Julie, Joyful at The Sphere

In 2025 my partner Julie went through chemo. I am not going to dwell on the details of the diagnosis because that is her story and this is about something else. This is about what she chose to do in the middle of it.

I took her to see Dead and Company at The Sphere in Las Vegas as a celebration of chemo being done. Julie had no hair. And here is a photo of her at that show, looking up at the ceiling of The Sphere, and the only word for what her face shows is joyful. Not brave. Not "making the best of it." Joyful. As if the ceiling of that building and the music filling it were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and in that moment, they probably were.

By the end of the show, the people sitting around us wanted to know her. Not because of the chemo. Because her energy was magnetic. She was radiating something that people wanted to be near, and what she was radiating was a choice. The choice to be fully present, fully alive, in a situation that gives most people permission to withdraw.

I tell this story because it is the most powerful proof I have of something I believe and teach: happiness is a choice, and it is contagious in the same way a healthy business is. When the leader of a company shows up with energy and presence and genuine engagement, the people around that leader respond.

When Julie showed up at The Sphere with joy and presence, the strangers around her responded. The mechanism is the same. What you bring into a room changes the room.

This is the Being leg in its purest form. Not mindset hacks. Not gratitude journaling because someone told you it would optimize your cortisol. The real thing: choosing to be alive in the moment you are actually in, especially when that moment is hard.

Julie did not need me to coach her on this. She is better at it than I am. What I learned from watching her that night is that thriving is not something achieved when conditions are favorable. Thriving is something chosen when conditions are the worst they have ever been. And the choice itself, the act of choosing joy when the world has given you every reason not to, produces something in the people around you that no amount of strategy or discipline or effort can replicate.

The line I use is this: happiness is contagious. It works the same way in a business as it works in a concert hall. The leader's energy sets the tone, and the tone determines what everyone else feels safe to bring.

Julie showed me that the choice to thrive is available to anyone, in any circumstance, at any moment. The question is whether you make it.

What are you choosing to bring into the room today?

~b