The Hidden Herald: When Your Purpose Starts Pulling Hard

There are seasons in a leader’s life when purpose stops being a quiet background melody and starts pulling hard.

You notice it in the invitations that come your way, in the energy you feel when you speak, in the rooms you suddenly find yourself in. You also notice it in the resistance that follows: the inner voice that whispers, “Careful. If you really say what you see, they’ll come for you.”

This is the tension many purpose-driven leaders are living in right now. Their work is becoming more relevant, not less. Their message lands more deeply, not more superficially. And at the same time, the stakes feel higher. Visibility feels more dangerous.

This is a conversation about that tension.

When relevance starts pulling hard

In the transcript behind this article, a seasoned leadership coach describes giving a keynote at the first B Corp Scotland conference. It is exactly his kind of room: businesses committed to being a force for good, hungry for conversations about purpose, trust, and responsibility.

He doesn’t just “give a talk.” He calls the room to respond. He names the political headwinds, the rollback on sustainability and diversity, and the way some corporations reveal the shallowness of their values by quickly following the new signals from power.

The room doesn’t just nod politely. They shout back. They join him.

He comes home energized, with the quiet satisfaction of someone who has just done his job. And then, a day or two later, he feels rattled, edgy, pulled hard by something he can’t quite name.

This is what happens when relevance spikes.

In his words:

“The relevance is pulling hard. The purpose is pulling hard at the moment.”

Leaders often expect this pull earlier in life. They wonder why the market didn’t respond as strongly five or ten years ago. But purpose doesn’t obey our timelines. It intensifies when the wider context converges with the work we’ve been doing in the dark for decades.

The challenge is less about finding purpose and more about staying with it when it starts to demand something from us.

Ikigai and the question of reward

To make sense of this, the conversation turns to the Japanese concept of Ikigai.

Ikigai sits at the intersection of four circles:

• What you love
• What you are good at
• What the world needs
• What you can be paid for

Many leaders are familiar with three of these circles. They love their work. They’re good at it. The world clearly needs it.

The fourth circle is more difficult.

When your work addresses deep, often unconscious needs in a system, it is not always easy to get paid in the conventional sense. The conversation reframes this:

Instead of asking, “What can I be paid for?” ask, “What am I rewarded for?”

Sometimes reward shows up as money. Sometimes it shows up as something else: the look in the room when a shared truth lands, the sense of alignment when you do the work you were born to do, the quiet blessing of knowing, “You did your job.”

At the Edinburgh keynote, there was no fee. But there was a massive reward.

This is not a romantic argument against commercial discipline. It is an invitation to widen the measurement of value for work that is, by nature, long-term, systemic, and deep.

Aspirins, vitamins, and broad-spectrum antibiotics

The market, however, does not care about our inner sense of reward.

The market wants aspirin.

Dorie Clark uses a simple phrase that captures this: it’s easier to sell an aspirin than a vitamin. Aspirins remove pain that is here and now. Vitamins promise future benefits that are vague and often deferrable.

The conversation extends this metaphor.

• Most organizations want targeted solutions for specific pain points:

  • Pain A → Pill A
  • Pain B → Pill B
  • Pain C → Pill C

• Work like worldview agility is more like a broad-spectrum antibiotic or a holistic practice such as yoga:

  • One deep intervention that eases multiple pains at once.
  • A shift in how you see and respond to reality, not just a fix for one symptom.

From a purely transactional perspective, worldview agility always seems to lose out. For pain A, a targeted Pill A is usually faster and more measurable than a deep shift in worldview. The same holds for B and C.

You see this in leadership, too. There’s always a training program that promises a quick fix:

• Boost engagement in 90 days
• Reduce conflict with a new feedback model
• Drive innovation through a workshop series

These can be useful. But they rarely touch the underlying operating system: the worldview that shapes how leaders interpret events, power, risk, and possibility.

Holistic work is harder to sell because it is:

• Preventive rather than reactive
• Systemic rather than symptomatic
• Long-term rather than short-term

And yet, for many leaders, it is exactly this kind of work that their organizations most desperately need.

The yoga studio and the doctor’s office

A simple image illuminates the challenge.

Think of two doors on the same street:

• One leads to a doctor’s office. Inside, you get a prescription that quickly relieves your current pain.
• The other leads to a yoga studio. Inside, you practice something that, over time, will change your body, your nervous system, and your relationship with stress.

Both matter. Both are valid.

But if you stand outside with a headache, where do you go?

That is the business challenge for leaders offering deep, holistic work. You are, in many ways, selling yoga in a world set up for aspirin.

The mature strategy is not to despise the doctor’s office or condemn those who choose it. The strategy is to:

• Accept that you are serving a niche
• Get clear about which niche
• Find the rooms where people are already open to holistic, preventive, systemic solutions

Where are the rooms?

This is where the metaphor of “rooms” becomes crucial.

When the coach speaks at the B Corp Scotland conference, he is in a room where people already understand purpose, trust, and responsibility. He is, in his phrase, “preaching to the converted.”

The energy is different in those rooms. The message lands more quickly. The work feels aligned.

For the proponent of worldview agility, the immediate question becomes:

“Where are my rooms? Where do people already gather who are open to worldview agility, even if they don’t yet have a name for it?”

This is not a trivial question.

Part of the difficulty is internal: a belief that these rooms may not exist, that potential allies are scattered individuals on solitary journeys, not yet in community. Part of it is strategic: these rooms might be nascent, emerging at the edge of existing networks rather than in obvious places.

But in business terms, the path forward is clear: find or create the rooms where your implicit solution becomes an explicit desire.

That might mean:

• Purpose-driven leadership circles
• Communities around conscious capitalism or regenerative business
• Peer groups for senior leaders exploring spirituality and responsibility
• Learning spaces where systems thinking and inner work already have a place

You don’t need every room. You need the right rooms.

The hidden herald

Underneath the strategic question lies a psychological and spiritual one:
Am I willing to be seen as a herald?

A herald is someone who brings a message, often one that is inconvenient, countercultural, or ahead of its time. The image is powerful. But it is also frightening.

The phrase that emerges in the conversation is “hidden herald”.

It is instantly recognized as an oxymoron:

“A hidden herald does not exist.
If I remain hidden, either I am not a herald, or I am useless as a herald.”

This is uncomfortable truth for many leaders who sense they are carrying a message. They write the occasional article, speak fully in one-to-one settings, and are deeply honest in small circles, but hold back on the bigger stage: the book, the keynote, the public stance.

They are heralds in everything but scale.

The reframing is subtle but important:
“I am a herald in training.”

You are not completely hidden. Your website exists. Your current clients know what you stand for. You have already spoken your truth in some rooms.

At the same time, you are not as visible as your message will likely require you to be.

This is not failure. It is a developmental path.

Fear of crucifixion

If you think this is simply a marketing or confidence issue, listen more closely.

Beneath the hesitation sits something older and more visceral: a fear of crucifixion.

Not necessarily literal physical harm, but:

• Being intellectually attacked
• Being socially excluded or ridiculed
• Being professionally discredited
• Being overwhelmed by unwanted visibility

In the transcript, this is framed explicitly through Christian imagery: Jesus as a “professional colleague,” the baby boys killed by Herod, the message “do not be afraid” repeated throughout the gospels, the belief that heralds are, historically, crucified.

A powerful inner script emerges:

“If I open my big mouth and speak powerful words, they will come and get me.”

Whether your own tradition is Christian or not, many leaders carry some version of this script. It might not use biblical language, but it carries the same structure:

• If I speak the deeper truth I see,
• Some larger, punishing force will notice,
• And I will be taken out.

The irony is sharp: the very leaders whose content emphasizes that fear is an illusion and life is larger than death are often paralyzed by this archetypal fear when it comes to their own visibility.

Spiritual tests and resistance

A tantric teacher in the conversation names these patterns as “spiritual tests.”

They are not random. They show up precisely at the threshold of the next level of visibility or contribution.

The leadership coach recognizes a similar pattern after the Edinburgh keynote. He describes an “aftershock” where old belief systems push back: you opened your mouth, you rallied a room, now “they” will come for you.

Psychologically, this is resistance. Spiritually, it is a test:
Will you choose to align with the deeper truth you profess, or with the fear you inherited?

The work is not to eradicate fear, but to:

• Bring it into the light
• Name it clearly
• Laugh at its distortions
• Keep going anyway

You don’t pass the test once. You pass it again and again, often in small, unglamorous decisions: publish the article, say the sentence on stage, decline the watered-down version of your work.

Reward, blessing, and “you did your job”

If you strip away the drama, what remains is disarmingly simple.

The deepest reward for this kind of work is not market share, social media reach, or keynote fees. Those may come, and they are not irrelevant, but they are not the core.

The core reward is something like this:

“You did your job.”

The phrase appears in the conversation as a kind of blessing. To hear, in whatever way you interpret it, “You did your job, thank you,” may be the truest compensation for a life spent speaking a difficult, necessary message.

From that vantage point:

• Market demand matters, but it is not the ultimate judge.
• Payment matters, but it is one form of reward among many.
• Visibility matters, but as a servant of the message, not as an ego project.

You become less concerned with whether your work is recognized as the next “Seven Habits” or “Five Dysfunctions,” and more concerned with whether you are carrying the piece of the work that is yours to carry, in the time you have.

Energetic handshakes and partnership

One of the quiet, practical insights in the conversation is the value of good partnership.

One partner describes himself as temperamentally “pulling hard,” easily fired up, prone to racing ahead. The other is more naturally calm, slow, reflective.

In their calls, they notice a pattern:

• The fired-up one calms down.
• The calm one gets energized.
• Both end closer to the optimal center than they started.

They call it an energetic handshake.

For leaders carrying heavy, complex messages, this kind of partnership is not a luxury. It is a support structure. It helps you:

• Normalize fear and resistance instead of pathologizing them
• Test your thinking without diluting your message
• Stay honest about your own patterns while staying committed to the work

No one herald walks alone. At least, they shouldn’t.

From hidden herald to herald in training

If you recognize yourself in any of this, the invitation is simple and challenging at the same time.

• Acknowledge the hidden herald in you.
• Name the spiritual tests that show up when you move toward greater visibility.
• Reframe yourself as a herald in training, not a fraud or a failure.
• Start looking for the rooms where your work is already needed and partially understood.
• Shift your question from “What will they pay me?” to “How will I be rewarded, and what is my job in this season?”

And then, one conversation, one article, one room at a time, let the work become as visible as it needs to be.

Because there is one more irony here: the heart of the message in the transcript is that crucifixion is an illusion and that life continues, expands, and renews itself beyond every apparent ending.

To keep that message hidden out of fear of crucifixion is, as the conversation notes, almost funny. Funny, and very human. Which is why we need each other to keep going.

(These reflections were inspired by a Conscious Conversation with a dear friend & professional colleague on 7th March 2025.)