There is a version of compassion that protects us from discomfort.
It softens the feedback. It changes the subject. It tells us we’re doing fine when we’re not. It means well. But it keeps us stuck.
Real compassion – the kind that actually frees us – does something harder. It tells the truth.
I’ve been intentionally sitting with that truth for the past two months. Not just thinking about compassion, but practicing it, toward myself and alongside professionals navigating some of the most vulnerable seasons of their careers. Walking with people in career transition has a way of stripping everything down to what’s real. Compassion has always been part of who I am. But there is a difference between compassion as a quality you carry and compassion as a daily practice you choose.
And that practice led me somewhere unexpected: to forgiveness. But that’s a conversation for another day.
What I want to talk about today is the doorway.
It was my training at New Ventures West® that first introduced me to the idea of compassion as the doorway to truth. But it wasn’t until I sat with it – really sat with it – that I understood what it meant in my own body, my own history, my own leadership.
During the pandemic, my mentor coach led a meditation that stopped me in my tracks. Simply called “Sitting with Fear.” Not solving fear. Not reframing it. Just sitting with it. It deepened my understanding of compassion, and brought into sharper focus how much of my strength had been built on motion: staying busy, staying capable, staying ahead of the fear rather than being with it.
That meditation opened a door I’ve been walking through ever since.
For high performers especially, there is so much to do that the inner life gets managed more than it gets lived. Fear gets rebranded as drive. Anxiety gets dressed up as ambition. We stay busy enough to avoid the questions we most need to ask ourselves.
But the things we don’t look at don’t go away. They just go underground, and they do their work from there.
Real compassion begins with the courage to be honest about what’s actually happening inside. To name the fear. To sit with the discomfort. To see the parts of ourselves we’d rather not see, without turning away.
That is painful work. I won’t pretend otherwise.
Scripture says: “You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Not comfort. Not certainty. Not the absence of struggle. Truth.
The pain of honest self-examination is different from the pain of avoidance. One moves through you. The other accumulates suffering. One leads somewhere. The other keeps you circling.
If you’re a leader who appears unshakeable on the outside while quietly carrying fear on the inside, this is for you. The compassion you extend to others has to begin somewhere. Let it begin here. With yourself. With the truth.
You don’t have to have it all together to lead well. You have to be willing to be honest about where you actually are.
That willingness is not weakness. That willingness is the work.
