Tremendous Tracey

They call Iceland the Land of Fire and Ice. Volcanoes and glaciers. Lava fields and frozen waterfalls. And standing there, I realized that's not just geology. That's life. The most spectacular results, the deepest beauty, come from being forged in the fires of trials and intense pressure, or from enduring the cold you feel while searching for your purpose. Fire and ice. Both shape you. Both are necessary.

And speaking of being shaped... Iceland kept showing me hearts.

I've been to Iceland before—passing through Keflavik during my Air Force days. But this time, Mike and I are finally HERE. And standing in front of Harpa Concert Hall, watching it glow from within, I couldn't help but think: that's what leadership looks like.

I gave my neighbor a copy of The Island of Misfit Leaders. He read it straight through, then sent me a meme: a white horse looking into a mirror, seeing a pegasus. The wings belong to the swan standing on its back. From where the horse is standing, that is impossible to know. It cannot see its own back, and no amount of straining or self-examination will ever show it what is there. That is not the flaw in the design. That is the design. Nobody sees their own wings, which is why God gave us each other.

Everybody loved my father, 99 and 44/100 percent of them anyway. Seventeen years after he died, a speaker wrote in to tell me about the woman in the front row who never came around, and what Charlie did about her that cost him half a keynote.

Authoritarianism. Attractiveness. Dominance. Nobody wants to circle a 5 next to those words in a room full of their peers — and in three years of running this exercise, nobody has. But our people never stop scoring us on them. Rank has its privileges, and it has its responsibilities, and the leader who sets hers down at the door is the only one in the room who thinks that part of the test is over.

Some weeks the hostility just hangs in the air—a volatile leader you can't steady, a teammate who turns cold, conflict that pulls your own good people off center—and the real question is never whether you'll face it, but who you'll be when you do. Drawing on Paul's battle-tested counsel in Romans 12, this piece lays out four ways to lead through hostility without being made ugly by it: be the shock absorber that takes the blast so your team doesn't have to, refuse to let anyone else set your terms, lead for the room rather than the malcontent, and walk the long road of kindness home to the follower who has drifted away. You will not win every difficult person, but you can keep your side of the peace clean—and let the good people around you grow steadier for having watched you stay steady.

Insubordination is the first sin. Before the first murder, before the first lie, there was a rebellion in heaven, and the root of it was pride: the self swelling up and deciding I get to say. One week into our next 250 years, here's why inverted is perverted, why a house divided cannot stand, and why the honorable answer to hating your surroundings has never been to stay and stab. It's to walk out the open door.

I can't emphasize this enough: It was overflowing with fellow Americans. Pure and simple. Not THIS type of American or THAT type of American. Not red or blue. Not left or right. Just thankful Americans who deeply love this country.

By the time you're reading this, I'm headed to DC! At 12:01 AM on New Year's Eve, watching the Story of America projected on the Washington Monument, I knew I HAD to be there for the 250th. Six months of planning, the last pair of limited-edition Corral eagle boots in my size, and a whole lot of manifest destiny later — these boots are made for walking straight into history. Stay tuned for pictures from the greatest birthday party in the history of mankind!

A church convention and a stock exchange have more in common than you'd think: both reveal the oldest trick for silencing the people we'd rather not hear. Here's how to spot the rigged ledger—and dress your mind for the best-dressed list.

My father, Charlie "Tremendous" Jones, believed the bedrock of a tremendous life was rich dialogue. So I pay close attention when someone drops the "Q" from "Q&A". When you ask a fair, honest question and the room turns on you instead of answering it, that reaction tells you everything. Here's what the military, a board meeting, and an auditor's wisdom taught me about asking the hard question the right way.

Addiction isn't a weakness. It's devotion aimed at the wrong altar. A line from Ty Ngachira sent me back to a strange little phrase in Hosea 13 — "kiss the calves" — where God's people melted their own silver into an idol and bowed to the work of their own hands. Money does that. It doesn't create what's inside us; it reveals and magnifies it. Hand a fortune to a whole person, and it becomes a tool. Hand it to a hollow one, and it becomes a god. From Arthur Guinness to Milton Hershey to a short tax collector in a sycamore tree, here's what righteous wealth looks like when devotion gets redirected.

I was deployed to the UAE during the first Gulf War when I read Leon Uris's The Haj, and one phrase branded itself into my soul: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. I spent decades studying why people move in and out of groups — through my PhD research, my leadership practice, and my deep appreciation for Leader-Member Exchange (LMX) theory. I never expected my most powerful illustration would have scales.

I screamed at a baby garter snake in 2022. By 2026, I was calmly coaxing an eight-foot black rat snake off my kitchen blind. That transformation — from terror to trust, from out-group to tribe — is the whole leadership lesson. Some relationships you recognize immediately. Others take time, research, and a glass door between you and eight feet of black rat snake.

Meet Mr. Bo Tangles. And the ally you might be missing right outside your door.

He'd been gone ten years. The first stranger he met on the outside got to say welcome back into the world. And it almost didn't happen — because I never change my seats.