Ask yourself: Where am I choosing safety over growth? Where am I reacting out of doubt rather than responding from faith? Where have I mistaken control for security?
You cannot protect yourself by building walls. Trust me, I tried and failed. However, you can protect yourself by building character.
If you’re reading this, you’ve likely spent your life building everything that you think is necessary for success, everything that you’ve been told you were supposed to do. Early in my career, I focused primarily on building my reputation as an attorney and creating a body of work that spoke for itself, giving me entry to the places I aspired to go. Along the way, I was unaware of the powerful walls I was building.
I built all kinds of walls, from very subtle ones to ones that I would justify like I were trying the case of my life! It took me burning through two marriages and a law career I was thriving in to recognize the emotional walls that I thought were supposed to protect me from the weight of responsibility, from disappointment, from the exhaustion of being the one everyone counts on, and ironically the ones that kept me at bay from the things I wanted most.
I imagine that you have built some similar walls. It is difficult not to when you hold the kind of expectations you have for yourself. It’s not as though you built them intending to limit your access to what lies beyond them. You built them because you thought that it needed to be done for you to focus in a way that would heighten your performance and give you the edge to succeed.
The unfortunate truth (which I learned the very hard way) is that walls don’t protect you. They only serve to isolate you. To add more irony to the mix, your brain knows this. From a neuroscience standpoint, the act of walling yourself off, emotionally or mentally, activates your brain’s threat detection systems more.
You might feel like it is less, because you think you are creating distance, but you are doing the opposite to keep yourself safe. When you avoid feeling susceptible to unwanted things in the name of safety, you keep your amygdala, your brain’s fear center, on a hair-trigger. You may think you’re playing it safe, but neurologically, you’re training your brain to see life through the lens of “what could go wrong” instead of “what could go right.” That’s not protection. That’s a low-grade fight-or-flight state, which can compromise your chances for achieving what you want.
In high-stakes professions like law, leadership, medicine, entrepreneurship, truly any field where people depend on your clarity, your steadiness, and your ability to stay cool under pressure, your nervous system is your real asset. When it becomes dysregulated, everything from your decisions to your relationships to your sense of self is wildly compromised.
The conundrum is that the more you wall yourself off to protect your professional identity, the more that identity begins to feel fragile. When you try to develop an identity that is not based on character and is instead based on guarding the image of who you think you have to be, that is where you lose momentum.
Character creates wildly different results. Character is the internal structure you build not to defend yourself, but to define yourself. It is fully within your ability to respond with integrity when everyone is watching and to remain calm and curious under pressure, instead of judgmental and reactionary.
Neuroscience tells us that character is deeply linked to self-regulation. Self-regulation is a function of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of your brain responsible for executive function, emotional regulation, and your ability to plan, choose, and override impulses. The more you build character, the more you strengthen this area.
This differs from the illusion of safety that walls offer and instead creates the real safety of knowing you can navigate hard things without collapsing or lashing out. Walls say, “Don’t get too close.” Character says, “I can handle challenges. I can handle hard feedback. I’m a champ at handling uncertainty.”
Walls feel like control. Character is control. You don’t need to micromanage everyone and everything to feel safe when you trust your own resilience. When I learned this, it changed almost every aspect of my life.
You’ve probably already experienced this. Think about the moments in your career when you were most proud, not the moments when everything went according to plan, but the moments you handled yourself in a way that surprised even you. That wasn’t your walls protecting you. That was your character showing up.
The higher you rise in your profession, the more tempting it is to rely on old armor. The problem is that these layers of armor tend to push people away. But if you want to grow and if you want to lead (not just others but your own life), then you’ll need something stronger than outdated defense mechanisms. You’ll need strategic, even neuro-strategic skills like emotional flexibility, self-awareness, and bounce-back-ability at a rate you may not have experienced before.
When you’re grounded in character, you send signals of psychological safety to others—whether in the courtroom, the boardroom, or your own home. People feel calmer around you. They trust you. Not because you’re perfect, but because you’re real. You regulate yourself, so you don’t dysregulate them. That’s the dynamic of character in action.
So if you’ve been feeling distant lately, and as though you keep working harder but it seems like what you want stays just out of reach, it might be time to stop fortifying some walls and focus on ways to have more faith and leverage with your character.
Ask yourself: Where am I choosing safety over growth? Where am I reacting out of doubt rather than responding from faith? Where have I mistaken control for security?
You don’t have to have all the answers right now. But start noticing where you have built walls and how they are blocking you from building the legacy that you want.
If you’re like me, you want to feel alive in your work, successful with your relationships, and honest with yourself about what you are choosing to create. This happens by deliberately engaging with life in a way that honors your values, not just your résumé.
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