What Do You Plant After the Storm
Richer Soul Podcast • Episode 507 • Tom LeNoble
There is a particular kind of person who survives something brutal and comes out the other side completely unchanged. They get the diagnosis, the layoff, the divorce, the failed launch, and once it’s over, they go right back to running life exactly the way they did before it happened. Tom LeNoble has a name for what those people skip past. He calls it the wet ground.
Tom has been told he had six months to live three separate times. He has lived with metastatic cancer for fourteen years. When you hear a resume like that, the instinct is to expect a story about survival. What he actually offers is a story about attention. After his first terminal diagnosis, he sat in his car, looked in the rearview mirror, and spoke to the illness directly: if you want to come join my party, welcome, but if you think you’re going to take me out, you’re in the fight of your life. That is not a survival mindset. That is a negotiation over what still gets to happen while he’s here.
The Hidden Pattern Underneath That Moment Goes Back Much Further Than The Diagnosis
Tom grew up in a one-room house with no hot water and no refrigerator. His father, shaped by the Depression, once bought three replacement door handles for a window that only needed one, because the rug might get pulled out at any moment. That belief, that scarcity is always one step behind you, became the operating system of the household. Tom names it plainly. At five years old, a few weeks into starting school, he looked around that house and decided this was not going to be his life. He didn’t have the words for it then. He has them now.
The Assumption Most People Carry Is That Surviving A Hard Season Means Returning To Normal
Get through it, get back to baseline, resume the plan. Tom’s version is different, and it comes from a line he keeps returning to in his own book: every storm runs out of rain, and the storms in our lives leave the ground just as wet and fertile as the ones outside. The question he asks people isn’t whether they made it through. It’s what they’re going to plant now that the ground is finally soft enough to hold something.
That Reframe Is The Clearer Lens. The Crisis Is Not The Event You’re Supposed To Get Past
It’s the one moment your usual operating system gets interrupted long enough for you to actually choose something on purpose, instead of defaulting back to whatever scarcity or fear was already running underneath. Tom’s coaching work operates on the same principle in miniature. He calls it the haystack method: the client already has the answer, buried under everything else that’s louder. His job is not to hand them a new belief. It’s to hold space long enough for them to clear the hay themselves.
The Implication Is Uncomfortable If You Sit With It Honestly
Most people don’t need another crisis to force the question. They need to ask it now, while nothing is on fire, which is exactly when it’s easiest to skip.
One question to sit with: If this were the last storm you got to walk through, what would you plant in what’s left?
About Tom LeNoble
Tom LeNoble is a confidential advisor to founders, executives, nonprofit leaders, business owners, and professionals navigating meaningful leadership moments. He is an international speaker, coach, and philanthropist. His career spans Fortune 500 giants including MCI (VZ), Walmart.com (WMT), Palm (HP), and Facebook (META), as well as multiple high-growth startups. As CEO of the Academy for Coaching Excellence and a Leadership Coach with the Miller Center at Santa Clara University, he mentors leaders and entrepreneurs worldwide.
He is the bestselling author of the award-winning memoir My Life in Business Suits, Hospital Gowns, and High Heels. Tom’s new book, Morning Ground, will arrive in June. He is also the creator and host of the Opening Pathways podcast, where he shares stories and insights on leadership, resilience, and reinvention. Having survived multiple life-threatening diagnoses, he lives by his conviction: “I’m Still Here!”
Links
Website: https://openingpathwayscollective.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomlenoble/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tomlenoble
Instagram: @lenoble.tom
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@OpeningPathways
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@richersoul
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