#20 Walking your Path
How can you find your Path and feel God's nudges?
Steve Steele
9/14/20269 min read
The Pull — Listening When God Speaks
I didn't apply for the CEO job.
Not at first, anyway. Not because the opportunity wasn't real or because I didn't respect what the role stood for. I hadn't applied because I had never once imagined that path for myself. I was a football coach. A biology teacher. A husband and a father of four. I had a framework for my life that made sense to me, and a non-profit CEO position didn't fit anywhere inside it.
Then my wife said, "This sounds like you."
That's how it started. Not with a burning bush. Not with a voice from the sky. Just a subtle nudge. A quiet, almost offhand comment from someone paying attention to something in me that I wasn't paying attention to myself.
I've come to believe that's almost always how God works.
The Nudge You Almost Miss
There's a version of finding your path that looks very cinematic. A moment of clarity coming off the heels of a dramatic crossroads. A sign so obvious that even the most distracted person couldn't walk past it. That version makes for a great movie. It's also not how it usually works.
In my experience, God's pulls are mostly quiet. They don't announce themselves. They arrive unexpectedly through a comment or an opportunity that shows up in a random season of life when you weren't even looking. It's like a door that opens to a hallway you didn't know existed. It feels small in the moment, only becoming clear in hindsight when you can look back and trace the line from where you were to where you ended up and see that it wasn't random at all.
In the You Are Enough chapter of Building the Empire, I write about a realization that crept up on me during what would become our seventh championship season. Working alongside Cade Kaiser (a young man wrestling with whether he could possibly be enough without being Lincoln Kienholz) I found myself in a conversation I didn't fully realize I was having with myself.
We don't need another Lincoln. We just need Cade.
The words I kept saying to him were words I had never been able to say to myself. Even after six consecutive state championships, I had never fully believed I deserved to be in the room. I needed to prove it one more time. Then one more time after that. The frame I had built around my purpose, winning is how you earn your place, had become a weight I carried everywhere, even when the scoreboard was in my favor.
What shifted that year wasn't the championship. It was something quieter. As Cade grew in confidence, so did I. As I watched him discover that he was enough for this team just being himself, I began to entertain the idea that I was enough for God just being myself. I didn't have to strive to be the version of myself that had been performing for a decade. That God might have something different in mind. That the skills He had given me, sharpened through years of coaching, might be meant for a wider field than our football field.
That's when the pull started to feel less like noise and more like direction.
Paying Attention to the Call
Chip and Dan Heath write in The Power of Moments about the way we tend to drift through our lives, letting the defining experiences happen to us rather than recognizing them as they arrive. I've written about this in the context of creating moments for other people, but it applies just as powerfully to discerning your own calling.
You have to be paying attention.
In the Hold the Pen chapter of Building the Empire, I reflect on the months surrounding a decision that would change the trajectory of my life. Should I pursue the CEO role at the Boys & Girls Club of the Capital Area? I had no formal background in nonprofit leadership, no business degree, and no financial training. What I had was a growing sense that the work I had been doing was pointing me toward something beyond the football field.
When I'm honest about how I made that decision, it comes back to one thing: I had learned, painfully and gradually, to stop ignoring the nudges.
I had learned that paying attention isn't just a leadership skill it's a spiritual practice. The quiet moments like a conversation with a friend, a pull in a direction you didn't plan for, a door cracking open that you didn't knock on, deserve serious consideration rather than reflexive dismissal. God tends to speak in the frequency of what you keep coming back to rather than in lightning bolts.
The call wasn't loud, but it was persistent. I had finally gotten quiet enough to hear it.
Permission to Follow
Here is what I've observed about the gap between people who follow their calling and people who don't: it's almost never about ability. It's almost always about permission.
We wait for certainty that never comes. We wait until we feel ready, until the timing is right, until the path is clearer, until we're more qualified, until someone else validates what we already sense is true. We give ourselves permission to pass, because passing feels safer than stepping forward into something we can't fully see.
I gave myself permission to fail before I ever applied for the CEO position. If I don't interview well, it's not my thing. That was protection language. A way of managing the risk of following a call that scared me, by leaving myself an exit ramp before I ever got on the highway.
But here's what I've come to believe, the call doesn't wait forever. The nudge doesn't repeat itself indefinitely. There is a moment, in every pull you feel toward something meaningful, when you have to decide whether you are going to move toward it or explain to yourself why this probably isn't the right time.
In my pregame speech at Yankton during the Hold the Pen season, I always told our guys that I try to let God put the words in my mouth and trust that He gives me what they need to hear. I've found that same principle applies to the bigger decisions in life. If you're willing to let go of the script you wrote for yourself and be still long enough to hear what's actually being asked of you, the words tend to come.
They don't always sound the way you expected and the direction they point is sometimes nowhere near the destination you planned.
But they are almost never wrong.
The Wider Field
Two years into leading the Boys & Girls Club of the Capital Area, I can tell you that it is the hardest thing I have ever done professionally. I can also tell you that it has produced some of the most meaningful work of my life. Not because it's gone perfectly, it hasn't, but because it is exactly where I am supposed to be at this moment in time.
The kids walking through our doors are not football players. Many of them do not have a stable home, a parent in the stands, or a natural community of belonging. They need someone to believe that their development matters and that their potential deserves investment. Giving them a moment of genuine attention from a caring adult can change the direction of a life.
That's just coaching with a wider lens.
Everything this blog has tried to say about Momentous Leadership in creating moments for the people nobody else is creating moments for, paying attention to what's already in the room, building something that lasts beyond the season lives at the center of what our organization does every single day. The football field prepared me for the wider field in ways I couldn't have designed if I'd tried.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the coach who spent a decade learning to see overlooked kids ended up leading an organization built specifically to serve them. I think that's what it looks like when you finally stop outrunning the pull and turn around to face it.
How to Hear It
I want to be honest about something: I am not naturally good at stillness. I am a coach. I am wired to plan, to prepare, to identify a problem and move toward it. Sitting quietly and listening for direction does not come easily to me.
But I have learned, slowly and imperfectly, a few things about how God tends to speak (at least in my experience).
He speaks through people who know you better than you know yourself. My brother John saw a Boise State underdog in me before I believed it. My wife saw a CEO before I would have imagined the word applied to me. The people closest to you are often carrying information about your calling that you haven't been willing to receive yet. Pay attention to what they see.
He speaks through the things you keep returning to, even when you try to move on. The idea that won't leave you alone. The problem that keeps finding you. The population of people whose challenges you can't stop thinking about. That persistent return is directional.
He speaks through the doors that open without you pushing them. The opportunity that arrives when you weren't looking, in a form you didn't expect, from a source you didn't anticipate. These moments deserve more than a polite dismissal. They deserve serious, prayerful consideration.
And He speaks through seasons of stripping. When the thing you built your identity around shifts, or ends, or no longer satisfies the way it once did, that's rarely just loss. I would guess it's almost always preparation. The ground has to be cleared before something new can grow in it.
The call to purpose is rarely dramatic. But it is rarely silent, either. The question is whether you've gotten quiet enough, humble enough, and present enough to hear it.
What Are You Being Pulled Toward?
I want to leave you with one of the latest nudges in my life. As we leave church, our kids always look forward to getting a bulletin on the way out. In the middle of summer as I had read it, a specific advertisement caught my eye. The diocese was looking for writers to help write for the Bishop's Bulletin, which is a monthly publication to all families in the diocese. As I have started this journey in writing with Building the Empire, Momentous Leadership, and this blog, it was another nudge I felt.
As I read the ad, I immediately felt God pulling me to reach out to the contact. God had shown me this love of writing and helped me all the way through a book. Could this be my opportunity to give that skill back for Him? Another part of this conversation is that my wife and I always talk about how we can give back to the church, but our season of life with four young kids in a pew, serving during church right now is mainly ensuring our kids are at mass, and hopefully not disrupting others (even when some families behind us enjoy that). Within minutes of reading the ad, I was sure this was God showing me a way I could be involved in serving the church in a way I had never considered.
Fast forward through some email exchange, I was assigned my first article to write in July for the September issue. Not only was the interview a blast, I learned a ton and left the conversation thoroughly impressed with the person I had just interviewed. I was honored to be able to tell his story and to hopefully use his story to bring more people to know our Lord through it. As I have received feedback on my book and other writing, I have no doubt that God wanted me to step up and serve Him in this manner. While I won't have another assignment until after football season, I am already looking forward to meeting more inspiring people across our diocese and sharing their story to bring others closer to God. (Link to article found beneath parting thoughts)
Our paths usually make sense looking backward. Rarely can we see what His future holds for us. We can be perfectly happy with our jobs and life only to be called to uproot and do something totally different on a moment's notice. Our job is to pay enough attention that it starts to make sense looking forward.
So ask yourself honestly: what keeps pulling at you, even when you try to set it down? What door has cracked open recently that you've been explaining away? What are the people closest to you seeing in you that you haven't been willing to see in yourself?
The purpose you're looking for is almost certainly not waiting somewhere far away, in a dramatic revelation designed to get your attention. It's been nudging you quietly, in ordinary moments and ordinary conversations, for longer than you realize.
The only question is whether you're listening.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Think about the most significant turning points in your own story, the ones that changed your direction in ways you didn't plan. Looking back, can you trace the nudges that led to each one? Were you paying attention at the time, or did you only see it clearly in hindsight?
Is there a pull in your life right now (toward a person, a role, a community, a calling) that you've been explaining away or waiting to feel more ready for? What would it look like to take one step toward it this week, without waiting for certainty?
The gap between people who follow their calling and people who don't is almost never about ability, but rather permission. What permission are you withholding from yourself, and what are you actually afraid will happen if you stop waiting?
God tends to speak through the people who know you best, the things you keep returning to, and the doors that open without you pushing them. Which of those three is speaking most clearly to you right now and what is it saying?
Bishop's Bulletin Article Link = https://sfcatholic.org/bishopsbulletin/called-to-coach-using-gods-gifts-to-guide-our-youth/