What My 12 Year Old Dog Taught Me About Showing Up Fully in Business and Life
I found an old photo of my dog Toby recently and could not help but laugh. He was wearing a hat and a bandana, sitting in front of a table of Munchkins with an expression that can only be described as dignified absurdity. He knew exactly how he looked. And he simply did not care.
Why? Because there were Munchkins on the table.
I have thought about that photo more than a reasonable person probably should, because there is actually something worth holding onto in it.
Toby has never overthought a moment in his life. He does not worry about how he looks, whether the timing is right, or what anyone nearby might think. He shows up fully, tail wagging, completely present in whatever is happening right now. No filter. No self editing. Just there.
Somewhere along the way, most adults, and most leaders, lose that.
We start performing instead of participating. We think before we speak in ways that are often less about clarity and more about protection. We hold back the laugh, the reaction, the unguarded response because we are thinking about how it will land or what it says about us. We wait for the right moment to celebrate, to express gratitude, to be human in front of our teams, and the right moment quietly never comes.
Authentic leadership does not mean being unfiltered in every direction or bringing every personal emotion into a professional setting. But it does mean showing up as a real person rather than a carefully managed performance. And in my experience, the leaders who are willing to do that tend to create something in their organizations that no amount of strategy or structure can manufacture. They create permission. When the person at the top is genuinely themselves, it signals to everyone around them that they can be too.
That matters enormously for team culture. The best teams I have worked with are not the ones with the most polished communication. They are the ones where people feel safe enough to say what they actually think, react honestly, and engage with real energy rather than managed professionalism. That kind of environment does not come from a culture initiative. It comes from a leader who models it.
There is also something worth naming about joy specifically. Business ownership is genuinely hard. The decisions are real, the pressure is sustained, and the uncertainty is constant. It is easy to slide into a mode where everything is serious and the lightness gets squeezed out. A good quarterly result gets acknowledged and immediately replaced by the question of what comes next. A team win gets noted and filed. The celebration gets deferred until some imagined future moment when things feel settled enough to enjoy.
That moment rarely arrives on its own. If you are waiting for the right conditions to feel good about what you have built, you may be waiting for a long time.
Leadership well being is not a soft metric. It directly affects decision quality, communication, team morale, and the long term sustainability of your ability to lead. Leaders who make room for lightness, gratitude, and genuine enjoyment tend to last longer and lead better. Not despite those things, but because of them.
Toby’s approach to the Munchkins is not a business strategy. But the underlying principle, show up fully, stop editing the joy out of your life, be present in the moment rather than always managing how it looks from the outside, is one that I think a lot of business owners could genuinely benefit from.
He turned twelve. He wore the hat. He ate the Munchkins and he was not remotely sorry about any of it.
There is a lesson in there somewhere.
And beyond the humor of it, I think it connects to something real about what makes leadership sustainable over time. The leaders I have seen last the longest and lead most effectively are not the ones who were the most polished or the most serious. They are the ones who remained genuinely themselves, who could laugh at themselves, who made the people around them feel that they were in the presence of a real human being rather than a performance. That quality of presence creates trust in a way that professional polish simply cannot.
Show up. Be present. Stop editing the joy out of your days. Your team will feel it. And so will you.
