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This Week's Challenge: Audit the Loyalty
Hey Champion.
I want to ask you something before we get into this week's challenge. And I want you to sit with it before you answer.
Are you loyal to who you are right now, or are you loyal to who you said you'd be back then?
Take a second with that.
Most of us were raised to honor our commitments. Loyal to our word, our crew, our people. That's a non-negotiable for me, and I'd bet it is for you, too. But somewhere along the way, that loyalty gets turned inward in a way that quietly works against us. We start honoring commitments we made to old versions of ourselves. Plans we drew up when we had less information, less experience, and less life under our belt. And we keep running those plays long after the game has changed.
I've been sitting with this a lot lately.
My career is in the middle. Not the beginning, where everything is fresh and hungry, and you'll run through a wall just to prove you belong. Not the end where you're wrapping things up and passing the torch. The middle. And the middle is something nobody really prepares you for. Your mentors talk about how to get in and how to go out, but the stretch in between? You mostly figure that out on your own.
What I've been noticing is that a lot of the pressure I carry is self-generated. It comes from holding myself to a picture I drew a long time ago of what this point in my life was supposed to look like. The career was supposed to be here. The business was supposed to be there. The body was supposed to be doing this. And when reality doesn't match the picture, it's easy to feel like you're behind. Like you're failing a plan that made sense once, but maybe needs to be redrawn.
Here's what I know about loyalty. Real loyalty isn't blind. Real loyalty is honest. If you're loyal to a teammate, you tell them the truth even when it's uncomfortable. You don't just tell them what they want to hear. So why do we give ourselves less than that? Why do we keep chasing a version of success that the current us doesn't even fully recognize anymore?
Growth is supposed to change the picture. That's not failure. That's the point.
So this week's challenge is simple, but don't let the simplicity fool you into skipping it.
Write down one thing you're still doing, still holding, or still chasing out of loyalty to an old version of you. One thing that, if you're being fully honest, might not fit who you're becoming. You don't have to blow it up today. You don't have to make any big moves. Just be honest about it. Name it. Because you can't adjust what you won't acknowledge.
That's where the real work starts. Not in the big dramatic moments. In the quiet, honest ones.
Before I let you go, I want to put two things in front of you.
First, if today's challenge connected with you, I want you to come find me on Substack. I've been publishing longer, more personal writing over there, and this week I dropped a piece called "Nobody Warned Me About the Middle" that goes deeper into everything I touched on today. It's the kind of writing I do when I'm not performing, just being honest. You can follow me at substack.com/@severenhenderson. Read it. Share it if it hits. And if you're building your own thing and want more of this kind of conversation, subscribe so you don't miss what's coming.
Second, if you've been sitting on an idea for a book, a guide, a course, anything you've been wanting to put out into the world but don't know where to start, I built something for you. It's called Just Publish. It's a no-nonsense self-publishing guide built for people who have something to say and just need someone to walk them through the process without the fluff. Seventeen dollars. You can grab it at iamsevy.gumroad.com/l/afbto or find it alongside everything else I have going on at iamsevy.com. Stop waiting. Just publish!
That's your challenge this week. Audit the loyalty. Rewrite the picture if needed. And keep building.
Your move.
Keep building.
Sevy
