Faith Taught Me to Stop Being Afraid

LISA  GOLDENTHAL

In March of 2020, everything I had spent decades building disappeared in about eleven days. My calendar, that used to be packed with keynote speeches and important client meetings, turned into a blank, blinking computer screen. I remember sitting at my kitchen table thinking, “This is it. This is the moment where everything I had worked for all falls apart.”

Fortunately, it did not fall apart. It just refused to stay the same as it was. And there is a difference between those two things that took me a long time to understand.

I have spent my entire career studying leadership, building frameworks, and standing in front of rooms full of CEOs who are far smarter than I am on paper. But nothing prepared me for watching my entire industry vanish almost overnight and having to decide whether I was going to fold or pivot.

Luckily, I ended up pivoting. Not because I had some grand plan waiting in a drawer. Rather, it was because something underneath the fear kept whispering to me, saying, “Keep going; this isn't the end of your story—it's just an ugly chapter.” I didn't always believe that voice. Some days I screamed back at it. But I never stopped listening for it.

That's faith. Not the kind that requires a pew or a particular Sunday service. It’s the kind of faith that shows up in the eleven days between everything you built and everything you're about to rebuild, that tells you to take the next step, even before you can see where it lands.

I think about the people who taught me that the quality of our lives is the quality of our decisions, and that clarity creates success. Both are right, but neither tells you what to do in the gap—the terrifying space between the decision and the clarity, when you have neither. That gap is where faith actually lives.

I watched leaders go one of two ways during the pandemic. Some froze, waiting for certainty that was never going to arrive. Others found the internal strength to move forward anyway, scared, imperfect, completely unsure if the pivot would work, yet they took action. The ones who moved are the ones still standing today. Not because they were smarter, but because they decided fear didn't get a vote.

I rebuilt my entire business in real time, without a roadmap. My guide was my unshakable faith. Even though I couldn't always put a name to it out loud, I never stopped leaning on it. I don’t know exactly what was holding me up during those eleven days, or the eighteen long months after them. I just know it wasn’t me alone.

So here are my words of advice and takeaways: Never give up. Never be afraid of the pivot. And most importantly, never assume you are doing it all by yourself. There’s more going on than we understand. It’s hard not to attribute my journey to an orchestrator rather than just random luck.