Episode 6: Feeling It All and the Courage to Respond Instead of React

In this episode of Courage Is Built Here, Justine opens Pathway One: Feel It All, which starts with clarifying your values and learning how to feel your feelings well. Values are your deep roots. They shape how you spend your time, what you tolerate, what breaks your heart, and how you love and lead. Feel It All invites you to move from reacting out of emotion to responding from your values.

Justine welcomes her longtime friend and client, Meg Brown, Chief Operating Officer at Cambridge Air Solutions in St. Louis. Meg has walked the full Courage curriculum multiple times and has been practicing this work in her leadership and family life for years. She and Justine have partnered through challenging team work and personal seasons, and Meg brings a grounded, lived perspective to Pathway One.

Meg shares a recent story about parenting teenagers, missed curfew, and getting completely hooked in fear. She talks honestly about losing access to her thinking brain, reacting from anxiety, and then doing the courageous work of circling back, owning her part, and sharing what was really going on inside her. They reflect on how powerful it is when parents apologize, repair, and model emotional responsibility for their kids.

From there, the conversation moves into values versus virtues and what it means to live a values consistent life. Meg’s core values are unconditional love and courage, which align closely with Cambridge’s values of unconditional love with high expectations. She and Justine talk about business as a force for good, how Cambridge has operationalized values into concrete behaviors, and what it looks like to ask team members to extend benefit of the doubt even when relationships are strained.

Meg also shares the less glamorous side of courage. For much of her career, she saw courage as being the tip of the spear, always out on the edge taking bold risks. Through this work, she has learned that courage for her now often looks like being soft instead of strong, quiet instead of loud, patient instead of pushing. Sometimes her “feel it all” is recognizing that she is tired and needs to rest instead of being the one who speaks first.

The episode closes with Meg’s story of discerning whether to step into the COO role. Once she clarified her purpose, which weaves together her values of unconditional love and courage, the decision suddenly became clear. That alignment between values, purpose, and leadership shaped not only her career path, but how she shows up every day for her team and her family.

Key Takeaways

• Pathway One, Feel It All, begins with naming and living from your values as the deep roots of who you are.
• When you do not feel your feelings, they tend to drive reactive behaviors like people pleasing, overworking, numbing, or shutting down.
• Repairing with your kids and owning your mistakes as a parent is an act of courage that builds connection and trust.
• Practicing this work does not always make it easier, but it does strengthen your “bounce” so you recover and circle back more quickly.
• Self compassion and unconditional love toward yourself are essential if you want to feel it all without drowning in shame.
• Values are the behaviors you choose to live by every day, while virtues can be seen as the outcomes and atmosphere created when those values are practiced over time.
• Business can be a force for good when organizational values are clearly defined, behaviorally described, and practiced across the company.
• Unconditional love and high expectations can coexist, allowing people to be fully seen and still called to growth.
• Courage is not only bold, visible action. Sometimes it is quiet, patient, and expressed through rest, waiting, and not pushing before people are ready.
• Clarifying your purpose and values can bring surprising clarity to big career decisions and how you show up as a leader.

About the guest

Meg Brown is the Chief Operating Officer at Cambridge Air Solutions, a St. Louis based manufacturing company committed to being a force for good in the world. She is a values driven leader who believes work can help people go home better as parents, partners, and community members. Meg is married and the mom of four boys, and she is passionate about practicing unconditional love and courage in both her home and her leadership.

Connect with Meg

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meg-brown-4035201