You’re here. And you’re reading this.
That’s enough to start with. You don’t need to have read the other eleven posts in this series. You don’t need to have a clear sense of what you’re looking for or a tidy answer for why this one caught your eye. Curiosity counts. Searching counts. Having a vague feeling that something needs to shift counts just as much as knowing exactly what it is.
You’re here. That’s the first piece of evidence.
Fort Bragg. Springtime. A Swamp.
PLDC. The leadership course that determines whether you move forward or go back and try again. Four land navigation points to find. A time limit. A pass or fail waiting at the end.
I shot my azimuth and it took me straight into a swamp.
Not metaphorically. An actual North Carolina springtime swamp, the kind that forms after several days of serious rain, dense with pine trees and foliage so thick you couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction once you were inside it. I was already carrying the first two points. My uniform was already soaked through, it hadn’t been a cool day, easily high 80s, humidity sitting somewhere around 85%, and I was running at about 80% energy walking into the tree line.
At the 150-meter mark I stopped. Looked around. The vines weren’t just around me, they were on me. Little thorns and burrs cutting into my skin, catching on my uniform, some spots bleeding fresh and some already drying. It smelled unexpectedly good, some of the vines had flowers, and there was pine everywhere, but it was dense and wet and I could not see where I was going.
I had a choice. Pull out the map. Re-orient. Find a better route around it.
I didn’t. I kept going.
I fell down more than once, a vine would catch my foot and send me into the thicket, and every time I went down I wasn’t sure my legs had another push left in them. The cramps in my hamstrings started somewhere in the first quarter mile and got worse with every step, that specific kind of cramping where you lift your foot to take the next step and you genuinely don’t know if this is the one that drops you. Coming out the other side I was at 25% at best. Wet, cut up, stinking, muscles burning.
And the first thing I felt when I cleared the tree line was relief. Not accomplishment. Relief.
And then immediately: why didn’t I just turn around at 150 meters? Why didn’t I pull out the map?
Four out of four points. I passed.
And I spent the next few minutes questioning a decision that had just worked.
The Rearview Mirror
Here’s what I know now that I didn’t fully understand coming out of that swamp.
The thicket is the evidence.
Not the four points. Not the pass. The fact that I went through something difficult, disorienting, and physically miserable, fell down in it more than once, and came out the other side still moving. That’s the proof. And if you never glance back at it, you miss it entirely. You just keep moving forward with your eyes on the next point, carrying the weight of everything unfinished, and the thicket you already got through disappears into the background like it never happened.
That’s not humility. That’s an incomplete inventory.
The rearview mirror glance isn’t rumination. It’s not the same as staring backward so long you stop moving forward. It’s a quick, intentional look, specific, honest, so you know what’s behind you before you accelerate.
What’s behind you? What have you already gotten through?
The Evidence
Think about the goal that felt like a skyscraper when you first looked up at it.
Now look at what you already know. What you’ve already built. What you’ve already survived. The goal is no longer the size of a skyscraper. It fits in a carry-on. In the overhead compartment. Not because it got smaller, because you got bigger, and you weren’t paying attention when it happened.
The brain weasels will tell you it doesn’t count. That it was supposed to be harder. That other people have done more with less. That you’re still not where you said you’d be by now.
That is not evidence. That is the old song of doubt playing on repeat because nobody turned it off.
Here’s the actual evidence: you’re asking better questions now. About what you value. About whose permission you’ve been waiting for. About the stories that have been running in the background. About what rest actually costs you, and what belonging actually feels like in your body. About the gap between who you say you are and how you’ve been showing up.
Those are not the questions of someone at Square One. Those are the questions of someone who has already moved.
You are so much further along than you think you are.
All of us, every last one, moving through our own versions of the thicket. Falling down in it sometimes. Coming out the other side wetter and more tired than we expected, immediately questioning why we didn’t just go around.
The answer, most of the time, is that going through it was the thing that got us where we needed to be.
One Question Before You Go
What did it feel like in your body when you read the line “you’re further along than you think”?
Did something tighten? Did something loosen? Did you dismiss it immediately and move on? Did you want to believe it but not quite get there?
I want to know. Not as a formality, as genuine curiosity. That feeling, whatever it was, is the beginning of something worth looking at.
Send me an email. Tell me what came up. That’s it. No agenda on the other end. Just someone who has been through his own version of the swamp, who knows what it looks like to come out the other side questioning the route, and who is genuinely interested in what you found in yours.
I will be over here waiting for your message.
LaSchwann Killens is an ICF-trained life and executive coach and the founder of VALADD Coaching. He works with people who are further along than they think, and ready to finally see it.