I've been thinking about transformation this week.
When I was little, I loved catching lizards. Blue-bellied lizards. Alligator lizards. If it darted across a rock, I was probably chasing after it.
I also believed I possessed a remarkable gift. If I gently turned a blue-bellied lizard onto its back and rubbed its stomach, it would fall asleep in my hands. At least that's what feral six-year-old me believed.
Then one afternoon, something unexpected happened.
I caught one, and its tail came off.
I remember running to my mom in tears.
"I broke it," I cried. "We have to save it."
Without missing a beat, she smiled and said, "Don't worry. It'll grow back."
I stared at her.
She was obviously lying.
My mother wasn't someone who lied to me. She was honest—and a rule follower. But I knew this couldn't be true because she only had one hand. Part of her right arm had been amputated after a horrific car accident when she was a little girl.
I had grown up with one simple certainty.
Arms don't grow back.
She laughed when I pointed this out.
"That's true," she said. "They don't. If only we had tails."
I've thought about that conversation many times over the years.
Not because of the lizard.
Because of what it reveals about us.
Reptiles regenerate what they lose. They shed their skin, detach their tails, and grow them back. It's part of their design. They don't question the process. They simply follow their nature.
Humans are different.
We spend much of our lives trying to transform ourselves.
Perhaps that's why the language of transformation became so compelling. Entire industries have been built around the promise of becoming someone new. A better leader. A stronger entrepreneur. A more confident version of ourselves. Even coaching, for a time, became almost synonymous with transformation. The assumption was that growth meant becoming someone different than the person standing here today.
I understand that language because I once spoke it too.
But the older I've become, the less convinced I am that transformation is what most people are truly seeking.
The people I've spent my life working alongside rarely wanted to become someone else.
They wanted the freedom to become more fully themselves.
Not the version shaped by fear.
Or performance.
Or other people's expectations.
But the quieter, steadier person they sensed they were capable of becoming all along.
There is an important difference.
Transformation often begins with dissatisfaction. It quietly suggests that who we are today is insufficient, and that fulfillment lies somewhere on the other side of reinvention.
Formation asks something entirely different.
It asks who we are becoming.
Not what image we're creating.
Not what credentials we're collecting.
Not how convincingly we can perform the life we hope others believe we have.
But whether the person beneath all of it is being shaped into someone capable of carrying what has already been entrusted to them.
I've started wondering if this is why so much external success fails to produce the peace we expected it would.
Achievement changes our circumstances.
Formation changes us.
One can happen remarkably quickly.
The other requires a lifetime.
Perhaps that's why formation receives so little attention.
It's quieter.
Less dramatic.
Impossible to measure from the outside.
And yet it's the very thing that gives meaning to everything else we pursue.
The lizard never had to decide whether to grow its tail back.
It simply followed its nature.
We have been given something far more mysterious.
Perhaps the deepest work of a life isn't transformation at all.
Perhaps it's the patient work of participating in our own formation—becoming more capable of carrying what has already been entrusted to us.