Wayfaring Women: Glennon Doyle

A wayfarer finds her way the way a compass does, sensing the current, the wind, the small signs most people walk past. A felt sense of direction, trusted one step at a time. This week's wayfarer spent years building a life that looked right from the outside before she let herself admit it wasn't.

Initial Bearings Where she started, and what she didn't yet know about herself

She started as a blogger writing about faith, marriage, and motherhood, building a large and devoted following around a version of her life that was, by her own later admission, carefully curated. Her name is Glennon Doyle. She'd built something real, but she was still wearing a mask while she built it.

New Discovery The moment she noticed what she was actually built for

The turning point came when she fell in love with someone who didn't fit the life she'd built, and she had to choose between protecting the image she'd spent years constructing or telling the truth about who she actually was. Untamed built its whole philosophy around a single image: a cheetah born in captivity, still fast, still built for the wild, but trained out of ever using it. Glennon writes about spending years as that caged cheetah, quiet and dutiful, before she let herself ask what she actually wanted rather than what she was supposed to want. What she discovered wasn't a new personality. It was the wild one she'd been trained out of.

Course Pivot What she did once she trusted that discovery, more than once

She wrote Untamed, and it became less a memoir than a permission slip for millions of readers to ask the same question about their own lives. She kept building from that same radical honesty afterward, launching the podcast We Can Do Hard Things, where she and her sister and wife keep exploring the same territory out loud, week after week, in front of an audience instead of alone on the page. Each pivot came from refusing to put the mask back on, even when it would have been easier.

My Own Wayfaring Where I've seen this same instinct show up in my own life

Glennon's story is about taking off a mask in public. Mine is quieter, but it came from reading her book.

For many years, I kept my personal life quiet. I didn't want people to know what a seeker I was, always asking questions, always exploring, always more interested in meaning than in small talk. I felt like I needed to keep up a professional image, one version of me for work and a completely different, more honest version for everyone else. The pandemic actually started to even things out. When everyone was working from home, nobody had the professional image to keep up anymore. People showed up as themselves, kids and dogs and unfinished bookshelves in the background, because there was no other option.

Untamed asked all of us the same question the pandemic had already started asking: how could we be more untamed, more honestly ourselves, in every part of our lives instead of just the parts we could control? That question is still at the center of the coaching work I do now, helping people become a little more untamed, a little freer in themselves, whether that shows up at work, at home, or somewhere in between.

Your Turn to Wayfare An invitation to find your own bearings, discoveries, and pivots

Glennon Doyle calls it the difference between the caged cheetah and the wild one. What mask have you been wearing so long you almost forgot it was one, professional and personal, dutiful and honest, believed and known? What would it take to set it down, even just a little, even just with the people closest to you?

This is the kind of pivot I get to walk alongside in my own coaching work, watching someone trust the next true thing before they can fully explain why.

I'll see you next week with the tenth and final wayfarer.

I am Coach Ellen. I help leaders and seekers navigate life to find clarity, confidence, and purpose, living more aligned with who they really are. Graduate, CoachVille | Member, ICF Connecticut | emzlifedesign.com