When tragedy strikes, I know people who build mental rooms. The grief stays in one. Work in another. Family needs in a third. This isn’t denial—it’s survival. They have learned to close doors without locking them. They may visit the pain room daily, but on their terms. Ten minutes to cry. Twenty to rage. Then shut that door and open another.

You might think of this as unhealthy, but compartmentalizing isn’t about avoiding pain—it’s about functioning when everything inside might otherwise collapse.

The trick so I have heard… Never mistake closed doors for sealed vaults. Let yourself process it all in time. Maybe you process in contained bursts that don’t consume your entire existence. Maybe you try to make time to focus on joy until it becomes a room of its own… or perhaps until it is the lifeline that threads through all of those mental rooms.

Since I first met him, John Evans has always embodied joy to me. He is such a thread. When John is in it, the room is full of joy. He is a like-minded soulmate. What are we doing in elementary education if life can’t be fun? Participate in one game night organized by John Evans and you too will be hooked.  Like me, you will find yourself drawn to him and his decisive and positive energy.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It was sort of disheartening to me that it was going to be so disgusting here (in Wheeling) while we were walking, but I know it won’t feel that way, because I’ll be talking to you, John.

John Evans: Oh, I can be a little sunshine for you, I hope

Elizabeth Hofreuter: You are a little sunshine for me.

I asked John to be one of my very first walks. We were supposed to take to the trails together in October in Austin, TX, but life happens when you are making other plans. As a second best alternative, we committed to a virtual walk from opposite coasts since John Evans is the Head of School at Village School in Pacific Palisades, CA. Yes, the Pacific Palisades – the area where wildfires ravaged whole communities… including John’s school.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: When you and I did not walk in October. I wasn’t upset. I literally had this feeling we weren’t supposed to walk yet.

John Evans: Yeah.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I cried when I heard you lost your school because your heart is right there on your sleeve, and I knew it the minute I met you. I couldn’t imagine at first the pain you were experiencing, and then very quickly,  I thought, I can’t imagine anybody else leading children and parents and teachers through this, but you.

While the brick and mortar is in ashes, John is very successfully leading the school back to joy. Finding his way through tragedy is a journey with which he has become all too familiar, but he finds the greatest inspiration in the resilience of children.

Liz: I just have to ask, because my heart broke when you sent the email that you were in the hospital with your husband who broke his arm while skiing… right after you told me that you finally had room to breathe. What is tragedy on top of tragedy like for you right now?

John Evans: You know, I think it’s really odd to say this out loud, but the truth is, it’s become my normal. You know my headship has been scarred, laden with one tragedy after another. I started at Village in the pandemic. I got the job in 2019 and started July 1, 2020. I was handed keys and told, “Good luck opening the school.” That July 1st both my brother and my assistant head of school were diagnosed with cancer. My brother’s doing well, but my assistant head passed away the next year…and then after that… the fire. So I just feel like there’s been just a ton of heaviness and trauma. But I’m really good at compartmentalizing, which I didn’t realize I was so good at.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: And John, I love that your husband’s broken arm didn’t even make that list

John Evans: No, it sure didn’t. Poor guy!

Elizabeth Hofreuter:Have you come up with a metaphor of any kind for what it’s like to have lost your school in a fire?

John Evans: I mean, I’ve been focused so much on the future, so much on moving forward, I think the biggest piece for me was taking the lessons from the pandemic … be transparent. Tell the parents everything. Do not leave any stone unturned in terms of communication, and get those kids back together as soon as possible. So that’s why I, with my competitive spirit, rushed out immediately to get space… to find the best possible space and to start making it home. I’m only thinking about what’s next as opposed to what happened. Obviously we deal with trauma. But as Michael Thompson and Rob Evans said to my entire community, “The kids are all right.” And they look to the adults to make sure that we’re handling things in the right way. So that’s what my primary focus has been on making sure the teachers and the parents are okay, so that the kids can just keep doing what they need to be doing…learning, raising their hands, getting messy, you know.. playing at recess …all the good stuff.

…the pandemic feels like it pales in comparison to this, you know. Like, if you think of it as a game of Jenga. I just don’t even know what lever to pull. I just look forward, and I’m taking small wins and going day by day.

Taking small wins. Compartmentalizing. Yes, the pandemic taught every head of school I know how to compartmentalize. In one room you were a public health expert. In another, a psychologist. A strategist in another. In time we added a room for construction projects and campus planning. The list went on and on. For me there was also a great room just for Grace, Ella and me where we had prom night dressed in our best dining on the homemade sushi Grace rolled. There were no events or dinners to run off to – nothing that stole my “off hours” away from my girls. 

At a time when I too had to make sure all the WCDS children were all right, I also had more room to make sure my girls were all right too. It wasn’t a small win. It was a big one. It’s odd thinking that I miss some of that.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I just finished a walk called The Oxygen Mask about taking care of ourselves, and I didn’t hear that in your list of things you’re doing, but I did hear you allude to the way we look to a flight attendant during turbulence. And if the flight attendants are okay, we’re not panicking. This thing’s not going down.

John Evans: Yeah, no, that’s a really good metaphor, for sure. And you know, my husband, who takes very good care of me, at one point said, “You’re not taking the oxygen mask,” and I was like, “Leave me alone.” Admittedly, I think there have been moments where I haven’t stopped to take breaths when I should have, but now I’m starting to, you know, weave those in more consistently and really focus on the wins…

He hasn’t built that room to focus only on himself… yet, but he promises that is on the horizon. Less than four years after the fear of the pandemic, John is faced with the unknown again. The devastation this time is catastrophic. It is unreal.. although it is a reality I imagined when I walked off campus back in March 2020. I think of it in slow motion…turning off the lights, locking the door, taking what I feared was one last look around. It is like a scene in a movie I saw, not a moment I lived. As John recounts the similar events of the day the fire spread, he sounds like he is just telling me a story. 

John Evans: I was in the middle of a meeting with my director of athletics, and we were talking about a really important problem. We had too many kids enrolled for sports for the winter season. It was like we were giggling. We were so happy that we had 48 kids sign up to play basketball and volleyball. And so we’re talking about having to find more coaches… and then my assistant came in and said, “I need you to see something,” and I went out and saw billowing smoke.

I was like,” Oh, no! What is that?” We watched it for a good 30 seconds, and then saw orange flashes and we knew.

Right then I called my CFO. The Admin team came together, and within 10 minutes we had a communication out to all of our families saying, “Come, pick up your kids.” We just basically got everybody out super efficiently. I had to drive a kindergartner with me from the school. I was the last person to leave with little Everly Krubich in my backseat because her parents were trapped up in the Highlands. They had fire behind them and in front of them, and they couldn’t get out. Eventually, they did, but I had their daughter for about an hour.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: Is that one of your crisis scenarios that you had planned for?

John Evans: No. Definitely, not. I mean, we were able to call on our protocols for how to keep the kids safe and to move swiftly. I’m so proud of my teaching staff, and how folks just remained calm. What was amazing to me was having the kids all in the gym trying to keep them calm and happy. And some of the older kids, like the 6th graders, had kids sitting in their laps, and they were taking the role of caretaker and helping out. So it was a true, beautiful community moment, but it was also really scary. It was crazy out there, you know. People were pulling off to the side and getting out of the cars and running for safety. And then trucks had to barrel through, wrecking hundreds of cars because they needed to get to the fire. I don’t even know how to describe it. Dystopia.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It sounds like you’re describing a scene from an LA movie, not an LA school.

When we retell a tragedy, something strange happens – the raw, chaotic experience becomes packaged into a narrative with structure and meaning. When we share the stories, we naturally impose order – selecting details, creating cause-and-effect relationships, building toward climactic moments, and offering meaning or lessons. This narrative structuring helps us process overwhelming events, but simultaneously creates some underlying tension. We’re aware that our tidy retellings, however necessary for communication, inevitably fail to capture the full weight of what actually happened to us and to the people in our care. The gap between raw experience and narrative serves as both shield and balm. When we turn overwhelming pain into a story with coherent shape, we give it its own room and we gain some measure of control over experiences that originally left us powerless. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: It has to feel like you were there, but you weren’t there… like you’re telling me a story that somehow your nervous system is letting you believe is just a story and not reality.

John Evans: Yeah, yeah, no. True. That’s very true. 

John Evans: As we all know, grief is a wave, and it’s going to be felt in different ways throughout a very long time. But I knew immediately that the best thing to do was to get these kids with their friends and their teachers. Because that’s what children need. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: Resilient little ones.

John Evans: Yeah, adaptable and strong. And you know, our theme this year was leadership, and we had these banners made with our Village values. They’re beautifully done, and they were hung on the campus, and one of them survived, which is kind of incredible. 

John Evans: It’s pretty extraordinary. I have a picture of a mom who lived in the neighborhood, whose home burned down, so she had a pass to get in early, and she was the first who walked the campus. I think it was like 48 hours later, and she picked it up and held it. It’s quite beautiful.

It says Village builds courageous leaders. So we decided to move the focus from leadership to courage and talk about what courage actually is… leading from the heart with the root word “cor” meaning heart. So we focused a lot on that – just getting kids to understand how resilient they are and how adaptable they’ve been. 

John’s story is starting to come around to that beautiful conclusion – a story of courage – of heart. Like a good story it also seems to have a prologue recognizable only in hindsight.

John Evans: I wrote this piece, Liz, on January 6, after a really wonderful break that was now, when I look back, prophetic in its resonance, because it was all about Pema Chodron’s famous words, “Nothing ever really goes away until it has taught us what we need to know”…what we need to learn.  And it’s almost like I was preparing everybody for a real challenge to come.

We never know how the story is going to go. When we think we have learned the lesson, sometimes we have not. There is more to come. I am learning there is no prescribed timeline. No date by which to get over it. No box to check off. Even when we think we have learned what we need to know, some new challenge may lie in wait to test us. We may not have fully processed the lessons. 

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I have only just realized that one of the reasons this year is turning into a full year without a position instead of a shorter period of time as I thought it would be is because I still had so much healing to do between what I experienced with Covid and then losing my mom, my dad and my stepmother and I needed to heal, and I had no idea how much I needed to heal. But the other thing I’ve learned is that everybody’s timeline’s different.  I’m not healing late. This is just when my time was to heal.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: You’ll heal when your body and your spirit need it.

In the meantime, John has that gift to find and celebrate the joy. There’s a profound alchemy in finding joy within or after tragedy – not as erasure of what was lost, but as affirmation of what remains, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit… as seen in the resilience of children.

John Evans: The thing that I’m most proud of is just how we all came together at Village. How everybody was able to see the important aspects of community and lean into that  – that has felt really powerful.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: And something you can hold, no matter what comes next.

John Evans: Exactly.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: So you did it. You had the center hold when most people wouldn’t.

John Evans: And I learned that from Covid. I mean, all of these things do teach us what we need to learn.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: If we’re open to learning

John Evans: If we’re open to it. 

Nothing ever really goes away until it’s taught us what we need to know, what we need to learn. Maybe we can learn some of those lessons from the stories that connect us. When our personal anguish or suffering becomes communicable, we’re no longer alone with our grief. The storytelling itself becomes a communal act that can bring witnesses into our experience without overwhelming them or ourselves.

Perhaps most importantly, shaping tragedy into narrative allows us to gradually integrate it into our broader life story instead of remaining trapped in its raw immediacy. We can begin to say “this happened to me” and with it comes the subtle peace that storytelling offers – not erasure of pain, but the beginning of containing it in its own room.

Elizabeth Hofreuter: I will be writing this and smiling the entire time, which is one of your amazing gifts to help people smile through tragedy. So thank you.

John Evans: Thank you, Liz. I appreciate you so much, and enjoy the rest of your walks.

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Recently, I listened to A Bit of Optimism Podcast between Simon Sinek and Melinda French Gates. You need to understand that Simon Sinek impacted my leadership mindset years ago. I am a fangirl. When he spoke at the annual conference for NAIS, I sat in the front row and made Luke Hladek and Joe Jividen sit right there with me although once he started talking, I had no idea any one else was even in the space. 

In this particular podcast, he and Gates spoke about the ways we get through suffering. When life throws you a curveball, whether it is of your own choosing or not, gather your friends. You have some control. My mom used to say, you always have a choice – even when you are thrown into a transition that you didn’t choose – she’d remind me sometimes what you can choose is to simply walk away.  When you do, walk away, Gates would recommend that you surround yourself “with good friends who remind you ‘We don’t know where you’re going but you will be ok. Yes, you are sad now, but you are going to be OK.’ These people can hold space and offer the perspective that you are going to be fine even as you sit in the uncomfortable place you find yourself. Sinek reminds us that surrounding ourselves with good people is a positive action. It is an example of the agency we have. He comments, “You put the parachute on before you jump out of the plane.” 

Tammy Augustine is my parachute. We met months before my divorce when I hired her as a personal trainer. Her gym was steps from Wheeling Country Day School. Back then, the only way I was going to take care of my health was if someone scheduled it on my work calendar. 

Liz: If you know the only way you’re going to show up for yourself is if there is an appointment on the calendar, then that’s what you need.

Tammy: Accountability. You have to. And sometimes that’s somebody to work out with.

So I charged Tammy with my fitness, but with each rep, I recognized my strength. When life started to get squirrely, I still showed up and she held space for me to achieve whatever I could that day. Tammy Augustine didn’t fix me. She brought out in me the strength and fortitude I had. In the last eight years, she has been there through all of life’s big transitions. She is a trusted fellow traveler as she has had her share of suffering through big events.

Liz: In your life, what’s the big event? 

Tammy: Without a doubt…My son having a stroke when he was six. It changed my whole perspective of life, scared me to death, someplace I can go back to immediately and feel every aspect of how I felt in that moment, and it was a lot of pain.

I had two healthy children. And in a split second, my life changed.

That was the worst moment in my entire life to date. I hope that I don’t have to experience anything that traumatic again. But It also changed my perspective on the importance of the little things in life. I can remember sitting at a ball game, and my son, obviously, he survived with some deficits, but he worked really hard to get movement back and speech back and all those things. But he wasn’t the best player on the soccer team. He just got to get in a little bit, and he was part of the team, but I would sit in the stands, with parents who are screaming at their kids because they’re not playing well enough. Maybe they missed the goal. They didn’t give it their all that night. And me… I was sitting there just so happy that my son was part of the team, that he actually could be out there. And I actually got to watch him play. 

I wanted to lean over and say, “Hey, just be so grateful that he’s got two legs that work, and he can kick a ball.” He never scored a goal or anything for most of his soccer career. And there was one game, they were playing a team that was not really good at all, and they were killing this team. And the coach is like, “Austin, come off the bench. Come on, we’re going to put you in.” And he had wonderful teammates who all supported him. That whole game that he was in, they were trying to kick the ball to him, to assist so he could get a goal.  Somebody got it in front of him. He kicked a goal, and every single one of those players out on the field ran to him and picked him up. And I remember sitting up there just like… That was the best moment. He was alive and could do that.

I’m just so happy that he could even be out there. And don’t get me wrong, you fall back into that non-appreciative life. We all do. You fall back into getting angry about the dumb things. But if you can think back on that moment…

Liz: When I asked you about the big moment in your life, I wish that instead of the stroke, I wish our brains were wired to go to that really wonderful, positive moment.

Tammy: I’ve often wondered this, why in my life.. why do we remember so clearly every aspect of the painful parts of our life? But the happy moments, the joy, you don’t remember the details like you remember it in the detail that you do for the painful ones. 

It’s strange, isn’t it? The way our minds cling to memories of struggle and hardship with vivid clarity, while the moments of pure happiness seem to slip through our fingers like sand. I’ve been thinking about this peculiar tendency we have to catalog our suffering in high definition while joy gets filed away in some dusty corner of our consciousness.

Pain etches itself into our neural pathways with remarkable precision. I can still feel the exact moment my heart shattered after my fiance and I broke up. I recall the specific shade of beige on the hospital walls when I heard Nicolas had no heartbeat. I remember the distinct emptiness in my stomach driving to a lawyer’s office to give back a baby we had adopted 11 days earlier when the birth mom changed her mind. These memories don’t fade – they crystallize.

Perhaps it’s evolutionary. Our brains developed to catalog threats and hardships as a survival mechanism. Remember the berry that made you sick, the path where you encountered danger, the time you almost didn’t make it – these memories kept our ancestors alive. Joy, pleasant as it is, didn’t confer the same survival advantage.

Or maybe it’s because pain demands our full attention. When we suffer, we’re completely present – every nerve ending firing, every sense heightened. Joy can be experienced peripherally, sometimes even unconsciously, while pain commands our entire being.

Most ironic of all is how we gloss over the joy that emerges from our struggles. The relief of making it through a difficult time, the profound appreciation that follows deprivation, the deep connections forged during shared hardship – these precious afterglows of pain often fade fastest of all, though they represent some of life’s most authentic moments of happiness. 

Until we develop a new practice – to give joyful moments the same attention and reverence we automatically give to painful ones. To notice joy fully when it occurs, to reflect on it deliberately afterward, to tell the stories as completely as we recount our struggles. Like sitting at a soccer game when your son scores his first goal.

Tammy: Although it was the worst time in my life, I walked away with what was positive, that he survived.

While Tammy and Austin’s dad desperately waited for doctors to determine the reason for their son’s blood curdling screams that came out of nowhere, a nurse showed kindness.

Tammy: She has a little angel pin on the lapel of her shirt, and she takes it off. And she said, I want you to have this. Somebody gave it to me in a time when I had some things happening in my life. You’re going to need this. And she put it on my shirt. And next thing, we had to drive in the middle of the night in pouring rain to get to the next hospital – we had no idea where we were going.

There are always angels if we look for them – people who surround us when we need them.

After four days sitting with her son in a medically induced coma with doctors watching for brain swelling, Tammy was told

 Tammy: This isn’t good. We don’t know if he had another stroke. He’s not coming out of it. We’re going to take him down and do another CAT scan. And of course, we’re, again, in shock. There’s four people around him pushing the bed, and they tell us to come with them. And this is a moment that I’ve lived in my head many times. We’re following the bed down a hallway, and it’s lined with chairs, and people are sitting in the chairs waiting for appointments or whatever, and they’re bagging him. I’m a mess. I can barely walk. John is holding me up, and I’m falling. And all I can picture in my head is we’re the car behind the hearse. This is what is going to happen, and I don’t want to be here anymore. If he goes, I want to go. I can’t imagine him being in a big world that I don’t know of by himself. I have to go. They sat us in a room by ourselves for 15 minutes, but it felt like five hours. And the hospitalist comes in. She goes, “He’s fine. No changes. Can you go buy him a pair of high tops?

He’s getting dropped foot, and we don’t want him to get dropped foot.” And I went, What? You don’t know whether to cry, laugh. It was so nonchalant. Like, Oh, he’s fine. I just had the worst moment in my life, but he’s good.

And he was good.

Tammy: I sat in bed with him on day two of being in the upstairs wing. He had just learned how to read his colors in kindergarten… red, yellow, the primary ones, I wrote all of them down on a piece of paper in pencil, and I pointed to red, and I had crayons of the colors. And I said, Find this crayon. He could read the colors and pick the right crayon. When the doctor came in, I said, “He’s going to be fine. He knows. He didn’t lose anything cognitively. He knows.” And the doctor looked at me and he’s like, “He knows, I think you’re right. I think you’re right.”

The kindergarten teacher who taught Austin to read the colors turned out to be another angel – part of the Augustine support system. Just months out of college, managing her first classroom, her life was changed as well. She wrote in a newspaper piece, “ Suddenly the lesson plans and petty worries of everyday life didn’t seem so important anymore. Here was this bright-eyed little boy paralyzed on one side of his body with bleeding in his brain.”

Tammy: She’s 20-some years old. Oh, my gosh. She was devastated by it all. I mean, it impacted her a lot. She was a fantastic teacher. Again, so blessed and lucky that we had her as his teacher. She came to the hospital. When we got back home, she herself volunteered to stop twice a week after school and tutor him when she was done with her day, she would stop. And on good days, she could work with him. When he had bad days, there’s a lot of bad days that he was either too tired… or he’d have fits of crying, not being able to talk. So he didn’t know how to handle his new world, and we didn’t either. I mean, we were all learning.

Liz: Did he ever go back to kindergarten? 

Tammy: He did. Yeah. In her class. Surprisingly, he went back. I’m going to… I think it was like two months later.

Kalin Freisen, the kindergarten teacher who showed up on good days and bad held space for Austin and his parents. She couldn’t fix it, but she could be there in support and prepare his classmates to do the same. In that same article she also wrote, “I see such love and compassion shown in my classroom. The children have learned one of the greatest lessons of life: to show compassion toward others.”

Austin’s stroke had a positive ripple effect on so many lives… his classmates, his teacher, his caregivers, his therapists, his sisters and his mother.

Once Austin was back in school, however, Tammy had to find activities to help her move through her suffering. The caregiver requires as much recovery as the boy. For Tammy a great deal of it involved dedicating herself to her passion for wellness and fitness, but there were simpler actions as well like the comfort found in a swing or a rocking chair. When we rock or swing, the repetitive movement activates our “rest and digest” mode, which naturally counters the “fight or flight” response triggered by anxiety. At WCDS we bought rocking chairs to comfort children for that very reason. We adults used them much more often. For Tammy, she now has a porch swing for relief when worry sets in.

Liz: Your nervous system doesn’t forget. Even as your brain starts to… Your conscious brain starts to move past, your nervous system doesn’t forget. And I wonder if swinging isn’t our taking care of that earlier version of ourselves that is still really hurting.

Tammy: Right. Do you ever… I’ve caught myself at the grocery store standing in line, rocking back and forth. Do you ever do that?

Liz: Like you’re holding a baby. You know, I always assume that I’m going to sway the rest of my life because I am still swaying Nicolas.

Tammy: But hey, I’m also one that sees an empty aisle in Walmart or Kroger, and wants to lunge all the way down it.

Liz: Yeah, I don’t have that impulse.

Tammy: I want to do walking lunges down that aisle.

Liz: That’s good for you. You do those for me while you’re there. Everything in moderation.

Another one of my mom’s pearls of wisdom. Everything in moderation. That was her answer for diets, workouts, travel… we don’t have to go full throttle all the time. Sometimes we need to let up on the gas and just walk.

Tammy: Let’s just walk.

I guess that is why I started walking last fall. I was surrounding myself with good people. I was taking positive action. It was a reminder that I had agency. I was following the advice of Melinda French Gates before I had ever heard it.

Liz: I do go back and wish that when suffering came, I could more easily hit the pause button and see this too shall pass. And something good is probably coming from this.

Tammy: I’m going to ask you the question. Don’t you feel like you’re better at that now, though? 

Liz: I feel like I’m a ton better at it. 

Tammy :It’s saying to yourself, Why are you getting upset over this?

Liz: Right. But for me, It’s “Good Lord, you just went through this big thing seven years ago, and you let this take you to your knees?” You have to give yourself grace. 

Tammy: Agreed. Right. 

Liz: I am definitely better at it.

There’s an art to showing up when someone’s world is falling apart. When I’m drowning in grief, anxiety, or just the overwhelming weight of existence, I’ve learned to gather my people, but I have also learned to be selective about who gets to witness my undoing. The people who earn this privilege are rare and precious.

They don’t try to fix me. They understand that some pain can’t be solved, only witnessed. They sit with me in the darkness without frantically searching for a light switch. Their presence says, “I see you, and I’m not going anywhere.”

These space-holders don’t fill silence with empty platitudes or toxic positivity. They know that “everything happens for a reason” is the last thing a suffering heart needs to hear. Instead, they offer a gentle “this is really hard” – acknowledgment without minimization. They show up authentically. I’m not always good at that. I think I insert humor when I don’t always need to… but at the same time that is me being authentic.

The most valuable people in my darkest hours are those who remember to check in again next week, who drop off wine or coffee without expecting conversation, who text “no need to respond” and mean it. They understand that suffering isn’t linear, and healing doesn’t follow a tidy schedule.

I’ve learned that these rare souls often have their own intimate relationship with pain. They’ve been to the depths and back. They don’t fear your darkness because they’ve navigated their own. Their compassion isn’t theoretical – it’s been forged in fire.

The people who can truly hold space are the ones who understand that sometimes, the most powerful thing they can offer is simply to stay.

Tammy Augustine is one of those people. Tammy stays. She gives me strength… theoretically and literally. 

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There is a paradox in my life that I do not think I have ever articulated. I went into independent education because I could not believe how complicated it was to help a child learn in the public system when I was interviewing in 1989. I wanted to teach children directly without jumping through the hoops of imposed protocols. I refused to teach to a test where knowledge is reduced to multiple-choice option, and success is measured by filling in a correct bubble. I wanted to be part of developing creative and critical thinkers capable of solving real-world problems. I wanted to make an authentic connection with one child at a time. But…I wanted to help all children, not just the ones who could afford a private education or the ones who could easily comply in the classroom. Therein lies the paradox that never fully sat right in my spirit for 35 years. 

Without realizing it, I find myself drawn to walk with people who made similar choices – like Dr. Jeff Hoepfner.

Liz: I went into independent education as I came out of college because I didn’t like the red tape I found when I was interviewing for public schools back in 1989. And so I’ve been fascinated throughout my educational career with people who see their industry or their field as one patient at a time, and that was what I knew about you from the very first time I visited you.

Dr. Jeff: Yeah, that’s the art part in medicine. I was actually shocked today because one of my patients earlier this morning told me how there’s these little fatty tumors called lipomas that are often down here to your low back, right by your belt. They’re really obvious to me, but then when I send patients to their family docs, so they can get an ultrasound of it to get an idea of the size or get an MRI, the docs don’t touch anybody. They’re 100 % dependent upon special studies.

Liz: Scans, blood work, other tests, ultrasounds…

Dr. Jeff: Yeah, There’s very little clinical decisions made anymore with functional stuff and palpation.

Jeff Hoepfner is a chiropractor. His is literally the practice of hands-on medicine. It always amazes me when he knows exactly where my pain point is. It amazes him that I’m in awe of it. After a high school sports injury of his own, he was drawn to the chiropractic practice that saved him. His work focuses on the musculoskeletal system and the nervous system. I like to think of it this way – it is the infrastructure to my life. If the scaffolding isn’t right, how can I expect to build on all the other systems in a healthy way? I’ve been treated by other chiropractors, but Dr. Jeff’s practice seems different to me. I think it comes from his authenticity and his genuine approach to serving others. I loved the story of his early practice at the art of touch.

Liz: You said to me, I feel things differently with my hands than most people.

Dr. Jeff: In school I was advised to get a phone book, pull out some hair, and start with one page. Work way down into the phone book to where you can still feel the hair. We would do little challenges amongst us in our group of friends, who could go the deepest to hone that sense of feeling? And it’s just…

Magic. He certainly doesn’t finish the thought that way, but I will. As the patient, it can feel like magic.  Maybe that’s because there is something magical that happens when we embrace our authentic selves and the curious and distinct gifts that lie within us. That moment when we stop apologizing for our passions, our quirks and the things that make us uniquely us—it’s like breathing fresh air after being underwater. When we let our freak flag fly, we discover a joy that cannot be replicated. I used to lovingly say that I worked in the land of misfit toys. 

When you step away from conformity, you courageously enter a space of beautiful uncertainty. Without the rigid guardrails of social or (medical in this case) expectations, you’re free to explore the full spectrum of your capabilities. Dr. Jeff did this by taking the risk to become a private pay practitioner exclusively.

Dr. Jeff: Oh, man. That was my favorite year in practice… the year that I got out of doing third party payer systems. It was just all the restrictions left. I actually spent longer with my patients, I spent more time. My decisions were mine and my patients. They weren’t like, well, let’s see what your insurance says we can do, like what their flow chart, which box is next. And it’s really, really nice. 

My fee schedule is very, very low. I’m very old school with the way I do it, because I’ve been self-employed for so long and I have paid for my own health insurance for years. I know what that feels like with high deductibles and copays and things like that. I guess I’m probably too empathetic to the point where I would probably tell you that I’m a bad businessman. I leave a lot of money on the table. I give services away for free like crazy. That’s one of the reasons why I always have to work for myself, because I don’t mind asking for earned capital, but I’m also empathetic to when you’ve got someone in with a hot disk and they’re at 15 visits and you know Christmas is a month away. It feels really good to be that.

Liz: Well, that is what medicine was when I was a child and my parents practiced. I can’t remember the details, but I remember getting a chicken once from a family that couldn’t pay their medical bills.

Dr. Jeff: I’ve received canned food. I’ve received fish from their freezer. In all honesty, those are probably my favorite payments, favorite stories, because they’re equally proud of the fish they caught and the mustard that they made from their Hungarian wax peppers. And I loved that stuff growing up in rural Iowa the way I did. I guess I’m an old soul that way. I don’t know. And I have a good wife who is on the same page with me with this. 

Liz: When you put profit or policy in front of people, it doesn’t take long to fall apart.

Dr. Jeff: It really doesn’t. And it shows its backside every time, eventually.

Exhausted by the assembly-line approach to patient care that insurance companies demanded, Dr. Jeff made the calculated decision to ultimately stop accepting insurance altogether. The depth of care he can now provide has attracted patients willing to pay out-of-pocket for someone who truly listens. When some cannot pay at a given time, he prioritized the person over the profit.

It was a risk he found to be more than worthwhile.

Dr. Jeff: I was really happy to get rid of any of the HMOs just because of the amount of paperwork and then asking for just even six visits, twelve visits. And they’ll say, well, you can have two. And you’re like, well, what are you supposed to get done with two visits?

Now, he could take the time with his patients. The art and science of chiropractic medicine also has a therapeutic element in Dr. Jeff’s office. People share with him. They tell him about financial concerns, family crises, personal joys. Maybe there is something about trusting him to manipulate your spine that affords a level of trust to understand your worries and carry your heart. 

It hasn’t been long enough for me to forget, but I do. I am not sure if I met Dr. Jeff because I was a patient or if I met Dr. Jeff because he was a dad. Both endeared him and his family to me. He has two older children and a younger daughter whom I met when she was just four years old. She could light up a room, but she didn’t easily conform to social norms or the seemingly random benchmarks we sometimes blindly accept and expect in child development.

Dr. Jeff: She wouldn’t sleep. She didn’t sleep or meaningfully talk until she was four. And that was a really bad time.

Liz: Didn’t sleep?

Dr. Jeff: She would sleep for maybe two hours and then wake up. One of us would sleep up there in the other room because there’s three bedrooms up there and would get up with her, soothe her, comfort her, do whatever needed, and then try to get her back to sleep.

Liz: So it was years of sleepless nights. What was the moment that pushed you to ask, we’ve got to see what’s up?

Dr. Jeff: Oh, wow. It was that and the lack of conversation. She would say words, but she would say water, and not because she wanted it, whatever. It’s just because that word popped into her head, not because it was related to something she was seeing or doing.

Liz: Or necessarily wanted.

Dr. Jeff: Correct. So that’s what they… Meaningful language. The language didn’t have meaning. It was just random words that she knew. So we did a lot of sign language in the beginning just because that was the stuff that was meaningful. It was easier. My wife raised the question to our pediatrician, and he was more akin to thinking that it was just her being stubborn. So we had probably another six months, and then we went up to Pittsburgh to Children’s Hospital. And within 20 minutes of Julie being in the office, he’s like, your child has a spectrum issue. You know how it is when you get confirmation and stuff like that. It’s just a kick in the stomach.

Nothing prepares you for that moment. Even if you suspected something was different about your child’s development, hearing an official diagnosis feels like having the air knocked out of your lungs. In the days and weeks that follow, I have sat with parents as they go through stages of grief – disbelief, anger, sorrow, bargaining, and others. I think it is comparable to grief because there is a shift in the life imagined for their child. The truth is, receiving an autism diagnosis for your child changes everything – including you.

Dr. Jeff: It’s been the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. And I’m speaking from the dad’s perspective. I can’t imagine what it was like being a mom in that situation. Tough, very, very tough. Services are not great in Ohio as a whole, let alone in the Ohio Valley, as far as what we needed, because we looked around for stuff. Autism is such a vast spectrum. Not all of the hallmark therapies would be a good fit for our kid. You know what I mean? So we ended up traveling to the Boston area. Kelly did. Not me. Kelly did. And she did some training up there at the Sunrise Program, and that was a life changer. That brought her from moderate autism to more of a mild autism, more functional, much, much more functional.

Liz: And that’s the way that program works. They train a parent? 

Dr. Jeff: And you do home-based therapy there. You create a room specifically for the therapy, and you get volunteers to come in that you also train so that you can have someone working with your child. And we were very blessed that way. We had a church that was really helpful and some good friends who came in and helped a lot. And we just had huge jumps during that time. 

And the other thing was up in Wexford, it’s called Brain Balance. In that time period, she actually learned to advocate for herself, to understand what that was and start to do it. 

I guess I’m lucky I had a really good wife who was in education and was just super passionate.

In my years in education I have seen parents, like Kelly, become an autism treatment expert overnight. Special diets, sensory integration therapy, speech therapy, ABA, etc – you name it, they research it. Their calendars fill with appointments, and their credit cards max out with specialists and promised success. As if sheer willpower could change the diagnosis, they do all they can. Each child is unique. It is a spectrum afterall. There is no perfect intervention combination. As a Head of School, I felt helpless at times. I cannot imagine what it would be like to be a parent.

Liz: I think what you and Kelly did with Julie is really great advice that you could give your former self. Pick the thing that’s important. “We want Julie to have friends.”

Dr. Jeff: It’s funny that I’m glad that you’re describing that because Julie just turned 14 and we went out bowling. They had the lights down and they had all these flashing lights on, which Julie doesn’t really struggle with. And they had music playing. It was pretty loud, but it was like dance music. And she doesn’t really get too upset about that. And we, I mean, she brings that out in us. Because it’s always been there, my wife and I both like to dance and be goofy. We did that Saturday night and it was a ball. I always say, “Did you let your freak flag fly?” 

… she always feels best when she can do that, when she doesn’t feel the imposed filters that we as society put on. 

Liz: I feel best when I can let my freak flag fly. I mean, that’s just… I think who Julie is is more authentic than… any of us.

When you step away from social expectations, something remarkable happens. You realize how wonderful it feels to be authentically YOU. It reveals how much of our anxiety stems from trying to fit predetermined molds… or have our children fit into them. The energy previously spent on maintaining appearances, fitting in, fixing things, chasing profit becomes available for genuine creativity and connection.

The most profound benefit is discovering that your peculiar perspective, your unusual combination of interests, your distinctive voice—these don’t need to be suppressed but rather to be celebrated in an impromptu dance party at the bowling alley.

Dr. Jeff: I guess one of the hard things for our walk in autism was there’s not a lot of genuine cheerleaders. There’s not a lot of consistency. Because therapists come and go and things like that. I don’t know. Yeah, that’s a toughie. There are teachers, even during my time at Country Day, Julie could tell you who her best teachers were. And it’s not based on what she learned. It’s the ones who really tried to understand her and empathize with her. And she could also tell you the ones who didn’t. And so that’s a good lesson for us. I think as I’m saying this, it makes me think that maybe that’s what I gained watching that in the autism world, that’s what I gained in my practice life by going cash. Do you know what I mean? I could be that more connected, more empathetic chiro, as opposed to … well let me give you an example, I can see about 35, 40 a day max, and I am exhausted based on how I practice. And I have friends who see 70 to 100 a day, and they’re still up for going out for a sandwich after work.

You know what I mean? It’s got to be a stark contrast in how we’re talking with patients, how we just interact and all that stuff. 

Liz: But a patient has the choice to pick a different Chiro. Julie didn’t have that choice with any teacher …ever.

Dr. Jeff: Oh, man. Yeah, that’s the truth. I mean, there is open enrollment, but it’s roulette when it comes to… Because regressions are real, man, when it comes to autism, and that’s tough.

When we embrace our differences, our quirks, we create safe spaces for others to embrace us and to do the same in embracing their own. We silently give permission for authenticity to ripple outward, creating communities where genuine connection can flourish. So go ahead—geek out, laugh too loudly, dance off-beat, sing in the musical, drop the third party payer. The world needs you to be your authentic self more than it needs another complicit carbon copy. The rapturous joy you’ll discover in being unapologetically you is worth every moment of vulnerability it takes to get there.

Liz: Everybody should be forced to go back and just be somebody else on stage and let their freak flag fly. Well, that might very well have to be the title of this.

Dr. Jeff: Let your freak flag fly.

And when you do… you’ll dance …and if you are lucky… you’ll look at your remarkable child and your blessed life and you wouldn’t change a thing.

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Standing at walk 25, looking back at the distance covered and forward to the path ahead, I find myself both humbled and amazed by the evolution of this project and even more so by the expansion of my thinking.

This isn’t just about completing a goal or accumulating miles. The second 25 walks represent a deepening of everything I’ve learned so far. The first half taught me to show up, to put one foot in front of another even when I felt lost. Each story invited me to walk with greater awareness, to truly inhabit each step. When I offered trust, I found authenticity.

The art of listening has perhaps been my greatest teacher. Not just hearing stories, but absorbing the subtle meanings beneath them. Listening to others without the urgent need to respond, advise, warn or relate it back to myself. Listening to the world around me – the rhythmic conversation of footsteps, breath, wind and passing cars that provide a soundtrack of presence.

And through this listening comes the most transformative lesson: people just want to be seen and loved. Not the easy, conditional love that comes naturally, but the intentional love and seeing that requires practice. The kind that sees beyond differences, and extends grace when it’s difficult. I take the responsibility as an honor to carry their hearts as I write their stories. You would understand if I let you hear some of the responses I get when a walker approves the piece.  

Let’s be honest, there is a lot left on the cutting room floor. You don’t hear all of the stories or all of the cussing. You don’t have any idea how often I have to re-record because Finley is my not-always-so-calm constant companion. You don’t capture my anxiety at the start of almost every walk because the mics don’t work. You miss my ineptitude at taking selfies – or remembering to take the picture horizontally. You also might miss that I have started walking on different paths – place-based listening, as I like to call it. Of course, I walked in an airport for The Oxygen Mask …or the Celtics practice facility with Ashley Battle …or the streets of Bellaire, OH with Jeff Hoepfner …and the alligator path for Listen with Rick Poalina. Otherwise, I’d have a mental ranking of whose lawn needed intervention, who got a new dog, or who gets the most packages delivered. Instead it increases my presence as I walk in a place that matters to the story or the person telling it.  I love that this is an imperfect project from which we keep learning.

As I lace up for the next 25 walks, know that this second half isn’t just a repetition of the first. It’s an invitation to go deeper, to listen more intentionally, to love more completely. I hope you have realized that there is something to gain from every walk – a chance to learn something new – even if you do not know the person by my side. Every story matters.

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In the summer of 1993, a young man was working with children at a drop-in center in a troubled Pittsburgh public housing complex. He received advice from an extraordinary human being, Sister Lynn, who shaped his future when she said: 

Gregg: I know your heart’s in this, but you have a chance. You’re going to have an opportunity in this life to do more systemic things. And you’ve got to get up to the stratosphere so you can start to change systems that affect lives like the ones you’re witnessing here.

I’ve never forgotten that.

Liz: That’s amazing. That’s a huge gift. What was your reaction? Do you remember?

Gregg: I think probably a mix of emotions, right? I think it was probably incredibly affirming because I adored Sister Lynn and respected her so much, and I just thought she was salt of the Earth. Probably a little bit puzzled because I was still a young punk trying to figure out this world and my place in this world and my purpose. And probably some angst, too, right? Because I don’t know, it seems like a big thing to take on systems which seem amorphous and confusing. It’s much easier to work with Will and Wu and to know the kids and to be present in their lives.

Turning that advice into his life’s work, Gregg Behr, the Executive Director of The Grable Foundation has never forgotten what it means to work with a child.  Reminiscent of Mister Rogers himself, Gregg Behr’s smile reflects the profound power of being fully present and authentically yourself. He knows how much it feeds your soul to make a difference in a young life. It keeps you young at heart. As he says, “I am the luckiest kid in Pittsburgh.” He recalls a project that devised “ a way for kids to drive a submersible through the aquariums at the Pittsburgh Zoo. It was fascinating, and I loved it. I got to do it myself. There you are, driving this robotic device. It had cameras on it so you could zoom in on the shark that was right in front of and all other things. You and I laugh about it because you can think of the 100 reasons that went wrong. But actually, I think it sparked so many other things, including elevating the wonder and curiosity of someone today who’s now leading a space company.’

Liz: The fact that you got to drive one… I mean, forget that you don’t get to work with kids anymore. You get to do the things kids do.

Gregg: I told you I’m Pittsburgh’s luckiest kid.

So Sister Lynn was right, Gregg did end up in the stratosphere – in the world of philanthropy, but he maintains a grounded perspective with a heaping dose of wonder usually reserved for children: “I’m someone who believes deeply that genuine change actually happens in lots and lots of little things, being faithful to the little things. The compilation of those little things add up to something incredibly special.” 

This philosophy shapes his approach at the Grable Foundation, where success is measured by the ability “to support extraordinary people and their organizations who in some way are making life better and bringing goodness to kids, to families, to communities in this place that we call home.”

Gregg Behr galvanizes you to do what you can to make your corner of the world better for those around you – especially the children. Starting with something as simple as a pancake breakfast, he has a childlike enthusiasm for possibility that reminds us that the most transformative philanthropy often begins with wonder, curiosity, and the simple joy of asking “What if?” to a gathering of extraordinary people who are working with and for children everyday. 

Gregg: The best things in life happen over food and beverage of some sort, right? When I think back to the very first breakfast meeting at Pamela’s in the Strip District of Pittsburgh that was in so many ways the start of what became Remake Learning. It was a teacher and someone from a museum. It was a multimedia person and a technologist and a gamer. People I had met over the previous months who clearly cared about kids, cared about learning, and were thinking differently about learning. It was just one of those what-if breakfasts. I always figured it’s at least worth the price of admission: a cup of coffee and pancakes.

Bringing together people with a similar passion over pancakes turned into the Remake Learning network of more than 800 schools and organizations. The power of its network is the way it is connecting educators, researchers, and community organizations to fundamentally reimagine how children learn. Remake Learning amplifies the voices of those making a difference for children. Its grant making encourages us to think boldly – to imagine a future different from the one we know in an industry that has barely changed in the past 100 years. 

Gregg: I’m both blessed and cursed. Working in philanthropy, we’re always at 30,000 feet. We’re not the ones doing the work. And yet we have this great perch to see what’s going on, to meet extraordinary people, communities, places, projects, ideas. I don’t know. I think sometimes philanthropy at its best is when it’s simultaneously the R&D and also the connector of people who are doing things. And maybe that’s what I’ve tried to do.

For Gregg, philanthropy exists somewhere “on that continuum between egoism and altruism. It’s never, ever 100% of either.” This balance became profoundly transformed when he became a father.  The disparities he witnessed professionally now struck him at an emotional core he hadn’t experienced before. Each child in an underfunded school or struggling neighborhood was no longer just a beneficiary of the foundation’s work—they became someone’s daughter, deserving every opportunity he wanted for his own children.  It creates an urgency.

Gregg: Becoming a parent, I think you start to see your own kid in so many other kids. You visit communities, and you visit schools, and you visit libraries, and you think to yourself, this just isn’t fair. You start to imagine your own child faced with those conditions, faced with those circumstances, faced with those deficiencies. The work becomes incredibly personal. 

This is my experience too. I have said many times I worked on creating a school where my children would thrive. You could call me the most selfish mother in the community, I guess. I was asked to consider the position of Head of School two years before I accepted it. I turned it down at first because I was trying to adopt a baby and didn’t think I had the bandwidth for the responsibility of leading a school. Over the course of the following two years, I visited almost every elementary school in the tri-state area as a supervisor of student teachers. I would return home to pick up Grace from Universal Preschool and silently commit that school would be better for her than what I experienced that day. When I couldn’t find one, I knew I could lead one. 

Gregg: I remember When Catheryn was born, I had said, I hope she doesn’t graduate from a brick and mortar high school like I did. I wasn’t naive to think high schools were going away. I mean, schools are central in kids’ lives. But now, referring to Mister Rogers, Fred himself understood that schools were central in kids’ lives, but he also understood that there’s a great big neighborhood where kids can learn and have experiences.

Fred Rogers—Pittsburgh’s most beloved neighbor—emerges as a touchstone in our conversation and in Gregg’s life. “Being a Pittsburgh kid, I find relevant modern wisdom in the work of Mister Rogers, whom I loved as a kid and have come to love even more so as an adult.” A black and white photo of Mister Rogers sitting on the steps of his trolley hangs next to Gregg’s desk. Of course it does. In its simplicity it evokes innocence and hope and a way to be transported to a child’s world even as an adult. Fred’s legacy reminds Gregg that the most meaningful education happens when we honor children’s natural curiosity and connect them with diverse experiences and people who care deeply about their wellbeing. 

Gregg’s admiration for Fred Rogers’ educational philosophy ultimately inspired him to co-author with Ryan Rydzewski When You Wonder, You’re Learning: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Lessons for Raising Creative, Curious, Caring Kids. The book emerges from a series of lightning bolt moments that indicated the time had come to elevate and amplify the great work happening in schools and neighborhoods in and around Pittsburgh. These experiences manifest Mister Rogers’ seemingly simple messages as profound wisdom about child development and learning. By writing this book, Gregg and Ryan transformed their personal inspiration from Fred Rogers into a resource for parents and educators, demonstrating how the beloved TV host’s simple approach remains powerfully relevant in today’s complex educational landscape. The book reflects Ryan and Gregg’s commitment to “curating examples” rather than prescribing solutions—highlighting Mister Rogers as “a master educator whose work should inspire us in the things that we’re trying to do.”

When we push ourselves to notice and wonder about the people and the things right around us in our own backyard as Gregg puts it, “you start to notice that excellence and how you can be part of it, how you can cultivate it, how you can advance it.”  Excellence, in this view, is inextricably linked to acknowledging the full humanity—including the doubt and resilience—of everyone involved in the work, even ourselves.

Liz: I think the hard part for people in the work we’re in is you never feel like you can do enough because the problem is so big, the profession is so noble. How do you deal with that?

Gregg: I’m always feeling that “never enough.” Sometimes I notice that I’m trying to do too much and I pull myself back. Sometimes I notice I’m asking others to do too much. I think I’ve garnered at least a little wisdom over the years to know how to pull back. But I often quote Arthur Ashe, and I’m not sure that he originated this phrase, but in many places it’s attributed to him. Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. I say that to myself a lot. I think it’s in part why I use phrases like “this corner of the world.” I’m just at this point in the world with whatever skill or privilege or luck or whatever it is that I have, what is it that I can do? Trying to know when that’s enough, I think it’s probably a continuous lesson.

Honestly, I feel like that’s a lesson I learn repeatedly. But I think that’s partly the challenge of being human, isn’t it?

Liz: So when you say you have to learn it repeatedly, do you kick yourself? Oh, my gosh, I had to learn that lesson again. Or are you forgiving of yourself?

Gregg: That’s a hard question. Forgiveness is not my first instinct, but I think I do come to forgive myself.

Liz: There’s no timeline.

We walked for just over an hour through Gregg’s neighborhood. It rained the entire time. It was February. I was wet from my toes to my hips. Like another beloved neighbor, he invited me in.  “Hot tea?” he asked. 

The funny thing is I remember that afternoon as being warm, welcoming, and inspiring. I don’t remember it as the only walk I’ve taken in the rain.  The gentle patter of raindrops created a natural soundtrack to this walk. The rain made ordinary streets glisten. Trees appeared more vibrant. The local school took on a dreamlike quality as it was reflected in surrounding puddles. Or… maybe that is just what it is like when you are lucky enough to walk with Gregg Behr… the luckiest kid in Pittsburgh. 

Sister Lynn would find that to be true.

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AB: How are you doing? 

Maine Celtics Coach, Tyler Lashbrook: Livin’ the dream. 

AB: You know, when people actually say that, they don’t believe it.

Tyler: What do you mean?

AB: People don’t believe it. I’ve found in my experiences that people don’t believe when they say I’m living in a dream. 

Tyler: It’s like a Midwest hello.

Liz: That is true.

Tyler: That’s what everybody says over there. 

AB: Okay. On the East Coast, I’m like, You don’t believe that. I’ve worked at a few places where people would say that often and they were actually miserable.

So many people would look at Ashley Battle’s life and say she is living the dream. Her fifth grade self might agree given she is a three-time NCAA Division 1 Basketball Champion and currently working in the front office of the Boston Celtics, but for Ashley the dream shifts. In Ashley Battle’s world, excellence isn’t a destination but a constant pursuit. The dream, then, isn’t static—it evolves, challenges, and propels her forward. Perhaps that’s what makes her attitude not just impressive, but genuinely inspiring.

AB: My expectations of myself are just so high. It’s just one of those things. You just never reach it. You’re always just pushing forward. You’re just never – satisfied.

Liz: So that keeps you a little bit humble? Because you know there’s some place higher.

AB: There’s something more I could do. You’re just never satisfied. 

I’ve written about that nagging inner voice proclaiming, “You should be doing more,” but for Ashley Battle this thought emerges from a place of genuine inspiration and growth. She isn’t filling gaps or proving herself —she is expanding the possibilities that excite her, precisely because she already knows her worth. I’ve come to believe this is what healthy ambition looks like. It’s not the frantic energy of someone trying to outrun their insecurities, but the steady, grounded momentum of someone who knows their value and chooses to grow. This mindset is perhaps best illustrated by her reflections on a conversation that Ashley had with her former University of Connecticut coach, Geno Auriemma.

AB: I think we were having lunch or something like that. And he made this face. And I was like, I don’t really know what’s about to come out of his mouth right now. I don’t know if it’s going to be something super sarcastic or something profound. It could go either way. I don’t know. And he was just like… “You’ve never failed at anything in your life. Whenever you decide that there’s something that you want to do, you do it and you do it to the highest level.” Granted, I’ve had failures in my life, I like to call them learning and growth opportunities.

Liz: But he’s not wrong. I would say I know a couple of jobs you’ve been up for that you didn’t get. And my feeling when I talked to you afterwards is always not that I didn’t get it or I failed, but that it must not be the right opportunity. There must be something else coming.

AB: Right. I’ve always lived by the idea that God’s going to present opportunities to me, and it’s up to me to be prepared and step through them. 

Liz: You might misinterpret it and go hard after something that’s not meant for you?

AB: 100%. I will go hard for it and may not get it, but these are reps. Interviewing reps, reps with important people, decision makers, people with influence, who may down the road have a different opportunity that I had no clue was even an option.

When confronted with professional disappointments—jobs she didn’t get—Ashley doesn’t dwell in defeat. Her perspective is refreshingly optimistic: not that she failed, but that those must not be the right opportunities. Something else is coming. Not every opportunity that presents itself aligns with our true path. Learning to discern which opportunities to pursue—and which to let pass—may be one of life’s most valuable skills. This self-awareness informs Ashley Battle’s template for purposeful living: pursue excellence relentlessly, prepare diligently for opportunities coming, discern wisely, learn from setbacks, and maintain the anomaly of both confidence and humility simultaneously. 

This approach was apparent in elementary school. When she was in 5th grade – Ashley knew she was different. She had a coach that year that really focused on fundamentals. Throughout elementary school, she distinguished herself as the most talented player on the boys’ team. What came easily to her did not come as easily to anyone she played with, especially once in high school. ​​We’ve all seen it – that rare individual who stands head and shoulders above everyone else. The one who grasps skills immediately while others struggle. The natural talent who makes the difficult look effortless. But there’s a paradox of such exceptional talent: being the best doesn’t eliminate your need for a team. In fact, it transforms your responsibility within that team.

AB: I knew where I would want somebody to be, they just didn’t know where to be. And I had to teach them. So I had to teach my teammates like, Hey, if I’m going this way, go here. Even though I had moments where it was frustrating, it helped me grow as a leader, helped me grow in communication, and helped me grow in ways in which I didn’t really realize at the time being a 15-year-old girl trying to teach people how to play basketball.

I know this about myself. I’m a horrible loser. Back then, you could really see my frustration. I wore it on my sleeve. You could see it in my face. And that’s not necessarily the best way to get your point across. If you want somebody to follow you, you can’t just be mad at them all the time. You really have to teach and show empathy and try to meet them where they are to get them where you want them to go.

This simple realization, “I knew where I would want somebody to be,” is a mark of genuine leadership, but great leaders don’t just have a vision of the destination—they guide others along the path. As a high school basketball player, Ashley discovered that leadership isn’t about being ahead of everyone else; it’s about bringing everyone else along with you. With her exceptional talent, the greatest challenge was never proving her own capabilities – it was multiplying her impact through others.  She faced a choice: become limited by the capabilities of those around her or invest in elevating them to new levels. She chose to invest. What began as basketball lessons transcends the sport entirely. Leadership isn’t about demanding that others keep up with your pace. It’s about connecting with them where they are and guiding them toward a  vision of success. In the need to explain, demonstrate, and inspire rather than simply execute—she developed muscles she would need as a professional.

In the corporate environment, these principles become essential navigation tools in spaces where her race and gender are underrepresented.

AB: I’m often the only black female in a room full of white men. Sometimes I just don’t talk. I’ll have an opinion, and I won’t say anything.

Liz: And therein breeds imposter syndrome.

AB: And therein breeds imposter syndrome. And they’ll think, “Oh, you’ve been here a while. You should feel comfortable enough talking.” Yeah, not when you get talked over and there’s things happening within the room that you’re just like, I don’t agree with this. So sometimes you pick and choose when’s a good opportunity to go full throttle.

The basketball court teaches when to drive hard to the basket and when to pull back and reset the play. In corporate worlds, Ashley uses her skill of discernment to know when and how to use her voice. This isn’t about silencing herself —it’s about strategic deployment of influence.

The reality of being talked over or marginalized in meetings breeds what many misidentify as simply “imposter syndrome.” But what looks like self-doubt may just be sophisticated situational awareness. As a black woman leader, Ashley has learned to read rooms with exceptional precision, strategically choosing when to “go full throttle” and when to leverage other skills. The basketball player who knows when to take the shot and when to pass develops exactly this kind of strategic wisdom. Your worth doesn’t fluctuate with your race or gender any more than your influence should change with your shooting percentage. 

Having navigated spaces not designed with her in mind, Ashley has developed a natural expertise in creating environments where diverse perspectives can thrive. Her mindset converts obstacles into platforms for demonstrating leadership excellence.

The lessons learned while navigating team dynamics as a young athlete built precisely the skills needed to excel in professional environments, but she also had good role models who guided her early on her path. There’s something deeply moving about her gratitude toward them. Her mother first and foremost, but also her early coaches, and her Head of School, Reno DiOrio, all kept her on the right path. Those adults saw her potential – each one at a different time in her life played that role of “one caring adult,” the steady heartbeat when we are stepping outside our comfort zone.

AB: [Reno] knew the path, and he’s seen it. He knew the path could be screwed up, and he’s seen the path get screwed up. He knew where I lived in Pittsburgh. He knew it was a rough area. He knew that anything could happen. And so he was just really trying to make sure that I stayed on the path. And granted, do I think my path would have been drastically different if I didn’t go to Linsly? No. Linsly didn’t get me a scholarship to college. I did that with my AAU team and stuff like that. I knew the reasoning for me to go to Linsly wasn’t athletics. I knew that I needed to balance where I was athletically and where I needed to be academically. I knew I needed both of those to be at a high level.

Liz: If we were going to make a top five list of what the “one caring adult” needs to do or be, what list would we make?

AB: I think the first thing that would be on the list is respect. And the reason why I say respect is because no matter the age, you should respect that person. Even if they’re a kid, they have thoughts, they have feelings. You have to let them express themselves. Whether or not you agree with it, that’s one thing. But you have to have a dialogue. And I think that was the one thing I had with you, and that’s the one thing I for sure have with my mom. She is like, I don’t care what it is. We can talk about it. Whether or not I want to talk about it or not.

Liz: Number two, as the adult, I have to see myself as a guide and not a preacher. Because I have to recognize that you are going to be your own person, and you have to make your own mistakes to get there. I think sometimes the one caring adult thinks they see the best path for you.

AB: So this is funny that you bring that up. During the recruiting process, I was like…U Conn was becoming established. They had just come off of a national championship. Duke was on their way. They had a really good class coming in. And my mom’s like, “How can you turn down Duke?” A lot of people are just like, “It’s Duke. How can you turn down Duke?” And I’m like, I got to be there. I have to be there. You guys are not going to be there. And I could go to Duke and flunk out, or I could go to U Conn and win three national championships and double major in economics and marketing. My thought with school was like, it is what it is. School is what you make it out to be. I don’t care where you go. 

Ashley saw something in the path ahead that would best serve her. She knew she needed to find the right fit. The well-meaning adults were a little blinded by prestige. Myself included. I was her Humanities teacher at the time. It was years before Frank Bruni would write Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, which reset my mindset to align with AB’s – school is what you make of it. Once again in her life, she knew her worth, and it wasn’t measured by the name of a college on her diploma.

Liz: All right, so we came up with two. And to be honest with you, maybe that’s all we need to put on that list. Maybe it really is listening and realizing your job is to let them be their own person.

AB: Yeah.

Liz: Show up.

AB: Yeah, you got to be there.

AB: We had an unfortunate death in my family. My grandmother died my senior year in high school during all of this recruiting process. And Geno was really the only person that expressed his condolences.

Liz: Wow. That’s what it comes down to?

AB: That’s what it comes down to. Who are you as a person.

Liz: Geno made the phone call.

AB: Yeah, you got to be there.

This is truly the pattern I hear over and over and over in these walks. The essence of success is about people – the genuine humanity of a leader. I said in an earlier walk that confidence is born in countless hours in empty gyms, but I was wrong. The gym is rarely empty. There is one caring adult who got you there, or sits in the empty stands, or leaves you the key to lock up. Confidence is born because someone you respect returns the favor.

Basketball was only the beginning. Former teammate, Jessica Moore, forecasted as much.

AB: When we both got done playing, she was like, You know what, AB? Basketball is not going to be what really defines us. She was like, “We’re going to do so many great things that being at U Conn is not going to be the most brilliant thing that’s ever happened to us.”

At age 42, Ashley has some big dreams still ahead.

AB: If I had to pinpoint two things, it would probably be being a GM, and I’d broadcast more. No. There are three things. I’d probably become a mother, too. I would do that for sure. The world needs a little bit more Ashleys.

Liz: I couldn’t agree more. And if I’ve learned anything from talking to a lot of great people, they thought they had the best empathy or the best compassionate view of the world until they had a child.

AB: I got good genes, Liz. They need to be passed down. I’m an only child. The bloodline can’t end with me.

Liz: That’s right. I have the name, and I gave my name to my girls, even though they have Mark’s name, too, because I’m the end of Hofreuters.

AB: That’s what I’m saying.

Liz: And I hope they’ll continue it, even if it’s in the middle name.

AB: That’s what I’m saying.

Liz: Because there’s something about not letting something die.

AB: You want to talk about pressure? That’s pressure.

Liz: There’s no doubt about it.

AB: If I had to do one thing all over again, I would have become a mother way sooner. I would have done that way sooner.

Liz: And someday you’ll see why you didn’t.

AB: I mean, I live a great life.

Liz: You do.

AB: I understand why I didn’t. But if there was one thing that you would say, Oh, you’re going to regret? Yeah, I would do that sooner. Ready or not ready, I would have done it sooner.

Liz: I adopted Ella at 41, almost turning 42.

AB: What a blessing Ella is, too.

Liz: Oh, what a blessing. It’s hard now. I’m grandma-age.

AB: That is what it is going to be for me. I’m going to be a fun grandma, though.

She’ll be a fun grandma just like I remain “sporty spice” – a name my niece gave me 21 years ago when she was afraid my having a baby would change the way I approached life and played with her. It hasn’t. Not on most days. At 58, I’m still “sporty spice.” And I see in Ashley something I know which is true for myself – we both have the heart of a child.  Not only do we see the potential in a child and respect that, but in interactions with adults, I can see the innocent child within them. I try to appeal to that. The heart of a child doesn’t mean childish leadership—it means bringing our most human qualities to our work and our life. It means connecting with others where they are. It means leading with wonder, authenticity, and empathy in the pursuit of excellence in every encounter. I think that just might be a good definition for living the dream.

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Postscript

Ashley still teaches others with respect – not arrogance – just helping you see something in yourself or do something you didn’t know you had in you. As it was when she made sure I made a basket at the Celtics practice facility where we walked.

AB: So I’m going to just give you… Come closer. Give you a little bit of pointer. So when you’re going to shoot it… good angle… this is a great angle. You see the top of the box? Aim for right there. Just like that.

Liz: You have told me that before in this lifetime. It’s the way I hold the ball that sucks. Yeah, good.

AB: It’s just higher. Just higher.

AB: Boom. 

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