INTRODUCTION
I was about to get the joy sucked out of me—I could feel it coming.

The email set off an internal alarm—no subject line, no warning, just a meeting that slipped onto my calendar like a whisper.

When his face appeared on the Zoom screen, my body knew before my mind caught up: This was the moment everything would change. The day my joy got ambushed.

Up until that moment, I had always led from joy.

Actually … correction. Even in that moment, joy was hanging out in the background. Waiting to be invited, welcomed, or possibly deciding to run.

I don’t mean joy as a fluffy feeling or an accessory suggested by a motivational quote taped to the wall. I mean joy as my compass: quiet but insistent. It is my compass. So it showed up intrinsically in how I built teams, how I saw potential before others could, and how I stayed present even when the work was hard.

Joy was what made me tell someone, “You’re ready,” before they believed it themselves. It’s what compelled me to give a team member a “stretch” assignment with love and clarity, because I trusted who they were becoming, and the stretch assignment itself would become the proof of that.

That’s what leading from joy looked like in my world. It looked like care. It looked like high standards. It also looked like giving people the space to become more than their job description. And … it worked.

I wasn’t burnt out. I wasn’t disengaged. I loved my work. And I loved my team.

The truth is, if that “ambush” meeting had never landed on my calendar, I would have kept going, right where I was. Kept serving, kept leading just like that.

But organizations shift. Structures bend. New leaders arrive with their own models and measures of what leadership should be. Templates for how leaders should behave. What “proper” leadership should bring about, in teams, in turn. What investments would yield the organization’s alignment with new priorities?

That’s how I found myself staring into a Zoom screen, being told my responsibilities wouldn’t change, but my title would. My compensation would.

Same work. Smaller title. Smaller space. Smaller voice. Smaller paycheck.