The original of the article below was recently published in the Developing Leaders Quarterly and is behind the journal’s paywall.

“He who travels gently, travels safely; and he who travels safely, travels far.”
~ Joseph Thompson, Scots Explorer in 19th Century

In his 1949 tome, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell synthesized his massively influential mythic model of the ‘Hero’s Journey’. Even if you don‘t know it by name, you know it in substance. From the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh written around 2100 BC, through Homer‘s Iliad to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and almost every Hollywood movie, the Hero‘s Journey format endures in how we narrate our lives and decipher our leadership challenges.

The vast majority of stories in the West are one version or another of the Hero‘s Journey. Campbell, somewhat obliviously, labels it and praises it as a monomyth. The Hero’s Journey has incredible explanatory power of our experiences. Yet, human experiences can give rise to different explanations and stories. At the moment, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth. (Discover more about the strengths and drawbacks of the Hero’s Journey in this related article This Is Not Your Story).

Over the years, this has led me to imagine what could be another kind of journey and story conflict that we need now - one that is more accurate about our present condition and more generative for our times.

I have been experimenting with the concept of the Immigrants’ Journey in leadership development contexts with delightful results. It goes like this: We are immigrating into the future.

Stuck Heroes

When my daughter, Leta, was on her hero’s journey in the dragon-land of her high school, at the very same time, I was on my hero’s journey of slaying my dragon. I was to become a New York City teenage daughter’s parent. She, trapped in thinking this story was all about her dealing with the challenges of clueless parents and the magical yet treacherous world of her high school, and I, trapped in thinking this story was all about me dealing with the crowning mid-life task of protecting and passing on the wisdom to my posterity. Two stuck heroes.

I thought, “what if I cease seeing this as my journey?” So, I told her, “We have never had this relationship before. I don’t know what I’m doing. You don’t know what you are doing. Let’s help each other immigrate into territory that’s new for both of us.”

I told her, “Look, we are entering this world where I’m learning to be a teenager’s parent, and you’re learning to be an adult. It’s new for you. It’s new for me. I feel lost. You feel lost. What if there’s no need for this push and pull to see whether you can deal with me or I can deal with you? Let’s invite ourselves to immigrate to a new place where we both dare to experience being different. It would be a step into a new land where you and I would be displaced. Do you want to do this?”

Every story needs a conflict, and we had a better conflict. Instead of heroes needing villains and victims, the challenge was in us discovering and entering a new way of seeing, doing, and relating.

We crossed the threshold into the unknown. The heaviness lifted, and fresh air enveloped us. This was quite a different story. Mobilizing, sturdy, dangerous, and joyful. It was exciting! The new perspective affected my parenting from then on and fundamentally changed us. Today, we are still leading and following each other.

We took the Immigrants’ Journey. Notice the plural pronoun.

I now approach my life, love, and leadership differently. I adjust how I see who we are and who we are becoming. With heroes, villains, and victims in cameo roles, I found myself in a place of far more possibilities. I started using this concept in my executive coaching, consulting, and speaking. There were stuck heroes everywhere I turned.

Another Kind of Journey

In contrast to the Hero’s Journey, the Immigrants’ Journey is not sequential or neat. It resembles life more closely. We are all invited to live lives greater than we can control and lead others to learn to do the same. So, Campbell’s 17 steps have not fallen into place. There are no stages. Anything can happen at any time, anywhere and we find stability in our common human capacity to respond to life in real-time, re-interpret our past, and have grounded faith in the future. We do not roadmap. We wayfind.

Wayfinding is an irreducibly human capacity to live, love, or lead through uncertainty. It confronts us with the astonishing fact of being here now, insists on giving meaning to our experience, and meets our needs for belonging and becoming. In contrast to road-mapping or GPSing, which detach us from the landscape, wayfinding is a skill of leading as we go. There is always a new way.

Wayfinding, the earliest human capacity to move from known to unknown, has been well-researched by anthropology and neuroscience. Every species has its umwelt (one of those nifty German words) directly translated as “world-around.” It conveys the uniqueness of the species’ genius. We, humans, have this one thing that separates us from every other species: Left to ourselves, we walk into the unknown, befriend it, and learn to delight in it. We can’t help it. It took us a mere 20,000 years from grunting about our plan to catch dinner together to developing the theories about the universe’s consciousness. We are wayfinders.

Immigrant is a contemporary and more recognizable word for wayfinder. We continuously find a new home, take on new responsibilities, and become someone new.

Wayfinding has been our way since time immemorial. The very first human power was to find ourselves curious or frightened enough to get out of the confines of our shelters. Then we walked to the end of the familiar territory, then forward and forward again, learning to survive and thrive by finding a way we have never been on before. Walking, talking, inventing fire, the wheel, mirrors, juicing, soccer, computing all came as we went about our real business of befriending the unknown.

The true gift of wayfinding is not the arrival at the destination. It is who we become along the way. It is not that we have been finding a way out there; it is that we have changed as we did. Our wayfinding is as inner as it is outer. Yes, our world’s problems seem insurmountable. We know we cannot simply do what we have done in the past. But we are not doomed. Here is the good news: we are not the same humans we were back then and can do something we have never done before.

One more thing. In more personal terms, wayfinding is also about learning your particular way of traveling toward your horizon. Whenever we cross a critical threshold, we enter the unknown realm and temporarily disorientate. We become inner-life wayfinders as we discover the creativity that can only come with the experience of being a bit lost.

Immigrating is about knowing how to take your next very ordinary step, and then next, and then next, alone and in the company, always learning, always looking back to the pliable past and forward with our hearts tethered to the horizon that is calling. Knowing how to travel well may be the best definition of happiness. And to help others learn to do the same, the most rewarding view of leadership.

There is one non-negotiable quality of a leader. Having faith in the future. You have to believe that the unknown will not only serve new dangers and challenges but also supply you with new energy, truth, and joy. None of us have any business leading without this sort of faith in ourselves, others, and the world. As Michael Margolis, the leading authority on narratives for disruption, puts it, “Disruption sucks. So, give people faith in the future.”

You, an Immigrant

Before we go on, a clarification.

We think of immigrants as other people. Those of us who have been in a stable geographical configuration are not used to thinking of ourselves as immigrants. But we are. We all are.

We are all displaced. Whether or not someone is from this company, community, or country does not matter. Everything around us is shifting. It is not that we have moved into a different place; it is that a different place has surrounded us. Look back. We are not where we were a year ago or even a month ago. Transition upon transition upon transition. It is bewildering. In the new world of informational, political, and scientific “overwhelm” and escalating complexity, none of us feel at home as we used to.

We are all on the move from the known into the unknown - everybody. There is no home for the hero to return to. We are creating new homes as we go, and it is as scary as it is exhilarating. And we do it together. It is not that we are vulnerable. It is that we are vulnerable together. “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is a part of our common humanity,” says Salman Rushdie.

Leaders with whom I have shared this invitation to see themselves as immigrants felt empowered, particularly if they were not geographical immigrants. “Now I know why I feel the way I feel. I am an immigrant too,” they would say. “This helps me lead others with more empathy and imagination.”

Three Skills That Matter

Let’s select and review three immigrant skills that can make our leadership more robust.

1. Perspective

It is entirely possible to change one‘s perspective.

Nobody knows this better than immigrants. Almost by definition, only immigrants know the meaning of having a new perspective.

As we immigrate, we change not only the answers to our questions but also the questions themselves. With the new questions, we change where our attention goes. And where our attention goes, our mind and heart follow.

If our perspective can change, everything can change.

Without embracing our status as immigrants, we fully invest ourselves in defending and perfecting our established views, which is another way of safeguarding the biases that have been running our lives in the known that is no more.

Immigrants, on the other hand, are willing to drop their old maps for a moment. They have to. As mathematician Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The limits of language are the limits of my world.” Instead of looking for a villain, immigrants focus on learning a new language. Made of new words, concepts, or experiences, this language can be literal, nonverbal, emotional, cultural, business, or a new kind we don‘t even know yet.

Immigration can occur from country to country, from system to system, from this to the next epoch of our lives. In each case, it is a journey from one way of seeing to an additional way of seeing everything. Two ways of seeing are far more than double. It is experiential proof, a bodily experience and the memory of that experience, that there is truth, kindness, and beauty outside of the way we are used to being in the world. That is a mystical moment.

Perspective is today’s leader’s defining asset not more information, not more time, and not more power. When the tsunami of information, knowledge, and wisdom is drowning us, people follow the leaders who will help them get on a hill.

How do you see?

That is what matters. Your perspective determines how you show up in every moment and what stories you tell.

2. Practice

It is entirely possible to change one‘s practice.

Immigrants embrace the role of apprentice again.

Instead of observing change and talking about it, chasing an illusion of managing change, or indulging in calling themselves change agents, they learn to inhabit change.

This is humbling. Rainer Maria Rilke writes in a poem, “The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.” Immigrants acknowledge the forces larger than their own lives and are finding their way to survive and thrive in a story larger than their own.

We live and lead in a reality far larger than what we can control. Yet, there is one thing we can control: our practice. While navigating the new landscape, our previous views become difficult to maintain. Our new experiences no longer fit our old explanations. New experiences and new experiences make new and more useful explanations possible.

We are entering a new landscape with old maps, gravitating to answers based on the intuition that has sustained us in the past. Our intuition is our capacity to have a lucid moment that helps us deal with complexity.

However, it is based on our experiences up to the present moment. That is why we have to recalibrate our intuitions with new experiences. Without updating them as we go, our intuitions deteriorate into biases.

On a more personal level, we can never control the outcomes the way we can control what we do day-to-day, the rituals, the habits, and others routines.

The artists stand with one foot in the known and one in the unknown, communicating from that place to us. They do not have control of their communication‘s impact, but they do have control of their process and practice. A painter cannot paint six masterpieces at will, but she can create her masterful practice of showing up in the shop and doing her thing her way six hours a day.

The results are not up to her, but the process is.

This is the case with the change artists, too, which is another name for leaders.

Controlling results is daunting personally, professionally, and spiritually because it is impossible. Even if it were possible, control would render our lives deathly dull. We live in a complex system made of complex systems. But complexity does not have to be complicated. It is possible and critical to respond to complexity overload with some form of radical simplicity. More likely than not, such radical simplicity will be in the form of practice.

A thought leader on how to live in complex times, Jennifer Garvey Berger asks a helpful question we can use: “Who have I been, and who am I becoming?” I think this is less of a question of pondering and more of a question of observing. You will not become who you wish or strain to be. You will become who you practice becoming.

What is your practice of becoming?

We want our life and leadership to produce something of great value, and here is the kicker: The practice is that something. In economics-speak, the practice is the product.

3. Participation

It is entirely possible to change how we relate to the world.

We begin our adult journey when we finally cross the threshold called ‚’ I’m enough’. Once we utter this with conviction, it is a joyful new beginning with a wide-open floodgate of confidence and accomplishments. That is what lots of leadership coaching for people in their 20s, 30s, and even 40s is about. Later in a leadership career, the path of growth leads through realizing something quite startling: Actually, I am not enough.

Everything that matters to us, lasting and meaningful, cannot be done alone. In some ways, our early career resistance to saying ‚ “I am enough” is a premonition of the future discovery that, in some fundamental way, ‘I am, in fact, not enough’. ‘As Carl Jung puts it, ‘The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego’, the second half is going inward and letting go of it. ‘

Hero‘s epiphany: I am enough.

Immigrant‘s epiphany: I am not enough.

Both are necessary. This is one of the reasons we cannot afford to live with a monomyth.

What is it that you want but can never accomplish alone? Go and give your best to that, and you will soon realize that your best is not enough. You merely (and gloriously!) participate.

When the time is right, cross the threshold called ‘I‘m not enough.‘ Then, ask for help and offer help. This is one of the most crucial thresholds one has to cross on the way to executive-level leadership. Your participation is not what you do when you cannot do leaderly things. Your participation is the highest calling and experience of leadership.

Being an immigrant never resolves. You continually take the risk of trusting the unsafe world. Which is the only way we can walk into the future.

I play the role of leader as needed. Others play the role of leader as needed. We all participate. The story is largely not about me. It is like the meaning of Ubuntu: ‘I am what I am because of who we all are.‘

The Invitation

Leadership at its best is modelling followership. A leader is a lover. We love and care for something deeply, so much so that we are willing to get lost in order to find it.

We are willing to enter the borderland where we continually leave and arrive. It is not a phase. It is a place where we are learning to make our home now.

We live more than our own heroic story. We discover other stories, participate, and sing our songs, old and new, perhaps all night long, as immigrants do.

The unknown is dangerous. It is also a place where our not-yet-known collaborators, questions, and answers await to be found. It is all so exciting!

Unlike the Hero‘s Journey, the Immigrants’ is not a story of defending our perceptions until the strife teaches us otherwise. We are not blinded to the ordinary mysticism of being where we already are. Instead of bending others to fit our story, we invite them to our story and let them invite us to theirs.

Often, we don‘t need or even want to be heroes. With all its dangers, the unknown is also waiting for us in friendship. We don‘t know who we will become but are not frightened because whoever we become will catch us.

Leaders who learn to articulate a new way of journeying to their people in a plausible, felt, and pragmatic way will touch them the way the Hero‘s Journey used to touch people, eliciting a nod of recognition and giving expression to a new and newly alive language that can meet the challenges we face.

Let‘s summarize our three leadership tips:

1. Perspective: Watch over the way you see.

2. Practice: Do what is yours to do.

3. Participation: Enjoy leading and being led.

Leadership is an invitation. Whether to our daughters, organizations, teams, board members, friends, or enemies, we say, “Let‘s not go where I am, as beautiful as that place seems to me. Let‘s not go where you are, as wonderful as that place seems to you. Let‘s go together to a place that neither you nor I have been before.”

👇🏾 I would love to hear from you about anything in the article that has resonated with you. Please leave a comment below. Thank you!

This year has had the texture of speed. Headlines, polarization, wars, elections, migration, fires, AI slop everywhere, loneliness everywhere. Many of us are living with a low-grade hum of dread and a high-grade demand to function. We’re tired. We’re disoriented.

I believe it will begin (and it is already beginning) with the practice of seeing differently.

There’s an old image I return to: when the storm comes, cows turn away, hunker down, and prolong the pain. Buffalo run toward it, then walk into it, shortening the suffering. Seeing differently isn’t a spa day from the world. It’s choosing the buffalo move: turning toward what’s here so that we can meet it with courage and creativity.

Twenty years ago, on a whim, I went to a Jewish Mysticism Seminar at 92Y (a venerable public learning institution in Manhattan). I was in the front row, a teacher’s pet at the edge of my seat, when Rabbi Lawrence Kushner looked at us and said, “You. Are. Mystics.”

“Who, me?” I blurted out, startling myself.

“Yes, you,” he said.

I staggered onto the sidewalk of Lexington Avenue during the seminar lunch break, drunk with the discovery of human power to see differently. This mystic courage went beyond what I’ve experienced in my home, educational, religious, or professional life. (Mystic courage: the willingness to perceive what is without recoiling)

I was still dizzy when we reconvened. The rabbi went on to say that “for most people, their mystical experiences occur for about twenty seconds, about every two years.” That seemed about right.

What if, I asked myself, the twenty seconds became a daily minute?

Soon after the seminar, the angular life of computer screens, city streets, and filing systems of our modern minds took over. I got back to familiar worries that have been squatting in my head ever since I can remember.

But that’s not how the story ends. My muscle of astonishment warmed up, relaxed, and awakened, and I found some long-needed rest from the numbing sanity of my strategic mind and defended self.

After the experience, a new sense of freedom would rarely appear. It happened while taking my daughters for a walk. I would sometimes blurt out, or even scream, “Joy, joy, joy!” to them (As kids, they were a bit embarrassed on the street. Now, as adults, they see it as a tic of their aging dad). Then, while running, cooking, or cleaning. A brave step forward was trying it while paying bills. Then, while feeling worried, sad, or anxious. Then, the latest, while enraged.

Is it possible to think these thoughts of joy and feel these feelings of surprising appearance, belonging, becoming, and then glorious disappearance? To live alive, everywhere and always?

Seeing differently doesn’t make us float above the mess. It makes you more available to it. It changes what you do in meetings, in conflict, in parenting, in voting, in the way you spend, in what you refuse, in how you apologize, and in what you build. It makes you harder to hypnotize and easier to mobilize.

It’s an intoxicating prospect for those who want to change the world: Learning to see the world as ordinary mystics, urban monks, suburban wizards, or corporate shamans (How would you call yourself?). Not biannually. Daily.

You and me. Daily.

To be clear: I’m not talking about using wonder as anesthesia. If “seeing differently” makes us less honest, less accountable, or less willing to face suffering, then it’s not seeing, it’s sedation. This is not about feeling better while the house burns. This is about seeing the fire clearly enough to carry water with steadier hands.

We want to change the way we see the world and help those we love and lead to do the same. So let’s set down Mevlana Rumi, Theresa of Avila, and Albert Einstein for a moment. Let’s set down Anne Frank, Mr. Rogers, and David Whyte, too. Let’s even set down our compassionate teachers, life-nourishing artists, and family members who showed us how to be in love with life. They are fantastic guides, and we owe them our lives.

Yet, they have all been saying, loud and clear (here in Rumi’s words):

Don’t be satisfied with our stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth

Our steps toward a safe and thriving future do not have to be as difficult as we imagined. We don’t have to control the process from start to finish. You can begin with the mystic courage of seeing differently and learning to fully inhabit a life you cannot control, and do your life’s work that has no competition.

Before you answer the question below, try a tiny inventory of the year: one or two moments you shrank to stay safe, and one or two moments you expanded without knowing the outcome. Don’t judge them. Just name them. That’s already the practice.

What was a recent occasion when you’ve hazarded yourself experiencing life greater than what you can control? Perhaps starting a conversation with a stranger? Or by giving more than you can afford and noticing more than you can take in? Or by your bold stand for justice? How about a vulnerability? Or letting go of what you know and asking a more beautiful question?

May you find yourself surprised, in 2026, by the ways you can see the world.

“We don’t need another hero.” ~ Tina Turner

“Happy is the land that does not need heroes.” ~ Bertolt Brecht

If you are a leader in an organization, you will have heard it said, “You only need to focus on what you can control.”

It is not that simple, though. We cannot wall ourselves into a space where we are in control. And even if we could, that is not where the action is. Or fun. Or people. Or relationships. Or reality.

Learning to let go of control and lead from that space is not antithetical to leadership. Quite the contrary, when we know how to be out of control, we cease to be at war with reality and become better not only at making things happen but also at letting things happen as we participate in dynamics larger than the circle we have drawn around ourselves.

Control does matter, obviously, and we aim to get control of the shared reality by creating models, frameworks, and maps that help us manage what we think is going on.

“All models are wrong,” wrote statistician George E. P. Box back in 1976, “but some are useful.” We move to better ways of making sense when the previous ways become less useful in helping us predict, manage, and work with and through the new complexities we face. When a model does not work anymore, we move to those that work.

Myths that Work

One of the most powerful tools for living with complexity is choosing the myths we live by. Myth is a timeless truth poured into a story, armed with our values, and cemented into our experience.

We humans used to think we were above them. Fortunately, we have been coming to terms with the fact that we have over-reached in our myth-free confidence. We are not living in a merely complicated machine we can learn to control, but in a constantly changing system managing physical, psychological, organizational and other forces that we cannot bring under control. Life and, with it, change, is too wide and too deep to master.

There is always far more happening than what we can fully grasp. So, we have to relate to the unknown, befriend it, even delight in it, get things done in the middle of it, and get others to get things done. That is where the myths come in.

Myths that work hold our worlds together.

They are larger stories that hold smaller stories. Whether true or false, myth is a necessity for any meaning we hope to have as humans. Without the myth, we are all whirling subatomic particles, becoming aware that we are nothing, a realization that is itself a myth.

Now, the most crucial function of myth is to provide us with a perspective, and in today’s world of excess information, perspective is everything, or almost everything, depending on how you look at it. Myths we hold, whether we are aware of them or not, are that perspective.

Good Old Myth

There is a myth we are all quite familiar with.

Even if you don’t know it by name, you know it in substance. It is a pervasive and recognizable story format in the West, particularly in the United States, that has gone global. If you are unaware of it, use this ChatGPT prompt: Tell me about the Hero’s Journey. Then brace yourself.

You might also be familiar with the powerful work of Joseph Campbell, who brought the Hero’s Journey to public awareness. If you are a movie maker, marketer, coach of any sort, organizational psychologist, leadership trainer, management consultant, officer in the military, entrepreneur of any kind, or work in any industry that uses the power of the story, you are probably already overdosed on the Hero’s Journey. It is ubiquitous. So, I promise you, the rest of this article will not be just another Hero’s Journey drill and praise fest. We will go beyond.

First, a quick summary. (Feel free to skip this paragraph if you think, ya, ya, ya, I’ve heard this a hundred times already.) The Hero’s Journey is an archetype, an original and recurring motif or symbol behind many ideas and stories that shape our lives today and have also shaped the lives of humans since the dawn of human civilization. Campbell traced the Hero’s Journey through 17 universally traversed steps across culture and time. In its most fundamental form, the journey comprises a three-part cyclical structure: Departure, Initiation, and Return. The hero leaves the ordinary world responding to a call to adventure (Departure). The hero then enters a liminal space, where they face trials and achieve a climactic victory or revelation (Initiation). Finally, the hero returns to their ordinary world, transformed, and often with knowledge, power, or healing to share with others (Return). This cycle, we are told, represents a universal process of growth and integration that resonates across people and eras.

The Hero’s Journey has obvious advantages. It provides a framework for personal growth, fosters empathy for the experiences of others, and offers a roadmap to navigate life and leadership challenges, among other benefits. Its explanatory power has been felt by many of us. Do you remember the rush when, in the middle of a troubling life challenge, you first thought, “Is it possible I’ve been on a Hero’s Journey all this time? Is it possible I am on one right now?”

Living In a Monomyth

While Hero’s Journey is part of the truth, it is also less than the truth. It has its limitations, which, as we move into a world where our stories are colliding with one another, are becoming quite obvious and grave.

Our imagination has been taught to look for it, and now we see it everywhere. Often, it is the only thing we see. It is what we are told we want and what we learn to want.

When I engage with leaders who question this myth, the majority become defensive from the start, forcing every alternative idea into the existing perspective. They have experienced the monomyth’s power and now use it to construct the same explanations for new experiences.

However, life and leadership bring new experiences, and these are arguably the only forces capable of loosening the grip of our knowing and opening up possibilities for new explanations.

As poet David Whyte would put it in his corporate leadership training, we tend to name our experiences too early. We leaders, he argues, can find our way forward by first stopping the conversation we are having. By conversation, he means the tired and tiring ways of naming and reassuring ourselves, telling the same old story over and over again.

Stories, like humans, are alive. One model or myth gives way to another. That is how we change. As all living beings, our stories exist in ecosystems. In every complex system, whether biological, cultural, or organizational, a monoculture eventually, and always, spells devastation.

Historically, we humans are all exposed to the tyranny of one story. Like the former head Rabbi of the UK, Jonathan Sachs, argues in his book The Dignity of Difference, the more perfect we become as humans and the better we become as a global society, the more varied we will be in the way we see, understand, and experience the world.

Let that land. The more perfect we all are, the more different from each other we will be.

The drive to find the best way to finally get control over complexity, uncertainty, and volatility will sooner or later end in violence, he argues. Universality breeds death.

We have been driving the Hero’s Journey for so long, and so far, we are in danger of finding ourselves on the depleted soil of a monomyth.

Let's examine three constrictions of the Hero's Journey so that we can open ourselves to new experiences, explanations, and stories that might help us liberate ourselves from the monomyth's grip on our leadership.

Constriction 1: Hero's Perspective Only

The Hero's Journey requires tricking our perspective. It is the story told through the eyes of the hero and limited to the way the hero sees the world. It suffers from solipsism, a self-centered lack of awareness, and a single perspective to the exclusion of other perspectives.

Humans tend to suffer from the main character syndrome. We believe the main story is about us. We see our story, the story in which we are the protagonist, as the story. We have all met leaders who suck up the majority of the oxygen in the room and expect all participants to contribute to the story they have already written for themselves in their heads.

I am not being judgmental here. I am still in recovery from it myself.

In reality, where we actually live, there are other stories at play. If I see myself as being on a Hero’s Journey, however, I need others to play the roles I need them to play.

You know what happens next, right?

In a world where a hero monomyth shapes our imagination, everyone expects to be at the centre of the story. Even when there is every reason to agree, use opposing views to find a solution, or play only a supportive role to create a better world, we do not choose to do so. We are conditioned to feel like we are somebody only if we focus on our opinions.

We are drowning in opinions.

Not clarity, not inspiration, not shared values, but nauseating contrarianisms. It is a pyramid scheme of heroes. Heroes are taking over the heroes, who are taking over the heroes, where we eventually all lose—a contrarian hell.

But, deep inside, we know: other stories don’t exist to serve ours. To love and lead, we let others have their own stories in which they see us differently. Perhaps we are a villain in their story. Or a victim. Or, even better, we both live in a story that is different or larger than heroes colliding with villains, in which the same villains see themselves on Hero’s Journeys of their own.

As a human, I have the capacity to realize that my perspective is not the only perspective. My story is not the only story. Who I am is not only about me. It is also largely about how I am seen and experienced by others. As Spanish poet Antonio Machado puts it, "An eye is an eye not because you see it; an eye is an eye because it sees you."

There is nothing wrong with telling a story from the hero's point of view. A lot is cut out, though. Too much. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe says, 'Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.' Everything, literally everything (including our planet), but the hero and his beloved story is expendable.

Constriction 2: Villains Wanted

Another limitation of the Hero's Journey is the way it creates tension in the story. Every story that commands our attention and draws our hearts needs a conflict or, at the very least, a contrast. Without a conflict, there would be no story. The issue here is how Hero’s Journey creates the story's conflict.

When leadership work becomes difficult or overwhelming, we have a favourite starting point: a villain. Someone, somewhere, is doing this to us. To regain control, we need to identify and vanquish the villain. We believe our world would be better without it.

Notice how in the Hero's Journey, the villain is expendable. There is neither redemption nor a future for the villain. There is an evil, a mistake, or a problem. It is the other. We do not have to understand, live with, or certainly not learn from the villain. God forbid we find the villain in ourselves.

And in the world where everyone wants to be a hero, everyone needs a villain of one kind or another. Stories in which the roles of heroes, villains, and victims are the only roles available push us apart and antagonize us. While everyone loves a hero, who wants to be the villain?

Or the victim? In these kinds of stories, victims are story extras or, to name them more directly, passives. Think of employees, consumers, the public, or the planet. They have to be conquered, saved, served, or entertained. The story offers them no agency.

“Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy,” writes F. Scott Fitzgerald. The monomyth has left us in a perpetual cycle of conflict. Sometimes, it seems as if we live in a Groundhog Day scenario. The villain and the hero play a zero-sum game to the bitter end, setting the stage for the next cycle in the spiral of destruction. The result is an exhausting and increasingly tedious repetition of establishing the next king of the hill, cage-fight champion, or a winner who takes all. In many ways, modern history is a story that repeats itself over and over again, with heroes' departure, initiation, and return becoming three stages of not changing.

What if the world beyond the walls of the village is not villainous? What if that world just is? Like our world. What if the dark underworld is troubling but also kind and cooperative? What if the wild we fear is not evil or ungodly, and what if it does not need our hero to tame it or save it? What if the unknown is not only a source of danger but also a source of new and better questions and solutions we have been looking for all along? What if the unknown is reaching out to us in friendship?

Constriction 3: Superpowers Distraction

Over time, Hero’s Journey has become too predictable, a shortcut, really. One of the earliest and most notorious problems with ChatGPT has been how quickly it will make you into a hero. A hero has now become a tourist, with a curated journey into a liminal space. And that tourist now wants, nay, expects, a superpower.

In the Hero’s Journey, heroes used to be regular people who, among other things, discover their unique power. They stumble on it, or a mentor gives it to them, or they win it.

In the monomyth world, that is far from enough. We are all now talking about superpowers. Superpowers break the laws of ordinary life. They pull out an extraordinary sword and other feats that break the physical and every other aspect of our ordinary lives, but the ordinary life is where we all actually live. Superpower shrinks our larger, complex, and natural human abilities into a fetish. In other words, our pining for a superpower distracts us from what I would call commonpowers.

Commonpowers are powers that come from having an aware, curious, and courageous human experience. Coping, connecting, creating, relating, and contributing, to name a few. They are skills of human maturity. In other words, our ordinary lives can teach what no specialized book or training (even those on the topic of leadership) can. Developing our common powers is the most direct way to increase our leadership range, repertoire, and results.

We believe that superpowers will solve our problems “once and for all” and give us a sense of control. If we can wield fire at will, we can just incinerate those bastards attacking our walls. If we can make people laugh, we can bypass feeling uncomfortable by simply cracking a joke. You get the drift. Superpowers are a distraction.

Power is much more common. You have what you need, and others have what they need for us to do what we need to do. Hiding in plain sight, these powers are potent and available. If only we could let go of our paralyzing fascination with what we don’t have, and recognize what we already do.

I know, something is deflating about this.

You have probably walked away from a superhero movie exhilarated to face your own situation, only to realize there is no superpower in sight. Realizing that you are a common person, led by common people, who in turn lead other common people, can be a downer.

But if you stay with that difficult feeling long enough, the weather inside of you will change. You begin to feel the strength of something real arriving. Your ordinariness becomes a door into everything. To embrace yourself as ordinary is the way (perhaps the only way) to discover and live out one’s singularly unique calling in the world.

That deflating feeling is the experience of moving from fantasy (someone else’s journey) to a dream (of what is actually yours to do). Superpowers are for stories of control. Commonpowers are for stories of something greater: reality. And reality is better.

Done Pretending

As I came of age, I had three posters on the wall above my bed. The most idolized guru of my youth was David Bowie. Now, forty-five years later, I find his epic song “Heroes” prophetic. That anthem took me over the threshold of allowing myself to be different from other people and live a life I can call my own.

I remember singing it back then with my freshly colored turquoise hair, fantastical purple pants, and newfound freedom to be myself. His soaring voice declared, “We can be heroes, just for one day.”

Notice his qualifier, however, “Just for one day.”

That is it. Have your turn to be a hero, for a day.

That is plenty. More than that, would that really be sustainable for you? For others?

Okay, take a year, or, if necessary, ten years. But then go on with the task of finding stories other than the hero’s story you have inhabited for so long, no matter how awesome that story might have seemed when you first encountered it. There are different ways to see, experience, and act in the world.

What if you are not on the Hero’s Journey? What journey are you on? What else is out there?

The invitations to the good old myth will keep coming to each one of us from all directions: “Become the hero of your own story!” I hope that now you know, and cannot un-know, that for that to work, you need to pretend that your story is the only one that matters to you.

But we are done pretending. When we stop and think about it, we cannot, and we don’t want to, control the world, even the corner of the world that we lead. We want to discover, be turned around, and right side up. Leadership, at its best, is not a matter of control but of surprise, including the surprise of finding ourselves in a story we have never imagined before.

Don't Lose Heart

These are the times of myth-famine. Both religious and scientific myths have been steadily deteriorating, losing their potency to inspire and ground human thriving. Communism is dead. Its longer-living twin brother, capitalism, is on the deathbed, pretending to be the greatest hero ever. You might have a global myth that you see to add to this list.

The truths behind many of these myths no longer ring true. There is no timelessness and boundlessness to them. They are not useful anymore, too small to inspire and ground us.

Yet, in my daughter’s generation and among people from around the world, I notice that people come alive when someone tells a story that interrupts the tired patterns of symbiosis, ecology, revolution, friendship, pilgrimage, and magic, even in the stark worlds of business, economy, and politics.

When I immigrated to the United States, the most popular American phrases I encountered were startlingly violent. “You killed it.” “You are dead in the water.” Then there were also empowering (and less boring) ones, such as “You got this.” It assumes that you already have what it takes and witnesses to you that you are not alone.

So, let’s not lose heart.

We got this. While the loud and powerful are falling asleep at the wheel of imagination, in the clandestine places invisible to unsuspecting people like many of us, new and better myths are being born, like new stars. These myths in the making are so new, tender, and powerful that we cannot even recognize them yet. As our disoriented hearts are taking the necessary time to grieve the myths that are dying, away from our sight, new ways of being kind, strong, and wise are being discovered and practiced in thousands of communities of young, old, divergent, and inexplicably good and resilient humans in every corner of the world.

(originally published in Developing Leaders Quarterly, August 2025)

💎 LEADERSHIP TOOL 💎

Are you stuck in hero mode?

This is a 2-minute self-check—a mirror, not a metric. Ten quick prompts help you spot “hero-mode” reflexes, then pick one tiny 48-hour experiment to try.

Use it solo: notice your patterns, reduce control-anxiety, and make one purposeful shift.

Use it with your team: create shared language, defuse hero-vs-villain loops, and align on one small experiment everyone tries.

NOTE: It’s available to read below for paid subscribers of The New Glossary. A printable PDF that includes both the tool and this article is attached.

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