When the Hero Needs to Play: On Joy, Sleeping Words, and Leading from Your Source
I used to step off planes in foreign countries with a tiny dictionary and zero plan. Somehow I turned that person into a serious leadership consultant.
It happened gradually, the way most important things do. One responsibility added to another. One role layered onto the next. The weight of it all perfectly reasonable, perfectly earned — and somewhere underneath it, that young woman who flew to Peru in her twenties to write a thesis on tropical agricultural engineering, with zero Spanish and infinite nerve, quietly stepped aside.
She didn’t disappear. She just waited.
The Heroic Journey — and What It Leaves Behind
I have long viewed leadership through the lens of Joseph Campbell’s Heroic Journey. It is a framework that resonates deeply with me and sits at the heart of how I understand growth. You leave the familiar shore. You face trials you did not anticipate. You are changed by them. And you return carrying something new — a gift, a wisdom, a capacity that you could not have found without having made the journey at all.
It is a powerful arc. And it is real. I have lived it, and I have witnessed it in the leaders I work with.
But Campbell’s hero, for all their courage, is always moving forward. Leaving, venturing, returning transformed. What the myth does not always tell us is what gets left behind on that road. And one of the things that quietly slips away, for many leaders I know — myself included — is the quality of the child. The capacity for play. The willingness to begin something with no plan, no goal, no guarantee of return on investment. Just curiosity. Just joy.
A Girl on a Tupolev
Let me tell you how it actually started.
I boarded a Russian Tupolev — a Soviet-era aircraft with, as I discovered, no emergency slides. No mobile phone in my pocket, because there were no mobile phones. No safety net of any kind, really. Just me, a tiny dictionary, and the particular brand of fearlessness that belongs exclusively to the young and the naive.
I arrived in Peru with zero Spanish. Within two years, I was fluent enough to write my thesis in it — my very first thesis, completed in both Spanish and Dutch. The language had not just become functional. It had become mine. I thought in it. I dreamed in it. It was one of the lives I lived fully, before life moved on and that chapter quietly folded itself away.
For decades, it slept.
A Sleeping Language, A Woken Life
Last month, on a whim I cannot fully explain, I downloaded Duolingo. I did not research it first — that would not be like the younger me, and apparently some of her instincts are still intact. I saw it, thought it looked like a game, and dove straight in.
Within minutes, something unexpected happened. Spanish — my Spanish — began surfacing. Not slowly, not painfully. It came back like a tide. Word after word, dormant for decades, simply waiting.
And then: zanahoria. Carrot. A word that had made me laugh back then, for reasons I cannot even fully reconstruct. And it made me laugh again.
I had not known how many sleeping words were still there, just waiting to be woken up.
What struck me most was not the language itself. It was what came with it — the feeling of not being a beginner. Of having capacity I had forgotten I possessed. Of playing, freely, without a destination. A little addictive, in the best possible way. Because when there is no specific goal, there is no failure. There is only the joy of the thing itself.
Inspiration — The Center of Everything
At Lead True, our model places Inspiration at the very heart of leadership. Not strategy. Not performance metrics. Not even values, though those matter enormously. Inspiration — your source, your inner truth, the thing that animates you from the inside out.
At the model’s center resides inspiration, the origin of self-leadership. A critical step to leading true is identifying your source of inspiration.
And here is what I have observed, in myself and in the leaders I coach: that source of inspiration is not always found by looking forward. Sometimes it is found by looking back. By asking — who was I before I became so capable, so responsible, so serious? What did I love before I needed a reason to love it?
The Duolingo moment was not about Spanish. It was about touching something true again. Something that belonged to me before leadership, before consulting, before the weight of decades of building something meaningful. It was a moment of pure Awareness — one of the three core dimensions of the Lead True model — reconnecting with a part of myself I had quietly filed away.
Awareness involves the acceptance of the thoughts, beliefs and feelings that, based on past experiences, often inform our decisions. It promotes clarity about our strengths and opens new ways to leverage them. What I became aware of, through a language app on a quiet evening, was that joy is not a reward for work completed. It is a source. It feeds everything else.
The Quality of the Child
I think the greatest leaders did not begin their journeys with a five-year plan. They began with something that lit them up. And somewhere on the road to becoming effective, influential, capable adults — they left that quality behind. Not because they wanted to. Because growing up seemed to require it.
Maybe it does not.
Maybe part of the return journey — the second half of Campbell’s arc, coming home transformed — is coming home to that. To the playful, curious, slightly reckless person who once boarded a Tupolev with a tiny dictionary and no emergency slides and thought: why not?
We lead best by honoring ourselves — our unique purpose, our values, our strongest attributes. Coming from this inspirational center, we naturally make a difference in our workplaces, communities and families.
Joy is not soft. Joy is a leadership practice. It reconnects you to your source. And from your source, everything else flows.
This Month at Lead True: Joy
In April, Lead True is dedicating our focus to the concept of joy. Not as a luxury or an afterthought. As something central to sustainable, authentic leadership.
We invite you to ask yourself: what is sitting in your dust box? What did you love, once, for no reason other than that you loved it? What sleeping word is waiting to be woken up?
You do not need a plan. You do not need a goal. You just need to pick it up again, and see what happens.
The hero’s journey is real. And sometimes, the bravest step on that journey is letting yourself play.
About the Author
Lead True Global Leader Andrea Henning’s vision is that when people discover their authenticity and dare to follow their bliss they are happier and more successful in their lives while serving as an inspiration to their communities.
Read more from Andrea Henning below.
