June Trail Check-In: The View From the Valley

June Trail Check-In: The View From the Valley

I've been paying attention differently on the trail lately.

Not to the distance. Not to the elevation. Not to how quickly I can reach the top. I've been paying attention to where I am on the mountain and what that place is asking of me.

Someone shared an analogy with me recently that I haven't been able to stop thinking about. They said we spend a lot of time going up the mountain and coming back down, but we spend the least amount of time at the top. And the top, they reminded me, sometimes has the least air and the fewest resources. The peak isn't where the work happens. It's where we take the photo.

But the valley is where the growth happens.

I've been sitting with that ever since.

What the trail already knew

The trail has always been my sanctuary. A place where I show up, slow down, and let whatever I'm carrying find its proper weight. But somewhere in the push to keep moving, up the elevation, toward the summit, checking the miles, I realize I've sometimes missed what the valley was holding for me.

The valley is where the water is. Where things take root. Where the light filters through differently than it does at the top. You don't get that view from the peak. You only get it when you're willing to be where the growth is.

This same person also said something else that stayed with me. That it's important to embrace the season you're in. To acknowledge the changes that come with it and to be okay with who you are becoming in this stage.

Not who you were at the last peak. Not who you're trying to become at the next one. But who you are becoming right now, in the valley, in the middle of it.

That's harder than it sounds.

The leadership and mental health thread

June is Men's Mental Health Awareness Month. And while this reflection is my own, I don't think the valley is a gendered place. I think it's a human one, and one that men are too rarely given permission to name out loud.

And I think one of the most honest things I can say as someone who leads others is this: sometimes it takes someone else's words to give you language for what you've been carrying.

The valley analogy is one of those gifts. I spent a long time measuring my growth by peaks, promotions, milestones, moments of visible achievement. The kind of progress that shows up on a resume or in a highlight reel. But the valley seasons? I either rushed through them or quietly questioned what they meant about me.

For the men reading this especially, the valley is not weakness. It never was. It just hasn't always had permission to be named out loud. It's okay to name it now.

Spending time with my Dad this Father's Day has me thinking about him differently than I have before. Not just who he is to me now but who he has always been. The sacrifices he made quietly, without fanfare, that I didn't fully understand until I got older. The decisions he carried that I only now recognize as the weight they actually were. The valleys he moved through without ever calling them that.

He just kept going. And in doing so he showed me what it looks like to be in the valley without shame, long before I had language for any of it.

That's the kind of strength worth talking about this month.

I'm in a season of valley work right now. Personally and professionally. The details belong to me for now. But what I can say is that I'm learning to stop treating it like something to push through and start treating it like somewhere to be present.

The trail taught me presence. The valley is asking me to practice it on myself.

What I'm learning to embrace

I used to reach a certain point on the trail and immediately start thinking about what was next. The next mile. The next elevation marker. The next summit. Even in stillness, sometimes I was already somewhere else.

These days I pause more. Not because I'm tired, though sometimes I am, but because I'm learning to ask what this part of the trail is holding for me before I move on from it. What is this season showing me? What is changing in me that I need to acknowledge rather than outrun?

Someone said that's what embracing the valley looks like. I'm calling it the most honest hike I've ever taken.

Leadership asks a lot of us. It asks us to be clear, decisive, present, and strong. But I think the leaders who sustain, the ones who don't burn out or hollow out over time, are the ones who know how to be in the valley without shame. Who can say "I'm in a season of growth that doesn't look like growth yet" and mean it without apology.

That's the view from the valley. It isn't the most dramatic view. But it might be the most important one.

The trail is teaching me to stay here a little longer. And for the first time, I'm listening.

What season are you in right now? I'd love to know how you're moving through it.