One of One

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

A few weeks ago I had one of the most meaningful weeks of my life when I attended a five-day retreat at Modern Elder Academy with a group of men who came from all walks of life, but who each embodied two key traits: curiosity and vulnerability. This workshop was designed by men, for men, to provide an environment that encouraged deeply emotional sharing and genuine care for each other. It turned out to be a week that enhanced the personal transformation I have been undergoing for more than a few years.

My cohort ranged in age from the 40s to me, in my early 70s. What was interesting, though, was that age wasn’t really a factor that came up much. Short of me being a little slower or just playing observer during certain activities (surfing, for instance), there was no discernible daylight between us. I do believe, though, that maybe my age opened some of the guys to more deep personal conversations with me, and some shared reflections about themselves that I suspect they had never spoken aloud before. These instances, along with the inspiring programming, made for a moving experience.

One of the traditions at MEA is that each cohort participates in a “graduation” ceremony on the last evening of the retreat. Each person is honored by the facilitator, then a fellow cohort member speaks to you before the group. When my turn came, I was deeply touched to hear myself described as “one of one,” a reference to the improbability of my path from oil industry CEO to Zen practitioner and heart-centered coach.

I think the description was meant as a compliment. And it was emotional for me to hear. But it was more significant than that.

It’s become clear to me that the transformation I’ve been undergoing was improbable. In fact, I personally don’t know of any other CEO from my industry who has undergone such a remaking of self. But what struck me here was something else entirely; by letting go of my former corporate identity and allowing my heart to be, as Jerry Colonna puts it, “broken open,” my internal change has somehow become visible to others. That realization was as humbling as it was striking.

In clinical research, there’s a term: N of 1. It refers to a study where the sample size is a single person. In traditional science, that’s considered a limitation. You can’t generalize from one case. You can’t build a model. You can’t draw conclusions that apply broadly.

But there’s another way to think about it.

Some truths only reveal themselves through a single life, fully lived and without a safety net. Spending 40 years in an unforgiving industry and then turning toward Zen practice and self-awareness is not a path I would have ever imagined. There is no control group for that. There is no peer-reviewed study on what happens when a man trained to make hard decisions in hard places decides that the hardest call is the one he makes for himself.

One of one means the data set is your own life. And the findings are only valid if you’re willing to embrace them without editing out the parts that aren’t pretty.

The men at the retreat weren’t impressed by my resume. They’ve all got serious resumes. What I believe they recognized was something harder to define - a man who could talk about oilfield operations and loving kindness in the same conversation and explain both. Not a conversion story. Not a before-and-after. Just someone who stopped trying to live a past identity that no longer existed.

And here’s the thing: The fact that “one of one” landed as a compliment tells you something about the culture most men still operate within. In the industry I came from, and in the broader architecture of male achievement, there is almost no model for a man who does hard work and soft work at the same time. Toughness and kindness don’t generally share the same zip code. If you’re a Buddhist, you’d better not also be running a drilling operation. If you’re running the drilling operation, keep your inner life to yourself.

The result of this disconnect is generations of men who have been performing a version of themselves that costs them everything and leaves only a title. When the title goes away, and it always does, they have nothing underneath it. No foundation. No language for expressing emotion. No habit of being honest with other men about what's actually going on inside.

That's not a personal observation. That's an epidemic hiding in plain sight. Men don't lack the capacity for emotional depth. They lack permission, proximity, and proof that it can be done without losing standing.

What I saw at that retreat was proof. Not from me. From every man in that circle. Each one of them was running his own N-of-1 trial, testing whether vulnerability could coexist with strength, whether tenderness could survive contact with the real world they all had to go back to the next day.

I am one of one. But what I've learned is that so is every man who has the courage to stop performing long enough to find out who he actually is. Nobody else can run that trial for you. And nobody is coming to tell you it's time to start.