, it doesn’t feel like the beginning of a great story. It usually feels like fear, grief, or a frustration so deep and so persistent that you’ve started to wonder if something is wrong with you. Or for some of us, it’s confirmation something is wrong with us.
That moment is not the exception. It is the rule.
What the Threshold Actually Feels Like
The psychological research behind inspiration tells us that by definition, inspiration is about a feeling of transcendence. In Sparking Greatness, I describe it as a flash of clarity that allows you to rise above the ordinary and see beyond what you’ve been able to see before. It feels like a sense of openness in the chest, euphoria, even. Transformation, while certainly an element of an inspirational story, may not feel inspirational in the moment. A lot of them don’t. The “pre-work” for transformation often involves a prolonged, uncomfortable season.
In 2016, I left the corporate world which included the executive title, the stability, the identity that came with all of it. I had convinced myself I knew what came next. I would write for other people, as a ghostwriter and developmental editor. I had always dreamed of being a professional writer, I loved writing, described myself to others as a person who has “writer” written on my smallest quark, so it made sense to me at the time.
I tried it. I hated it.
It turned something joyful and creative for me into something…not that. And aside from the shock of finding it wasn’t a good fit (I had been so sure it would be), I kept moving. I taught writing, ran read and critique groups (which I loved). But those weren’t going to sustain me so I dabbled and searched and circled, and the longer I searched, the more the fear crept in. It was less the dramatic, acute fear of a crisis, but something quieter and more corrosive. I was worried that that maybe there wasn’t a “thing”and that I had walked away from something real toward something I had invented.
That season lasted over a year.
I am telling you this not because the story ends badly — it doesn’t — but because that stretch of restlessness and frustration and quiet dread is exactly what the threshold feels like from the inside. It doesn’t announce itself as the prelude to transformation. It just feels like being lost.
Why We Back Away
The threshold is uncomfortable by design. It requires you to sit with the not knowing, which is something most high-achieving people are spectacularly bad at. We are trained to solve, to move, to decide.
The temptation is to manufacture forward motion, grab the next available option, or settle back into something familiar. Sometimes we do exactly that. We back away from the edge, and the transformation that was beginning quietly stalls.
What makes the threshold crossable is not certainty. It is the willingness to stay in the discomfort long enough to let the right thing surface.
The book Sparking Greatness describes three states that create the conditions for inspiration to arrive: spaciousness, stillness, and self-forgetfulness. The first creates room. The second quiets the noise. The third shifts your attention away from your own anxiety and outward toward something larger. Together, they build what the book describes as a kind of garden, a structured openness where inspiration can enter.
This is not passive. It is one of the hardest kinds of discipline there is, when we sit still to be able to be open to what’s going to show up for us.
The Flash Is Not the Arrival
I found my thing at Vistage. I was sitting in the room at Chair Academy and something settled. It was an environment ripe for inspiration – I was in a new place with new people that gave me spaciousness, the nature of the training develops a sense of stillness, and I was surrounded by powerful and successful people with very similar values that gave me a moment of self-forgetfulness where I stopped cataloguing my own uncertainty long enough to feel where I actually was. And I knew. I felt like I was home.
And then the real work began. The group build, the members, the years of learning the craft of what I do now. The flash was not the transformation. It was the beginning of one. The moment just before everything that followed. The flash was the glimpse of what was possible.
That distinction matters because if we only celebrate transformation in its completed form, we accidentally teach people that the threshold is a sign they are off track and that the fear and the grief and the frustration mean they took a wrong turn.
They don’t. They mean you are standing exactly where you need to be.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you are in a season of searching right now, of restlessness or frustration or a quiet nagging sense that something needs to change but you can’t quite see what (or maybe know what but really are dreading that first step), I want to offer you this reframe.
You are not behind. You are not broken. You are not failing to find your thing because your thing doesn’t exist.
You are at the threshold.
And the threshold, uncomfortable as it is, is not the obstacle to your transformation. It is the beginning of it. The moment just before is not wasted time, it’s the condition that makes everything after it possible.
Stay in the garden a little longer and let the stillness do its work and the flash will come.