Nobody Sees the Two Hours Before the Coals

In September 2023, on the lawn at MIT Endicott House, I walked across a bed of burning coals.

I have the video. In it, I am all smiles - arms up, face lit, striding across something that should have stopped me cold. It looks effortless. It looks like the kind of thing a confident person just decides to do one afternoon.

What the video does not show is the two hours before it.

The nerves. The fear that sat in my chest and would not move. The tears ... real ones. The moment I genuinely was not sure I would step off that starting line. Before the coals, there was a board I had to break with my bare hand, and before the board there was a coach standing in front of me, walking me through what my body was going to do and what my mind was going to say to stop me.

I did not walk on coals because I am brave. I walked on coals because someone prepared me to.

Why it worked

Take the preparation out and the moment collapses. That is the whole thing.

If I had skipped the two hours, I would have arrived at the coals with the same fear and none of the tools. I would have hesitated. I would have stopped halfway or not started at all. The smile in the video is not the absence of fear, it is what fear looks like after someone has helped you move through it.

Three things made that moment possible, and none of them happened on the coals:

Someone who had actually done it went first. This was a COO Alliance event, and Cameron Herold did not stand up and teach the firewalk himself. He brought in Dave Albin of Firewalk Adventures, the man who ran the coals for Tony Robbins for 17 years. Dave had walked thousands of people across fire. He knew exactly which part was going to feel impossible, and he said so before it arrived.

The small rep came before the big one. I broke the board first. Not because breaking a board matters, but because it proved to me that the story in my head - I can't - was negotiable.

The emotion got to happen. Nobody told me to stop crying and get it together. The fear was part of the preparation, not an interruption to it.

Then, and only then, the coals.

Where companies get this wrong

Every organization has a moment it wants people to have.

The client who feels genuinely taken care of on day one. The new hire who walks out of orientation thinking I made the right call. The customer on the phone at the worst moment of their week who hangs up feeling like a person instead of a ticket number. The conference attendee who tells six people about your event on the flight home.

Leaders describe these moments to me with real conviction. And then, when I ask what preparation is in place to make them happen, the answer is usually some version of: we told the team it's important.

That is asking people to walk on coals because you emailed them a photo of the coals.

Notice what Cameron did instead. He is the one who built the room, set the stakes, and decided that a group of COOs should do something that scared them. He is also the one who knew he was not the person to teach it. So he found Dave. That is not an admission of weakness , it is the entire job. Leaders own the moment. They do not have to be the one who trains for it, and the ones who insist on being the expert in everything are usually the reason their teams arrive unprepared.

The moment your customer experiences is not created in the moment. It is created in everything that happens before it - the training, the language, the practice reps, the permission to be nervous about it, the person who has done it standing next to the person who hasn't. Without that, you are not delivering an experience. You are hoping for one, and hope is not a strategy your team can execute.

Here is the uncomfortable part: your customers only ever see the video. They see the smile or they see the hesitation. They never see the two hours. But they can tell, instantly, whether the two hours happened.

The question worth asking

Pick the single moment that matters most in your business, the one you would put in the video.

Now ask: what are we doing in the two hours before it?

If the answer is nothing, that moment is not a strategy. It is a coincidence you are counting on, and coincidences do not scale.

I still have a box of coals from that night. It sits in my office. Three years later, what it reminds me of is not the fire, rather it is Dave standing in front of a group of terrified executives for two hours, and Cameron being smart enough to go get him.

Experiences create loyalty. Loyalty drives revenue. Relationships build brands. But none of it starts at the moment of delivery. It starts in the preparation nobody claps for.

I help leaders intentionally create moments that remind people they matter, because when people know they matter, everything changes. If you have a moment your team is supposed to deliver and no plan behind it, let's talk about the two hours before.