The Reclaimed Man · Episode 5

The 3 Roles Costing You The Life You Want

A mate texted me last week. Three words: how are you? And I sat there with my thumb over the screen for longer than I want to admit — because I’m good ends the conversation, and there was a part of me that wanted the follow-up.

Nothing dramatic happened. I typed I’m good, he sent back something about the footy, life went on. But I caught it — and what I caught myself doing has a name. It’s one of three.

Victim, Rescuer, Persecutor. The Karpman Drama Triangle. Three roles that need each other to exist, that nobody ever agreed to play, and that spin so fast you can get through all three inside a single conversation. Between them they run most of the conflict in a man’s life, and they cost more than you’d think.

Mine that morning was the Victim, and the deal is a good one: be sick, and people will come. You don’t have that particular deal — good, I wouldn’t wish it on you. But you get offered the same role every single day. In the car. Across the table at the pub. At the kitchen bench at ten o’clock at night when you’re tired and someone asks how it’s going.

Yours might be the economy — and it is hard out there right now, that’s not me being dismissive. It might be the business. The interest rates. The clients who don’t value what you do. It might be your wife, and what she doesn’t understand about the pressure you’re carrying. Your kids, and what they’ve cost you. Your father, thirty years ago.

And here’s what makes the offer so good: every one of those might be completely true. Nobody’s asking you to lie. You’re just being handed a place to stand where none of it is yours to do anything about. Most men take it without ever noticing there was a choice on the table at all.

The way out isn’t three roles to avoid. It’s three to grow into: Creator, Coach, Challenger. Same instinct. Matured.

Including the part I got wrong, and the question that stops me in my tracks: who have you already decided isn’t strong enough?

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

OPEN

A mate texted me last week. Three words.

How are you?

And I sat there with my thumb over the screen for longer than I want to admit.

Because here’s the truth. I’m well. I look well — people tell me that constantly, usually with a bit of surprise in their voice, like they were expecting something else when I walked in. And I feel well. That’s the honest answer. Two words. I’m good.

But I didn’t type that straight away. There was a pause. And in that pause was something I’m not proud of.

I’m good ends the conversation. I’m good means no follow-up message. No phone call on the way home. No one asking, gently, how I’m really doing.

There’s a part of me that wanted the follow-up.

Now, nothing dramatic happened. I typed I’m good, he sent back something about the footy, and life went on. But I caught it. I caught myself, mid-text, being quietly tempted to take a deal that was sitting there on the table.

The deal is this. Be sick, and people will come.

That’s not a small thing to notice about yourself.

Now, you probably don’t have that particular deal on the table. Good. I wouldn’t wish it on you.

But you’ve got one.

Yours might be the economy. And it is hard out there right now — that’s not me being dismissive, it’s genuinely hard. It’s also the easiest sentence in the world to stand behind. Yours might be the business. The interest rates. The clients who don’t value what you do.

It might be your wife. What she doesn’t understand about the pressure you’re carrying.

It might be your kids. What they’ve cost you. What you put down to raise them.

It might be your father, thirty years ago.

And here’s what makes the deal so good — every one of those might be completely true. Nobody’s asking you to lie. You’re just being handed a place to stand where none of it is yours to do anything about.

And it gets offered to you every single day. In the car. Across the table at the pub. At the kitchen bench at ten o’clock at night when you’re tired and someone asks how it’s going.

Most men take it without ever noticing there was a choice on the table at all.

And let me name what the deal actually is, because I think it matters that we call it what it is.

What’s being offered to you — every time — is the chance to become a victim.

Now, I want to handle that word carefully, because it’s a hard one to hear about yourself and I’m not throwing it at you as an insult. Being a victim is not a character flaw. It’s not weakness. It’s a role — a position a man can stand in — and every one of us steps into it. I stepped into it sitting in my kitchen with my thumb over a screen, and I’m the one making the podcast about it.

It’s a role. And there are two others that come with it.

I only caught mine because I’ve got a model in my head that lets me see it.

That’s what today is about.

MENTAL MODELS

I want to start somewhere slightly wider than the topic, because I think this matters more than the topic itself.

A mental model is a filter you look at the world through.

You’ve got dozens of them. Hundreds. Most of them you’ve never chosen and never named. They were handed to you by your father, your first boss, the culture you grew up in, the school you went to. And they’re running constantly, underneath everything, deciding what you notice and what you miss.

Think of them as the operating system. You don’t see the operating system. You just see what it lets you see.

Now here’s the thing about a bad model. It doesn’t feel like a model. It feels like reality. It feels like just how things are. That’s what makes it so hard to get out from underneath.

And here’s the thing about a good one. It doesn’t give you answers. It gives you a place to stand outside the situation, so you can look at it instead of being inside it.

You’ve heard me use one of these already. This is not happening to me. It’s happening for me. That’s a mental model. Nothing about my circumstances changed the day I picked it up. What changed is what I could see.

Here’s another one, and this one I got from Tony Robbins years ago. The quality of your life is determined by the quality of the questions you ask. Ask why does this always happen to me and your brain will loyally go and find you an answer. Ask what is this here to teach me and it will go and find you a different one. Same brain. Same situation. Different question.

I’m going to be sharing a lot of these with you over the coming episodes, because I think the collection of models a man carries is one of the great quiet advantages in a life. It’s not intelligence. It’s not effort. It’s having a better lens.

Today I want to give you one of the most useful I’ve ever come across. It has changed how I show up in my marriage, in my business, with my kids, and in the middle of a cancer diagnosis.

It’s called the Karpman Drama Triangle.

THE THREE ROLES

It’s named after Stephen Karpman, a psychiatrist who in 1968 published a short paper called Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis. He noticed something looking at the stories we tell children — that almost all of them run on the same three characters. And then he noticed that we don’t leave those characters behind in childhood. We take them into our marriages, our workplaces, our families.

Three roles. That’s it.

The Victim. This is happening to me. I’m powerless here. There’s nothing I can do.

The Rescuer. Let me handle it. You can’t do this without me.

The Persecutor. You’re the problem. This is your fault.

And here’s the part that makes it a triangle rather than a list — the three roles need each other. A Rescuer cannot exist without a Victim. A Victim cannot exist without something persecuting him. The moment one person steps into a corner, the whole shape assembles itself around them.

Let me show you how fast this happens, using the last twelve months of my life.

When you’re diagnosed with cancer, the world hands you the Victim role before you’ve had a chance to decide anything. It’s in how the urologist talks to you. It’s in the oncologist’s language. It’s in the faces of people in the waiting room, in the tone of the pamphlets, in the way the whole culture around illness speaks. Nobody sits you down and says you are now a victim. They don’t have to. It’s in the air.

And I’m still working on that one. Daily. That’s not a story about something I sorted out last year — that’s this morning, and probably tomorrow morning too. Because so much of it pulls you toward powerlessness, and powerlessness is exactly the thing that will kill you fastest.

Now the Rescuer. I asked my oncologist a straightforward question. Is there anything I can do to improve my outcome?

He said, maybe eat a few more fruits and vegetables.

That was it. That was the whole answer.

Now, I don’t think he was being unkind. I think he was being exactly what he’d been trained to be. But listen to what’s underneath that sentence. There’s nothing meaningful for you to do here. I’ll handle it. He is the hero of this story. I’m the one being carried.

Lauren too, and this is harder to say because she does it out of love. When I’m in pain — physically, mentally, emotionally — everything in her wants to step in and carry it for me. Of course it does. That’s what love does when it’s frightened.

And the Persecutor? Obviously the cancer. That one’s easy.

But it’s not just the cancer. It was in the language too. Chemical castration — I talked about that in episode four. That phrase, delivered clinically, coldly, by men who’d said it a hundred times before. That landed on me like an attack.

And here’s the one I like least. Sometimes the Persecutor is me. When I lie there at two in the morning going back through it — the stress I carried for years, the things I ate, the signals I ignored, the what did I do to cause this. That’s not reflection. That’s a man prosecuting himself.

So look at what’s happened. In one situation, I’m the Victim of the disease, the system positions itself as my Rescuer, my wife is pulled toward Rescuer by love, and the Persecutor is the cancer, the language, and on a bad night, me.

Here’s the thing I most want you to take out of this section.

The roles rotate. Fast.

You can be the Rescuer at breakfast, the Persecutor by lunchtime, and the Victim by dinner. I’ve done all three inside a single conversation. That’s not unusual. That’s how the triangle actually works — it spins.

And the spinning is the problem.

Because while you’re going round, nothing is being learned. Nothing gets resolved. You feel like you’re moving — there’s heat, there’s effort, there’s a lot going on — and you’re getting absolutely nowhere. That’s how a situation in a man’s life can run for years without ever changing shape. Same argument. Same frustration. New decade.

You can’t transcend something you’re still going round inside of.

I’ll come back to that properly, because I think it’s the most important thing in this episode. For now just hold this: the triangle spins, and while you’re on it, you don’t get off.

VICTIM AND CREATOR

Now, there’s a way out of this. It’s not mine — it comes from a man called David Emerald, in a book called The Power of TED. And what he offers isn’t three roles to avoid. It’s three roles to grow into.

Here’s the frame I want you to hold, because I think it’s the whole episode.

The three roles in the drama triangle are the immature versions of three good things.

Same instinct. Undeveloped.

Which means nobody listening to this has to stop caring about their family. Nobody has to become cold. The energy isn’t the problem. The maturity of how you’re expressing it is.

Let’s take them one at a time.

The Victim’s mature counterpart is the Creator.

And the difference between them is one word. Agency.

The Victim asks why is this happening to me. The Creator asks what do I actually want, and what’s the next thing I can do from here.

And underneath that question sits the thing that really separates them. Power.

The Victim has none. That’s the defining feature of that corner — not that life is hard, because life is hard for everyone. It’s that there’s nothing he can do about it. The power all sits somewhere else. With the economy. With the diagnosis. With his wife, his boss, his father. Whoever’s fault it is, that’s where the power went.

The Creator has some. Maybe not much. Sometimes the only power on the table is what he decides the thing is going to mean.

Viktor Frankl wrote about this from inside a concentration camp. Man’s Search for Meaning. They took everything from him — his family, his work, his freedom, his name, the clothes off his back. And what he came to was that there was one thing they could not reach. The meaning he made of it. He called it the last of the human freedoms — to choose your own attitude in any given set of circumstances.

Now that is not much. Let’s be honest about that. But it is not nothing either. And that’s the part I want you to hear, because it’s the foundation. Once a man has hold of that, he’s got something to build on. Everything else gets stacked on top of it.

The Creator’s whole job is to go looking for where the power actually is — and then use it.

That’s the difference. It’s not optimism. It’s not positive thinking. It’s powerless versus powerful.

And the Creator works from here. Not from where he wishes he was standing. From the actual situation, with the actual constraints, in the actual body he’s got.

Now let me come back to that text message, because I owe you the rest of it.

The Victim corner has a payoff. It has to, or nobody would ever stand in it.

Sympathy. Attention. Check-in messages. Being let off the hook for the thing you were quietly afraid to attempt anyway. Somebody else carrying the weight of a decision you don’t want to make.

With cancer, that payoff is handed to you on a plate. Socially approved. Nobody would judge me for taking it. Some people would think less of me for not taking it.

And there is a part of me that wants it. I’m telling you that plainly because I think most men will recognise the shape of it in their own life, even if their version isn’t illness. The bad back that’s become an identity. The business partner who did the wrong thing in 2019. The father who wasn’t there. All of it real. All of it genuinely unfair.

And all of it still paying out.

The question isn’t is it true. It usually is. The question is what is this costing me to keep holding.

Because here’s what I want for myself. I want to hold a vision of a man who is strong, healthy and vital. That vision and that text message can’t both win. Every time I lean toward the sympathy, I’m voting against the man I’m trying to become.

So I typed I’m good.

And most days, that’s the whole practice. Just that.

RESCUER AND COACH

Alright. Let’s move round to the next corner of the triangle.

And I’ll be upfront with you — this is the one I’ve spent most of my life standing in.

The Rescuer’s mature counterpart is the Coach.

And this is the corner where good men get caught, because the Rescuer feels wonderful. It feels like love. It feels like leadership. The community claps for it — the guy who steps in, who sorts it out, who carries everyone.

And think about how deep this is wired into us. Every action film you’ve ever watched has a Rescuer at the centre of it. That’s the hero. That’s the entire job — he turns up, he saves them, the music swells, he walks off into the dust. We’ve been fed that picture since we were boys.

Karpman found it in fairy tales. It’s the same story. Bigger budget.

But look at what the film never shows you.

It doesn’t show what it cost him. What he gave up, what he’s carrying, who he had to become to do it.

And it never shows you what happened to the people he saved. Whether they got any stronger. Whether they learned a thing. Whether they could handle it themselves the next time it came round.

The credits roll before the bill arrives.

Now, run it back through the model.

For me to be the Rescuer, somebody has to be the Victim.

Sit with that one. If I am rescuing you, I have decided something about you. I’ve decided you don’t have what it takes. I’ve made an assessment of your capability and I’ve come up short on your behalf.

I don’t want victims in my family. I don’t want victims in my business. Because the moment you put a man in the Victim role, you have put a ceiling on him.

And I would hate that. I would hate for someone to look at me and decide Angus isn’t strong enough to get through this, so I’d better carry him. I would find that insulting. That’s exactly what I’m doing to other people when I rescue them.

Let me give you a live one from my own house.

Lauren is a phenomenal chiropractor. Genuinely gifted with patients. But the CEO side of a practice — the staff, the marketing, the operations — that’s not where she comes alive, and she’d tell you the same.

So what did I do? I stepped in. Of course I did. I’m good at that part, and it was faster, and it was easier, and it felt like support.

For a while.

And then comes the signal. This is the one I want you to write down, because it’s the most useful diagnostic I know.

Resentment.

When you start to feel resentful about helping someone, that is almost never about them. That’s a boundary you overstepped, and now you’re sending them the invoice for a job they never asked you to take.

Once the resentment shows up, the Rescuer doesn’t stay the Rescuer. He flips — straight across into the Persecutor. Why am I doing all this? Why won’t you just take it on? Why does this always land on me?

That’s the loop. Rescue, rescue, rescue, resent — attack.

And notice what just happened there, because this is the triangle spinning in real time. The man who started out helping is now the man doing the damage. Same man. Same twenty minutes. Two different corners.

I ran that loop with my wife, more than once, over a business that was never mine to run. I’ll come back to that in a bit, when we get to the Persecutor properly — because that’s the corner no man wants to claim, and I’m not going to pretend I’m the exception.

Now, here’s the other version, and it’s quieter and it’s more common than the first.

I have a habit of not telling Lauren everything. Not the hard stuff. Not the worst of what’s going through my head with this diagnosis, and not the worst of it back when things were rough in business either.

And the story I told myself was noble. She won’t cope with it. I’m protecting her.

Let me be really clear about what that actually is. That’s me sitting alone in a room deciding what my wife is capable of handling. She wasn’t in that meeting. She never got a vote.

And it isn’t the vision I want to hold for her. I want a vision of Lauren as strong. Capable. In this with me. Not someone to be managed around.

Every time I withhold, I’m choosing the other vision.

So what does the Coach do instead?

The Coach doesn’t do it for you. He does it with you, and then less and less over time, until he’s not needed at all.

But here’s the cleanest way I know to tell the two apart, and it takes us straight back to that action film.

In the Rescuer and the Victim, the Rescuer is the hero. That’s the whole arrangement. He’s the one the story is about.

In the Coach and the Creator, the Creator is the hero. The Coach isn’t really in the frame at all. He’s off to the side, shining a light on somebody else’s story.

Sometimes it’s the exact same act. Completely different centre of gravity.

So here’s the question, and it’s an uncomfortable one, so sit still for it.

Whose needs am I actually meeting here?

Am I stepping in because it genuinely serves this person? Or am I stepping in because of what it does for me? Because I like being the one who gets called. Because I like being capable, and this situation is offering me a chance to be capable in front of someone.

I’ve had to answer that honestly more than once, and I haven’t always liked what came back.

A Coach has to be willing to be invisible. That’s the test, right there. If you need the credit, you’re not coaching.

And when someone brings me something now, I try to run three questions before I move.

Do they have the resources to do this themselves?

Do they have the training?

And have they actually asked me?

Because most of the time the honest answer is that the person doesn’t need me to do the thing. They need the resource, or the skill, or a pointer toward where to find it. That’s not withholding help. That’s help that leaves something behind when you go.

There’s an old story about a butterfly. Somebody watches it struggling to get out of the chrysalis and, out of pure kindness, opens it up to make it easier. And the butterfly comes out and can’t fly. The struggle was the mechanism. The struggle was what built the strength in the wings.

That’s what a rescue does. It’s kind, and it’s quick, and it takes the strength.

Now here’s the other side of this, and it’s the hopeful part, so stay with me.

It runs in reverse.

When you stop treating someone like a victim, they very often stop behaving like one.

Remember how the triangle works. The roles need each other. A Victim needs a Rescuer in exactly the same way a Rescuer needs a Victim. So the moment you step out of your corner, theirs stops being held in place. You’ve taken away the thing that was propping it up.

I’ve watched this happen more than once. You stop jumping in. You start asking instead of telling. There’s a stretch of discomfort for both of you — and then the person in front of you starts doing things you’d quietly decided they weren’t capable of.

You didn’t make them stronger. You never could. All you did was remove the interference.

That’s the thing I want you to hold onto. When you step out of the Rescuer role, you’re not withdrawing from someone. You’re giving them permission to step out of theirs.

Because a lot of people are standing in that corner for one reason only — somebody who loves them keeps putting them there.

PERSECUTOR AND CHALLENGER

Right. Third corner. And this is the one nobody wants to talk about.

The Persecutor’s mature counterpart is the Challenger.

And I have to be honest with you here, because this is the corner no man wants to claim.

I go there. Same story, Lauren’s practice. I’d rescue and rescue, get frustrated, and then out came a version of me I’m not proud of. Sharper. Harder. That tone.

The angry dad.

That’s what it is. Talking to my wife — a grown woman, a highly capable professional — like a disappointed father. And the reason I know that’s what it was is that it didn’t come from strength. It came from frustration. It came from being tired of a job I’d appointed myself to.

We eventually made the call that us working together like that wasn’t good for us. It wasn’t good for the business, it wasn’t good for the marriage, and frankly it wasn’t good for the two of us as a couple at all.

Now, the Challenger has the same energy. The same directness. The same willingness to say the hard thing.

The difference is who it’s for.

The Persecutor makes you the problem. The Challenger holds you to who you actually are.

Think back to the teachers and coaches you actually respected — I talked about this in episode four. They were hard on you. But they were fair, and underneath the hardness was a clear message: I expect this of you because I think you’re capable of it.

That’s the Challenger. He holds a standard because he respects you, not because he’s frustrated with you.

Let me go a bit further on what he’s actually doing, because I don’t want you to hear “Challenger” and picture someone hard.

The Challenger sees the best part of you. Not the version standing in front of him — the one underneath, the one you’re not currently living up to. And he holds you accountable to that. He’s not measuring you against your worst day. He’s measuring you against who he can see you are.

So he’s a cheerleader. Genuinely. He’s in your corner, and he’ll say so.

He’s an accountability partner. He’ll ask you the question you were hoping he’d forget.

And he’s the man who won’t sit there and let you be unkind to yourself. That’s the one most men miss. A real Challenger will interrupt you running yourself down just as fast as he’ll interrupt you making excuses. Both of those are you being untruthful about who you are.

All of it is kindness. Every bit of it. But from the outside — and sometimes from the inside, when you’re on the receiving end of it — that kindness can look a lot like toughness.

Same edge. Completely different direction.

THE OVER-CORRECTION

Now I need to tell you about something I got wrong recently, and I want to tell you because I know exactly what some of you are about to do with this episode.

You’re going to hear stop rescuing, and you’re going to go home and step back from the people who need you. And you’re going to call that respect.

I did that.

We were in Bali a few weeks back. My daughter Mackenzie is finishing up her master’s in public health, and she’s applying for grad positions while she does it. The market out there is brutal at the moment. She’s feeling it.

Now, Mackenzie is one of the most capable people I know. Genuinely. So I stayed out of it. I didn’t step in, I didn’t offer to fix it, I didn’t start ringing people. I was proud of myself for that, if I’m honest.

And then recently, she let me know that she’d been feeling unsupported.

Not because she wanted me to solve it. She didn’t. She never asked me to. But she wanted her dad to look at her and say this is hard, and you’re doing a great job, and I’m here.

She needed a witness. And I’d gone so far the other way that I wasn’t even in the room.

Here’s the trap, and it’s a subtle one. The reason I stepped back was because she’s so capable. My respect for her created the gap. That’s how good a disguise this one wears.

So let me be really clear.

Not rescuing is not the same as abandoning.

Between doing it for someone and leaving them to it, there’s a whole territory, and that territory is where the Coach lives. Acknowledgment. Presence. Belief said out loud. Sitting beside somebody in a hard thing without taking the hard thing off them.

That’s the actual skill. Not stepping back. Stepping alongside.

WHY YOU CAN’T THINK YOUR WAY OUT

Now I want to say the most important thing in this episode, and I’ve held it until here on purpose.

The drama triangle is a closed system.

There is no growth inside it. There’s no resolution, no transcendence, no version of this where you play the roles well enough that it finally works out. Every exit from one corner just drops you into another one. Rescue until you resent, flip to Persecutor, feel terrible about it, collapse into Victim. Round and round.

You get all the intensity of movement and none of the actual movement.

And this is why — listen to this bit — this is why the same problems keep coming back in your life.

It’s the eleventh time you’ve had that argument with your wife. Different words, same shape. It’s a different staff member in a different year and somehow the exact same dynamic. It’s the same conversation with your son that you’ve been having since he was fifteen.

You’re not unlucky. You’re not surrounded by difficult people. You’re in a loop.

And here’s the part that should stop you cold. These loops run for generations. Your father ran one. He learned it from his father. And your kids are in the room right now, learning the choreography — which corner Dad goes to when he’s frightened, which corner Mum goes to when she’s tired, what you’re supposed to do when someone starts.

Nobody teaches this deliberately. It just gets passed down, like a family recipe nobody wrote out.

So if you don’t like the situation you’re in, the answer is not to try harder inside the triangle. Being a better Rescuer doesn’t get you out. Being a more reasonable Victim doesn’t get you out. The model itself is the problem.

You need a different model.

That’s what Emerald’s three roles are. Not three nicer characters in the same play — a completely different system, one that actually goes somewhere. Creator, Coach, Challenger. Agency instead of powerlessness. Building instead of carrying. Standards instead of blame.

The triangle produces drama.

The other one produces growth.

You’re allowed to choose.

THE MOVE

So what do you actually do with this?

Here’s the practice, and it’s smaller than you’d think.

Start with the difficult situations in your life right now. The relationship that’s strained. The conversation you keep having with the same person that never lands. The thing at work that keeps going round in circles.

And it isn’t only the moments with other people. Watch the feelings too. Frustration. Overwhelm. Resentment. That flat, heavy powerlessness where nothing you do seems to matter.

Those aren’t just moods. Most of the time they’re the receipt for a corner you’ve been standing in — and often there’s nobody else in the room at all. You can run the whole triangle on your own. The Victim of your circumstances in the morning, the Persecutor of yourself by the afternoon.

So whenever one of those shows up, three questions.

The first: what role am I playing here?

Rescuer? Victim? Persecutor? Be honest. And don’t be surprised if the answer is all three, depending on the day.That’s normal. The triangle spins.

Now, if there’s another person in this — and most of the time there is — then there’s a second question. And this one’s harder.

What role have I put them in?

Sit with that one, because it’s almost always the more revealing answer.

But naming the corner isn’t the work. Naming it is just what makes the work possible. So there’s a third question, and this is the one that actually changes something.

What would it look like if I played the mature version of this instead?

If I’m sitting in Victim — what does the Creator do here? Not the fantasy version where the circumstances are different. The actual next step available to me, today, from exactly where I’m standing.

If I’m in Rescuer — what does the Coach do here? What’s the thing I do with them instead of for them? What resource, what bit of training, what acknowledgment?

If I’m in Persecutor — what does the Challenger do here? How do I say the hard thing in a way that holds them to their best, instead of pinning them to their worst?

And then the practical one. What’s one thing — small, today — that I could actually do to step into that role instead?

One sentence said differently. One thing handed back to the person it belongs to. One time you sit with someone in a hard thing instead of taking it off them.

You don’t have to get it right. You don’t have to announce any of this to your family over dinner.

Because this is where the breakthrough lives, folks. Not in understanding the triangle — anyone can understand the triangle. It’s in the moment you’re standing in a corner, you can see that you’re standing in it, and you choose the other role anyway.

That’s a different conversation with your wife tonight. A different phone call with your son. A different meeting on Monday morning.

Same situation. Different man showing up in it.

CLOSE

Now, there’s one last thing I want to leave you with, and it’s the part that stops me in my tracks.

You have been handing out roles.

Not out loud. Never in a conversation anyone agreed to. But you’ve done it. You’ve decided your son can’t handle that responsibility yet. You’ve decided your daughter needs protecting from that news. You’ve decided that team member won’t cope with the difficult client. You’ve decided your wife isn’t strong enough for the truth about the business, or the diagnosis, or the money.

Nobody in your life ever agreed to the part you cast them in.

And every one of those quiet decisions puts a ceiling on somebody you love.

I would hate for anyone to look at me and decide I wasn’t strong enough to get out of this.

So who have you decided that about?