The Person Who Made You Brave Enough to Charge

Read Time: ~ 3 Mins

My friend Cam is moving this weekend and I’m experiencing a profound sense of loss.

He's a little older than me, a little further down the road, and for eight years he's been the kind of presence that's hard to name but impossible to miss. Not a mentor, exactly. Something more like a north star I could actually call on a Tuesday.

He didn't develop me. He grounded me.

There's a difference.

The Bison and the Storm

In my book Lead. Manage. WIN! I write about the bison. I also wrote an article about this in early April… READ IT HERE

On the Great Plains, when a storm rolls in, cattle turn away and try to outrun it. They're slow. They never make it. And in their attempt to escape, they extend their time inside the very thing they're trying to avoid.

Bison do the opposite. They turn toward the storm and charge directly into it, shortening their time in it, coming out the other side faster, with less damage.

The principle is simple: avoiding difficulty almost always leads to prolonged pain, never to a solution.

I've taught that principle to supervisors for years. Be a bison. Charge the storm. Face what's in front of you.

But here's something I didn't put in the book, something I've only understood because of people like Cam:

It's easier to charge when you know someone who's already been through it.

What Grounding Actually Does

Cam wasn't always in my storm. He didn't always fix things or talk me through them. Sometimes he just existed nearby as a person who had faced harder things than I was currently facing, and come out intact on the other side.

That is its own kind of courage transfer.

There's a version of supervision nobody talks about, and I mean no formal version at all. No title, no framework, no direct report relationship. It's just the presence of someone whose steadiness makes you more steady. Someone who has already charged enough storms that being around them recalibrates your instincts.

They don't teach you. They just show you what it looks like to keep moving.

What Supervisors Need That No Org Chart Provides

If you're a supervisor of humans at any level off our organization, you know the isolation that can seep in. You're supposed to be the bison for other people. You're supposed to charge first, signal calm, hold the line.

But who steadies you?

Most supervisors I work with have exactly zero Cams in their professional orbit. They have bosses who evaluate them. They have peers who compete with them. They have direct reports who need things from them.

What they don't have is a Cam. Someone a little further along, with no agenda for them, who makes them feel like it's going to be okay to charge.

That absence is costing them and you more than you realize.

The best supervisors I've encountered… the ones who last, who grow, who stay grounded under pressure… almost all have someone like this in their corner. Not a coach they pay. Not a mentor the company assigned. Someone real. Someone who showed up.

Your Move This Week

Two things.

First: if you have a Cam, tell them. You probably haven't said it clearly. Do it before they move away and you're sitting with what you should have said.

Second: think about who is watching you the way you watch Cam. Who, in your orbit right now, is quietly measuring their own courage against yours? Who is charging their storms a little more confidently because you've already been through yours?

You don't have to be perfect. You just have to be a bison.

And it’s a lot easier to be a bison when you’re your firmly connected to the ground.

That's what a grounding presence does. It doesn't solve anything. It just proves the storm is survivable.

Cam proved that for me.

I hope I'm proving it for someone else.