Reflections on Connection-Centered Leadership - Issue No. 30: The Sacred Work of the Launch Pad

Photo Credit: Melissa Swonger; John F. Kennedy Space Center, 2017

I am living in the middle of the now and not yet.

Some projects have been completed, some dreams realized, and some chapters finished. Others remain in building mode, caught somewhere between an idea and an outcome I can see.

In seasons like this, I can become preoccupied with all the not-yets. I look toward the next deadline, decision, opportunity, or milestone and begin measuring my life by what has launched instead of by what has been quietly built.

My oldest daughter turns twenty-eight this weekend.

When I think about the twenty-five-year-old version of me who became her mother, I want to reach backward through time and hold her for a moment. She knew enough to understand how much she did not know. So, in true James 1:5 fashion, she begged God for wisdom and trusted He would give it.

I would thank her now for the courage and fortitude it took to do the difficult work of changing a legacy for her children. She could not see the years ahead or know whether the choices she was making would be enough. She was simply trying to become the kind of mother who could build something different from what she had inherited.

My daughter has lived through chapters of her own and is now a year out of law school, working in the career she dreamed about for years.

My second daughter left home to play college soccer in Wisconsin, returned for graduate school, and moved into her grown-up apartment last week. She is finishing her doctorate in physical therapy while planning a wedding less than six months away.

My third leaves today for her final year of college, with a proposal apparently imminent from the high school sweetheart who has grown alongside her.

Lest you think we are about to become empty nesters, our youngest recently moved home to finish her last year and a half of college while preparing for the MCAT.Looking at them, I realized I had spent years celebrating milestones without fully appreciating the years that made those milestones possible. As I think about these girls, the lives they are building, and the legacy that has already changed through them, I find myself thinking about rockets.

More specifically, I find myself thinking about launch pads.

We remember the rocket because it leaves the ground. We watch the countdown. We feel the force of the ignition. We follow the ascent of something once tethered to Earth as it rises beyond what seemed possible.

The launch pad remains behind. Perhaps that's why we rarely think about it. We celebrate the launch because it is visible. We overlook the launch pad because its work is quiet. Yet without it, there is no launch.

The launch pad is far more than a concrete place from which a rocket departs. NASA’s mobile launcher serves as the structure upon which the rocket and spacecraft are assembled, processed, transported, tested, and eventually launched. Long before liftoff, a system of umbilicals connects the vehicle to the launcher, supplying fuel, coolant, electrical power, environmental controls, and communications. Those connections sustain the spacecraft until the moment they must release it to its mission in the stars.

The rocket cannot reach its destination while remaining attached to the launch tower, but it cannot be prepared for the journey without those attachments either. It must first be connected well enough to be released.

Healthy connection knows when to hold on and when to let go. Some connections are meant to remain with us throughout our lives. Others sustain us through a particular season and then change form as we become capable of carrying forward what they gave us.

Parenting may be one of the clearest examples.

For years, we become the structure. We offer guidance, correction, stability, encouragement, and a place to return when the world feels uncertain. We try to give our children enough rootedness to know who they are and enough freedom to become who they were created to be.

Then, slowly and sometimes suddenly, the connections change. The little girl who once reached for your hand begins making decisions you cannot make for her. The child you drove to practice moves across the country. The daughter whose future you prayed over is beginning to build a home, a profession, and a life of her own.

The goal was never to keep her attached to the tower. The goal was to prepare her to fly. Every parent eventually discovers that love is measured not by how tightly we hold on, but by how faithfully we prepare them to leave well and set out on their own successful missions.

Launch infrastructure is also designed to manage forces that could otherwise become destructive. At NASA’s Launch Pad 39B, water systems help suppress the overwhelming sound and pressure generated at ignition, while the flame trench directs the rocket’s heat and exhaust away from the vehicle and surrounding structures. The launch pad does not eliminate the force. It creates a way for that force to move safely.

That, too, feels familiar.

'Connection-centered leadership does not promise a life without pressure, conflict, disappointment, ambition, grief, or change. It asks whether we have built the relational architecture capable of holding those forces without allowing them to destroy what matters most.

Sometimes leadership absorbs enough pressure that someone else can think clearly. Sometimes it creates enough safety for difficult emotions to move without becoming destructive. Sometimes it quietly supports another person's launch, knowing few people will ever notice the structure that made it possible.

I see that in motherhood, but I also see it in the work before me now.

As I sit with research that needs more participants (know any women leaders in the NFL? Feel free to connect us.), book projects in various stages of ideas, outlines, and drafts, Mind Shifts Lab becoming an ecosystem with Erica, speaking events moving from vision toward rooms filled with people, books, and conversations, and The Sage Hill Project growing one meaningful interaction at a time, I realize something:

I am not in one season. I am standing on several launch pads at once.

Each one tempts me to focus on the launch rather than the process. I want the completed research, the published book, the successful event, the established platform, and the visible proof that the work mattered.

I can become so focused on outcomes that I overlook what the process is building and changing in me. This season is exposing the places where I still confuse movement with progress. Building is teaching me to hold a vision without trying to control every step toward it. Recruitment is reminding me that trust cannot be hurried. Collaboration is revealing where I need clearer boundaries and where I need a more generous understanding of what others can carry. Writing is forcing me to confront what I truly believe rather than relying on language that merely sounds good.

Even the work that feels unfinished is connecting pieces of my life that once appeared unrelated. This is part of integration. This is where connection-centered leadership changes the question.

Instead of asking only, “When will this launch?” I can ask, “What is being connected while I prepare?”

Vertically, I am learning again to bring my timelines to God without assuming that faithfulness guarantees immediacy. The delay between prayer and outcome is not empty space. It is often where dependence becomes more than an idea. I have the plans, but the Lord directs my steps.

Inwardly, I am becoming more aware of the ambitions, fears, expectations, and old patterns I carry into everything I build. The process reveals whether I am creating from clarity or urgency, from purpose or the need to prove myself. Shoring up my own launch pad is a critical part of success for lift-off.

Outwardly, every project asks me to build trust with real people, not merely ideas. Research participants are not data points. Readers are not numbers. Event guests are not ticket sales. Collaborators are not simply the means through which an idea becomes real. A community is being built alongside the work itself. Some relationships are new. Others have deepened. All of them remind me that meaningful things are almost never built alone.

The outcome matters, but who we become while pursuing it matters just as much.

Perhaps that is the hidden gift of the now and not yet.

We are not merely standing still until the important part begins. We are being strengthened, connected, supplied, tested, and prepared.

The launch pad is not the absence of progress. It is where progress is quietly made possible.

No one looking at my daughters today would see all the prayers, mistakes, difficult decisions, repaired conversations, boundaries, ordinary dinners, long drives, late-night talks, mentors, and repeated beginnings that helped bring us here. Much of what mattered most was invisible while it was happening.

At twenty-five, I thought I was trying to become a better mother. I understand now that I was helping build a launch pad. My daughters were not the only ones being prepared through those years. I was becoming, too. I still am.

My vertical connection changed what I believed was possible. The inward work changed what I could carry. My outward connections changed the legacy that would move through our family.

I wonder how often we mistake preparation for delay. We assume life is on hold until the next opportunity arrives, when the opportunity itself may be shaped by everything happening now. Looking back, I don't remember waiting for my daughters to become the women they are today. I remember becoming the mother they needed while they were becoming who they were created to be.

Character is being formed. Trust is being earned. Relationships are deepening. Wisdom is taking root. None of it feels as dramatic as a countdown, but all of it is essential to the launch. The launches may be what everyone notices, but I am learning not to rush past the sacred work of the launch pad.

There is life here, before the countdown reaches zero.

There is transformation here, before the outcome becomes visible.

There is connection here, beneath everything that will eventually rise.

Perhaps that's why the launch pad has become one of my favorite metaphors. It reminds me that what feels unfinished may actually be preparing me—and those around me—for what comes next.

Questions I’m Sitting With This Week

Am I so focused on becoming the rocket that I'm overlooking the sacred work of the launch pad?

Where can I pause long enough to appreciate what is being built in this season, even if it has not yet produced the outcome I hoped for?

Is there a younger version of me I need to thank for the courage, wisdom, or perseverance that made this season possible?

Is there anything on the launch pad that needs strengthening before the next launch? Do I need clearer boundaries, deeper trust, better preparation, more honest communication, or a steadier connection to God, myself, and the people involved? What would it look like to create the right environment for what I am building to rise well, not simply quickly?

And can I trust that the work being done beneath the surface is not separate from the outcome, but part of what will make the outcome sustainable?