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Ep#63: The Hardest Conflict is the One Within | Mylinh Brewster Shattan

Season #3

In this episode of the Healthy Leader Expert Forum, Traci Fisher is joined by her West Point classmate, Army veteran, and author MyLinh Brewster Shattan to explore a territory every leader eventually faces: The Hardest Conflict Is the One Within.

This conversation isn't about the military. It’s a raw, honest look at what it actually takes to keep choosing well when the conflict is the one no one else can see. Pulling from MyLinh’s powerful memoir, Raising Athena, they strip away the outer armor of leadership to examine what happens when the rigid stories we tell ourselves finally collide with reality.

In Today’s Session, You’ll Discover:

  • The Harder Right: Why West Point asks eighteen-year-olds to commit to a standard before they understand what they're choosing and how we spend decades uncovering what we actually signed up for.

  • The Cost of Supposed to Be: How the hidden narratives we carry about who we are supposed to be as leaders quietly drain our energy, and how to get a sharper read on what they are costing you.

  • The False Resolution: Why deep internal friction cannot be fixed or resolved with another promotion, another credential, or another year of white-knuckling the work.

  • Confronting the Untold: The profound leadership shift that occurs when we stop hiding our past and face the stories we’ve spent decades avoiding.

  • The Unlearned Skill: The exact thing MyLinh spent thirty years learning to do, and the practical steps you can take to start doing it today.

  • The Power of Fellow Travelers: Why true self-leadership requires stepping out of the expert persona and learning to look at your internal terrain with absolute honesty.

📘 MyLinh Brewster Shattan’s Book:

Raising Athena: A Mother and Daughter Attend West Point Thirty Years Apart is available wherever books are sold (Traci's personal recommendation, not a sponsorship).

🔗 Connect with MyLinh:

LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mylinh-shattan-80b41b129/?skipRedirect=true]

🎧 Listen to the full episode, and consider this: What stories are you still telling yourself about who you're supposed to be as a leader, and what are they costing you right now?

(To watch the episode on YouTube, click here)

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