The New Creation Process: Becoming Who You Already Are
I came across a TEDx talk by a guy named Michael Brody-Waite called “Great Leaders Do What Drug Addicts Do.” He’s not a Christian as far as I can tell, he’s just a recovering addict who built companies and figured out that the same three principles that kept him sober are the same three principles that make someone worth following. I watched it and felt my pulse quicken because he was describing my life back to me, except he stopped one step short of where the real power is. He found three true principles. I found out where they actually come from.
His three principles are practice rigorous authenticity, surrender the outcome, and do uncomfortable work. I didn’t borrow these from a business book or a leadership podcast, I built my entire framework around these three things before I ever saw his talk, because they are exactly what happened to me on January 30, 2025, the night I finally stopped fighting God and let him do what I couldn’t do for myself. So when I heard a secular guy in flip flops naming the same three things I’d lived through, it confirmed something I already suspected. These aren’t leadership hacks. They’re a description of what it actually looks like when a human being stops managing their own image and lets reality, and eventually grace, do its work.
Rigorous Authenticity
Brody-Waite talks about how addicts spend all their energy controlling perception, and so do a lot of leaders, and so do a lot of Christians. I spent thirty years doing exactly that. On the outside I was student body president, Christian Athlete of the Year, a six foot four basketball star with a pretty girlfriend. On the inside I believed something was intrinsically wrong with me, and I never told anyone that, because the mask was working. I kept the mask on through EDS, through Taco Bell, through Pepsico, through every award I won from senior brass who had no idea the man receiving the plaque was dying inside.
Scripture doesn’t ask me to manage my image either. James 5:16 says, “Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed.” Not confess your strengths. Confess your sins. The mask is the opposite of confession, and confession is the opposite of shame, and I lived inside shame for three decades because I thought authenticity would get me rejected. It turns out the rejection only happened when I kept performing. The connection happened the night I stopped.
Surrender the Outcome
This is the one that nearly killed me before it saved me. For years I believed that if I just worked the steps hard enough, prayed hard enough, did enough of the right Christian behaviors, I could control whether I stayed sober. That’s not surrender, that’s just addiction wearing a cross. Real surrender came on January 30, 2025, when I told God, “I’m not lifting another finger. You either heal me or I die, and I’m not even angry about it.” That was not a strategy. That was the actual end of trying to manage my own outcome.
Proverbs 3:5-6 says, “Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” I had read that verse a hundred times across decades of relapse and never once believed it, because believing it meant admitting I couldn’t engineer my own recovery, my own marriage, my own sanctification. Surrendering the outcome isn’t passivity. It’s the precise moment you stop trying to be your own savior because you finally believe you have one.
Do Uncomfortable Work
Brody-Waite is right that addicts in recovery do hard things every single day that normal people avoid. They walk into a room and say out loud what’s actually true about themselves. I had to do that too, but the uncomfortable work for me wasn’t just admitting I was an alcoholic. It was sitting with a clinical counselor learning to name cognitive distortions that had run my inner life since childhood, learning that black and white thinking had turned every gospel promise into a performance standard I was always failing. That was uncomfortable in a way drinking never was, because drinking numbed the discomfort and this work required me to feel every bit of it sober.
Philippians 2:12-13 says, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” That verse holds both truths together that Brody-Waite’s talk can only gesture at. The work is real and it is mine to do, and at the very same time the power behind the work was never mine to begin with. I did the uncomfortable work of therapy, of rigorous honesty with my wife, of facing thirty years of self-loathing, and God was doing something in me the entire time that I couldn’t have manufactured through effort alone.
Here’s where I depart from a TEDx stage. Brody-Waite found three principles that work because they’re true, because they reflect something real about how human beings are built to function. But he stops at competitive advantage. I’m not practicing rigorous authenticity, surrendering the outcome, and doing uncomfortable work to build a better company or become a more admired leader. I’m doing it because 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” The three principles aren’t the goal. They’re simply what it looks like, day after day, to walk out a new identity that Christ already purchased and already gave me, the night I finally stopped trying to earn it.
