Wonder, Leadership, and the Call to Creative Contribution
Alberta Stevens
A Kitchen Table Interruption
I remember that morning in 2016 clearly like it was yesterday.
It was just after 7am, and I was standing in the kitchen, urging my six-year-old son to finish his breakfast and sit down to do some creative writing before school in preparation for an upcoming school entry exam. He was always a natural storyteller, endlessly articulate, quick to absorb ideas, but stubbornly resistant when it came to putting anything on paper. That morning, like many others, had already become a quiet battle of wills.
Eventually he looked up at me, exhausted and exasperated, and asked, “Why are you making me do this?”
I replied instinctively that it was important because I wanted the best for him, and that how he turned out mattered, and hard work was the only way through it. Then I added something rhetorical, something careless: “Why do you think I’m making you do this anyway?”
He paused, and then said, with surprising clarity, “The whole purpose of my life is to study hard, get a good job, and succeed. Isn’t that why you gave birth to me?”
That stopped me.
Tears welled in his eyes, and something in me broke open too. In that moment I realised that, after six years under my influence, the story he had absorbed from me was not one of meaning, joy, or fulfilment, but of expediency. Do what you need to do to get ahead. Work hard so you can win. And winning, it seemed, meant working hard to get a good job.
Other interruptions in my life (story for another day) meant that at the time, I had stepped away from full-time which afforded me more time at home with my son. Yet I had brought the logic and energy of the marketplace straight into my parenting. The metrics had changed, but the mindset had not. And while I cannot say everything shifted overnight, that moment began a slow, necessary reorientation in me about how I lead and steward the people that have been placed in my care, one that continues to this day.
Don’t get me wrong, there is a great deal of value in wanting the best for our children and teaching them that discipline, grit, and hard work yield results. For me, however, that message should not come at the expense of grounding their self-worth in something deeper and steadier than their ability to produce, especially at age six, when their sense of who they are is still so tender.
Even now, I notice how easily I slip back into productivity mode, my worth measured by output, my attention governed by to-do lists rather than presence. As I was editing this piece, a friend “interrupted” my rhythm with a simple text message about my inner life, about how I was actually doing in this season. It was a small intervention, but it reminded me again that the most important movements in our lives are often not driven by urgency, but by attention.
The Hero’s Journey: The Arc We All Inhabit
When I look at my own story and the stories that come through my coaching practice, I see a pattern that echoes across cultures, traditions, and time. And I’m sorry to say, our stories are not as original as we imagine. Like the ancient myths and sacred texts, our lives follow a recognisable arc. We begin by doing what is required, learning how to belong, how to perform, how to survive. And for a time, this is faithful work. Necessary work. Honourable work.
But eventually, something interrupts us.
This interruption is the gateway of what is often called the hero’s journey, not in the romantic sense of conquest or triumph, but in the quieter, truer sense of transformation through encounter – being addressed. If you are paying attention, you will see this pattern everywhere.
For example, the biblical patriarch, Moses, was not looking for a spiritual awakening when he encountered the burning bush. He was tending sheep, living a quieter life after failure and exile. Yet the ground beneath his feet changed, and awe preceded instruction. Only after that encounter was he sent back into the very systems he had fled, now carrying responsibility shaped not by fear but by calling.
Star Wars fans would agree that Luke Skywalker was not seeking formation when he met Yoda. He was restless, frustrated, eager for power without patience. Yet it was only when he slowed down and unlearned what he thought he knew that he became capable of receiving a deeper kind of guidance, one that reshaped not just what he could do, but who he was becoming.
Similarly, Disney’s Moana was not searching for self-focused adventure or self-expression. She was trying to be faithful to her people as their world began to fail. The ocean disrupted her settled identity, awakening memory, ancestry, and responsibility. She returned not as a conqueror, but as a restorer.
And closer to the moral complexities of modern life, Erin Brockovich did not begin as a reformer or activist. Her ordinary world was disrupted by an injustice she could not ignore. Her authority emerged not from status or expertise, but from attentiveness and refusal to look away.
And of course, these are only a few among a far wider company of stewarded lives, from Nelson Mandela in politics, to Satya Nadella reshaping Microsoft through humility and renewal, to Ed Catmull quietly stewarding creativity at Pixar, and countless others whose leadership was forged through years of obscurity and formation.
What unites these stories is not triumph, but receptivity and attentiveness. They were not seeking domination or escape, but a purposeful return having being addressed.
In different ways, I believe our lives mirror this same arc.
When Survival Is No Longer Enough
Most of us do not begin our story by asking what our lives are for. We begin by responding to what is demanded of us: exams, bills, expectations, and roles. We become adept at navigating the systems we inherit. And often we do so well. Yet over time, many find themselves circling within the rhythms of survival and expediency, until something slowly or suddenly disrupts that rhythm.
For some, this disruption comes quietly, through a growing listlessness after years of doing what was required. Studying, achieving, paying the mortgage, carrying responsibility. And then one day, the horizon narrows. Life still functions, but no longer coheres. The question begins to press: is this all that remains now?
For others, disruption arrives through rupture: redundancy after years of commitment, a promotion passed over, a relationship that breaks after too much waiting, or even through joyful change that rearranges the inner furniture of the soul and leaves you asking who you are now.
There is often, in these moments, a tear in the hum of everyday life. A recognition that the strategies that once worked no longer hold. And in that admission, something honest surfaces: I cannot keep doing this alone.
It is usually here that people begin to awaken to a deeper journey of self-discovery and transformation, one that moves beyond optimisation and material success toward meaning. And this is where transformational coaching, at its best, enters as a contemporary guide. Not a voice that dictates answers, but a presence that helps people listen more deeply to what is being asked of them now.
Reimagining: The Return With Purpose
In my own work, this is the space in which the framework I call the 5Rs of Leadership Reinvention emerged: Rooting, Releasing, Resting, Reimagining, and Realigning. These are not techniques, but movements, ways of accompanying people through the thresholds of identity, disruption, and renewal.
Reimagining, the fourth movement, names a very specific moment in this journey. It is not the beginning, nor the end. It comes after someone has begun to come home to who they are, loosen what no longer belongs, and recover a deeper presence to themselves and the world. By this point, something essential has shifted. The story is no longer only about me. It is about what I am part of, and what is being formed through me.
Reimagining is the moment when this realisation turns our attention outward and upward. It is when the gaze lifts from managing what is to considering what might be. When identity and presence press toward purpose. When the question is no
longer only who am I, but what might my life be for?
In this sense, reimagining begins with wonder.
What Wonder Is (and Why It Matters)
Wonder not as sentimentality or fleeting emotion, but wonder as encounter.
To understand this, it is helpful to draw from a small constellation of thinkers who help us name wonder as a catalyst at this threshold – gateway of reimagining. Abraham Joshua Heschel, the Jewish theologian and philosopher, describes wonder as “radical amazement”, not a passing feeling, but a way of standing before reality that precedes explanation, control, or use.
For Heschel, wonder is a “pre-apprehension of God”: an awakening to the depth beneath existence itself. For some, this may be named as God; for others, as universal consciousness or the deeper coherence that governs all things. In either case, it names an awareness that exceeds the self.
Wonder is not located in objects, but in the way we are awakened through them. Standing before a vast ocean or mountain range. Hearing a piece of music that feels larger than sound. Witnessing birth, death, forgiveness, or quiet moral courage. Encountering grief, a near-death experience, or a dream that lingers with unusual weight. These moments are not wonder in themselves. They are thresholds that open us to the realisation that life exceeds what is immediately visible, manageable, or useful.
Rudolf Otto, a 19th century German Theologian gives language to this depth when he speaks of wonder as the numinous, that which both unsettles and draws us, disturbs yet fascinates. Wonder is not always gentle or luminous. It can be weighty, disorienting, even frightening with a purpose. It does not dissolve us into chaos, but reorders us within a reality that exceeds our control while compelling our attention.
Wonder, then, is the state of being encountered by life, by mystery, by God. Awe is what rises in us when we experience wonder – when we realise we are standing before more than we can contain or command. This is the moment when the world ceases to be flat or self-explanatory and becomes charged with presence.
This is why Heschel insists that wonder is not something we generate.
It is something that happens to us. We are addressed.
And in that address, the centre of gravity shifts. The self is no longer the sole reference point. Here Robert Fuller’s, a modern psychologist’s insight becomes important. He describes wonder as allocentric, meaning that it moves us away from ourselves as the primary measure of what matters. We begin to locate our lives within a story larger than our preferences, ambitions, or fears.
This is why wonder belongs so naturally within the hero’s journey. It breaks the spell of survival, loosens the grip of expediency, and opens us to a world that is no longer merely endured or conquered, but encountered and received.
Two Ways of Living: Wonder and Expediency
Heschel goes further, insisting that there are, at heart, two ways of living: the way of wonder and the way of expediency. Expediency is the posture of survival. It asks what works, what pays, what will get us through. It narrows our vision until life becomes a sequence of problems to be solved and outcomes to be optimised.
Wonder, by contrast, is an existential stance, a way of being in the world that refuses
to take life for granted. In the way of expediency, Heschel writes, we accumulate information in order to
dominate. In the way of wonder, we deepen our appreciation in order to respond. And when awe is forfeited,
he warns, the universe becomes a
marketplace.
This is not merely poetic language. It is a moral diagnosis.
Heschel warns that when life becomes a marketplace, everything is assessed by utility.
Time becomes a commodity. People become functions. Creativity becomes content, even meaning becomes branding. And yet, something in us resists this reduction, because we were not made only to perform or produce. We were made to attend, to respond, to be addressed.
Reimagining: A Coherent Horizon
Reimagining does not ask us to choose between meaning and success, between vocation and thriving, between serving the world and providing for our families. It is not a rejection of financial independence, influence, or ambition. It is a refusal to let these become the only horizon by which we live.
It offers a different coherence, one in which our desires are not pitted against the world, but woven into it. Where creativity serves both our becoming and the renewal of the systems we inhabit. Where success is not extracted at the expense of meaning, but held within it.
This is where leadership becomes not merely strategic, but formational and stewarded. Not only about what we build, but what we are entrusted to carry into the world in this season.
Reflections
Before moving on, it may be worth lingering with a few questions.
- Where in your own life have you felt that subtle stirring beyond survival or success alone?
- What moments, gentle or disruptive, have awakened you to something larger than your immediate concerns?
- And what, quietly or insistently, might you now be being asked to respond to?
If this reflection has got you thinking about where you might be in your own journey then I would love to invite you to
- Book a discovery call to explore whether it’s the right fit
- Or reach out at hello@aretequest.co.uk; we’d love to hear from you.
With grace and courage
Alberta