On this week's episode of The Transformational Leader, Adam kicks off a multi-part origin series tracing his path up to choosing coaching - an honest, unvarnished look at how a bright, passionate, open-hearted kid learned to dial down his own light. He explores the meanings he made from early structure and playground bruises, how "trauma" often lives in the stories we create about events, and the survival strategies that followed: hypervigilance, perfectionism, chameleon-like charm, overtalking to avoid intimacy, and numbing to feel creative or safe. Rather than the familiar arc of "it was hard, then I overcame," Adam names the contraptions we build to manage shame and seek acceptance, and invites you to examine the rules you quietly made about yourself and the world. This is part one - what shaped the man before coaching; next week, he dives into the messy, human journey of becoming a coach and a leader.