Life Happens Every Day. But What’s Going On?
A few Sundays ago, my pastor, Terrence K. Porter of Pilgrim Baptist Church, preached a sermon built around Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On. I’ve heard that song more times than I could count, but sitting there that Sunday, the title stayed with me.
What’s going on?
It's a simple question, but I've been thinking about how rarely we actually ask it. We're much more accustomed to asking what happened.
Someone lost their job. Someone's marriage ended. Someone they loved died. Someone struggled with addiction. Someone retired, got promoted, started a business or finally accomplished something they had spent years working toward.
Those are the things we can see. They're the events we use to explain what's happened in someone's life.
But knowing what happened doesn't necessarily tell us what was going on.
Think about your own life for a minute.
There are probably experiences you can explain pretty easily because you've told the story before. You know what happened, when it happened and maybe even why it happened. You've had enough time to put the events into some kind of order.
But if someone had sat beside you while you were actually living through it, would they have known what was going on inside you?
Would they have known what you were questioning? What you were afraid of? What you were trying to hold together? Would they have known what was beginning to change in you, maybe before you even recognized it yourself?
That's the part I've been thinking about.
I've been reminded of it over and over again in conversations I've had lately.
What I’ve found is if you give people enough space, they'll usually tell you what happened. They'll give you the facts, the sequence of events, the version of the story they've probably told before.
But if you keep listening, sometimes something shifts.
They begin telling you what was happening underneath.
Not just what they did, but what they were carrying. What they weren't saying. What an event was changing in them while everybody else was watching what was happening around them.
And sometimes the person telling the story is only now beginning to understand it themselves.
That's the part that intrigues me.
There is what happens in our lives. And then there is what happens inside us because of it.
Those can be two very different stories.
What Happened Is Only Part of the Story
We know a surprising amount about what happens in other people’s lives.
We often know enough about someone’s life to think we understand what they’re going through. We know the circumstances. We’ve seen how they’ve responded. Maybe we’ve talked with them about it, offered support or watched them keep moving forward.
And because we can see how someone is functioning on the outside, it’s easy to assume we have a pretty good sense of how they’re doing on the inside.
We don’t always.
The person who lost the job may be dealing with something much bigger than losing a paycheck. They may be questioning their value after spending decades attaching some part of their identity to what they did for a living.
The person who retires may be genuinely excited about having more freedom while also quietly wondering who they are without the title they carried for 30 years.
I know what it’s like for there to be more going on than other people can see.
I’ve written before about three words that became part of my life when I was nine years old:
Perform. Shrink. Control.
For me, those words translated into one phrase. “I got this.”
As a 9-year-old, that meant be the best at what you’re good at. Stay out of the spotlight unless it serves a greater purpose. Only let them see what they need to see.
For adult me, “I got this” looked like competitive competence. What people saw was confidence. Independence. Reliability. High achievement. Ambition. The Handler. Calm under pressure. People came to expect that performance because I projected that I could take care of whatever was dropped in front of me.
What people couldn’t see was the scared nine-year-old who had made up his mind that what happened to him would not beat him.
That part of the story was underneath.
I didn’t spend my adult life pretending to be capable. I was capable. When I say “I got this”, I’m serious. That phrase has helped me survive things, accomplish things and keep moving when life got difficult. Perform. Shrink. Control. Those three words and that phrase served me well.
But understanding where those words came from eventually helped me understand that there was more going on underneath that strength than other people could see, and for a long time, more than I could see myself.
That's the thing about what happens underneath an experience. It isn't always something we're intentionally hiding.
Sometimes we’re just living through or with it.
We go back to life. We go to work. We raise our children. We pay the bills. We meet deadlines. We show up for the people who depend on us. We solve whatever problem is sitting in front of us because the rest of life doesn’t politely clear its calendar while we figure ourselves out.
From the outside, we’re functioning and that can look like we’re fine.
The outside world gets the event. We get to live the story underneath it.
The Story I’m Really Listening For
I’ve spent more than 20 years in television listening to people tell me their stories.
Listening has always been part of the job.
I’d listen for the detail that matters. Listen for the thing someone says almost in passing that changes my understanding of the story. I’d listen for what didn’t quite fit. Sometimes I’d ask another question. Sometimes I’d stop talking and give the person enough room to keep going.
Why? Because I knew that would be the soundbite heard round the world. The moment every viewer would gasp. The plot twist that would spike the ratings.
So deep listening has been part of my DNA for quite some time. It serves me well as a coach. But not for the same reasons.
What’s different is why I’m listening.
The distinction matters.
In television, it served whatever story I was telling. I was listening for the piece that helped me understand and communicate what happened.
With coaching and My Life: Unplugged, I'm listening to better understand the person. To hear the disconnects. To challenge the personal narrative.
Every person I’ve coached or interviewed for My Life: Unplugged has had things happen in their life.
What happened matters. I need to understand what happened.
But that’s rarely where I want the conversation to stop.
I want to know what was going on underneath.
What was this person carrying while everyone around them thought they were okay? What were they afraid to admit? What were they trying to hold together? What did the experience change about the way they saw themselves?
Sometimes, if you give someone enough space, you can almost feel when the conversation moves from what happened to what was really going on.
I felt it with Jarrhette Burke.
During our conversation for My Life: Unplugged, Jarrhette began telling me about a moment from his life.
Then he said something that immediately changed the conversation.
He had never told anyone the story he was about to tell me.
What he revealed hit me deeply because there was something painfully familiar about reaching a breaking point that nobody else could see.
His vulnerability was so palpable I felt as if I was standing in a parking lot at midnight telling God if things don’t work out, it’s the end.
I knew in that moment that something had changed.
The mask had dropped.
It wasn't simply that Jarrhette had shared something he had never shared before. For a moment, I wasn't listening to him explain his life. I was hearing him let me into it.
That's the part of these conversations I find myself increasingly drawn to.
The moment when someone stops simply recounting an event and begins revealing something about themselves. Where they were internally. What was changing in them.
Sometimes We Don’t Know What’s Going On Either
It’s easy to understand why we might not know what is happening underneath someone else’s life.
We weren’t there for every private moment. We don’t know every thought. We only know what someone chooses to share with us.
What may be harder to recognize is that sometimes we don’t fully understand what’s going on inside our own lives either.
I know this from my own life.
I know what happened.
I know I was diagnosed with cancer.
I know I went through treatment.
I know I survived.
That’s what happened.
And when I was diagnosed, someone very familiar showed up.
The nine-year-old.
This will not beat me.
I got this.
At the time, getting through it was the job. But I was determined to do it on my terms.
I distinctly remember that it was in October 2018. I had done maybe 6 months of hormone treatments when my urologist told me they had scheduled my 40 consecutive days of proton therapy treatment, and it was scheduled to start the following week.
I had a cruise that was planned for late October, so informed him that I had a conflict.
My doctor was not happy to hear that and asked, “Is this cruise more important than getting this treatment?”
My response: “If cancer is going to take me out, I’m going on this cruise first.”
I started treatment November 19 of that year.
Looking back, I can see there was more going on.
Cancer didn’t just give me something I had to survive. It changed the way I thought about my life and, perhaps more importantly, what was left of it.
It made me stop long enough to really understand what I wanted whatever time I had left to look like. It made me question some of my prior life choices, and it forced me to be more intentional about the choices I would make going forward.
I don’t want to create a neat before-and-after story that isn’t true. Life rarely works that way.
One experience doesn’t explain every decision that follows it.
But cancer became part of how I thought about time.
And I couldn’t help noticing something else.
Decades after that frightened nine-year-old decided that what happened to him would not beat him, an adult facing cancer reached for the same phrase.
I got this.
There is something powerful about recognizing that. There is also something worth examining. Because sometimes what we think of simply as our personality has a history.
The way we respond to life may have been shaped by things that happened long before we understood what they were teaching us.
That’s something I explored more deeply when I wrote about unlearning some of the things I had come to believe about myself.
It also reminds me that an experience can end while what it changed in us continues.
Sometimes what happened is over. What’s going on because of it isn’t.
We may know the date something happened and still need years to understand what it meant.
Maybe that’s because understanding isn’t always available to us while we’re in the middle of surviving, adjusting or simply getting through the day.
Nine-year-old me wasn’t analyzing why “I got this” felt necessary.
I was trying to survive.
When I was diagnosed with cancer, I wasn’t sitting around contemplating what the experience might someday teach me about how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.
I wanted to beat cancer.
Sometimes understanding comes later.
Final Thought: What’s Going On?
That brings me back to the question I heard differently sitting in church a few Sundays ago.
What’s going on?
I think I’m beginning to appreciate the amount of space that question leaves.
It doesn’t assume we already understand.
It doesn’t ask us to immediately fix anything.
It doesn’t even require us to have an answer.
Sometimes we may need enough distance from what happened before we can understand what was happening underneath it.
Maybe we need to give ourselves some of that same space.
Life is going to keep happening.
Some of it we’ll choose. Some of it we won’t. Some of it we'll celebrate. Some of it we'll survive. And some experiences may change us in ways we won't understand until years later.
But every once in a while, it may be worth getting curious about the story underneath it.
Not necessarily so we can fix it.
Not because every experience needs to become a lesson.
Sometimes simply understanding ourselves a little better is enough reason to ask:
What’s going on?
Ready to Look at What’s Going On?
Sometimes we know exactly what happened but still need some space to understand what it changed, what we’re carrying forward and what we want to be different.
If something in this post felt familiar, I invite you to book a Strategy Session. That will give you the space to look at where you are now, what may be going on underneath and what you want your life to look like going forward.
Live on Purpose. Lead with Clarity. Thrive by Design.
TL;DR
We usually know what happened in our lives. The job ended. The relationship changed. We lost someone, achieved something or faced something we never expected.
What can take longer to understand is what was going on underneath it.
The people around us may see how we responded without knowing what we were carrying. Sometimes we don’t fully understand it ourselves until much later.
What happened matters. But it isn’t always the whole story.
Sometimes understanding ourselves begins with a different question:
What’s going on?
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