For many leaders, success becomes a destination. For Wayne Williams, it became a detour. In his new book, Grab Another Gear, the entrepreneur, coach and business leader draws on the world of cycling to explore what happens when life forces us to shift direction — whether through failure, transition, loss or unexpected opportunity. Williams knows that terrain firsthand. After watching a company once valued at more than $1.4 billion unravel during the dot-com crash, he was forced to confront questions far deeper than revenue or achievement. In this conversation, he reflects on identity beyond accomplishment, the challenge of releasing control, the power of community and why the life we’re meant for often begins just beyond the gear we’re afraid to shift into.
Your book uses bike-racing metaphors to explore life transitions. Which race moment or gear-shift from your own life best illustrates the book’s central message, and how did it change your direction?
The hardest gear-shift of my life started with a phone call from my investment banker.
It was the day before Thanksgiving 2000. A month earlier, everything looked bright — we were heading toward $275 million in revenue, 2,300 employees across six operations around the world, a valuation north of $1.4 billion, and an IPO in front of us. Then the dot-com bomb hit. Subscription prices fell off a cliff. Order rates dropped. Cancellations poured in. Over the next twenty-four months, our employee base went from 2,300 to 500, and revenue fell from $275 million to $60 million. More than once that season, I found myself in bed in the fetal position — not wanting to get up.
That’s not a story I tell to sound dramatic. I tell it because it’s where I learned the difference between coasting and driving. For years I’d had my identity wrapped up in that business — it was my thing, the place I’d poured my energy and my ambition into, and the people. When I finally sold it in 2017, a third-generation family business, the valuation was nowhere near what it had been at the top. A mentor looked me in the eyes and asked, “How embarrassed are you going to be to sell for so much less than you once expected?” I didn’t hesitate: “I’m not embarrassed at all. Because I’m not living for my peers.”
That was the shift. The track hadn’t changed — I had. I’d spent years thinking the goal was to protect the people, the numbers, the valuation, the version of myself that had built it. Losing most of it forced me to find out who I was apart from it. That’s the central message of the book: the life you were meant for is just beyond the gear you’ve been afraid to shift into. Grabbing another gear didn’t mean grinding harder to win the IPO back. It meant releasing my grip on what I’d built and discovering I was still here, still whole, still called — just no longer coasting on a single gear and calling it a life.
You encourage readers to examine “tracks” they’re running and to downshift or let go. What framework or first step do you recommend for someone who feels maxed out but can’t yet see which tracks to release?
My wife Terina once asked me, point blank, “How many tracks are you on?” I couldn’t answer it cleanly, and that was the answer. When you can’t name all of your courses or your tracks, you’re not driving them — they’re driving you.
So the first step isn’t to cut anything. It’s to SEE – Scan Evaluate Execute. Most maxed-out people try to solve overwhelm by subtracting before they’ve made the full list visible — and they cut the wrong thing. Write down every track you’re actually running: every role, commitment, and lane you’re responsible for. Get it on paper where you can look at it.
Then run each one through a single filter from the book: Could doesn’t mean should. Being good at something does not make it your assignment. We remain on good tracks out of competence, habit, and the quiet fear of disappointing people — and competence is the most dangerous reason of all, because it never feels like a problem.
Once it’s visible, sort each track into one of two piles: a mountain or a hill. Mountains are non-negotiable — tied to your convictions, your family, and your calling. Hills are preferences — good, but not load-bearing. You don’t have to release a single thing in that first sitting. You just have to stop pretending every track is a mountain. The moment you can see which ones are hills, the downshift stops feeling like loss and starts feeling like clarity. And remember — grabbing another gear doesn’t always mean accelerating. Sometimes it means braking on purpose or eliminating a track.
The book includes many reflective “Gear Check” questions. Which single reflective question has produced the biggest breakthrough for people you’ve coached, and why?
One question opens more people than any other: “What do the people closest to you see that you’re avoiding?”
It works because it does an end-run around our self-talk. I engaged a coach 15 years ago to access my mirror gear. They asked me a question that I had the answer to deep in my head. I let the answer flow out and went, “Wow!” We have the answers inside most of the time; we just need someone to engage our mirror gear and unearth it. Most of us are fluent at narrating our own lives in the most flattering, most defensible terms. We know the script. But that question doesn’t ask what you think — it asks what your spouse, your business partner, your kids, and the people in the passenger seat already know and have maybe been trying to tell you. Almost everyone goes quiet because they already know the answer. They’ve known it for a while. They’ve just been driving past it.
In the book I call this the difference between watching the dashboard and watching the road. Plenty of leaders stay glued to the controls — the metrics, the routines, the rearview — and call it leadership. It isn’t. That’s maintenance. That’s going historical. The people closest to us are looking through the windshield at our lives, and they can see the obstacle we’ve trained ourselves not to. The breakthrough isn’t new information. It’s permission to stop avoiding what you already half-know — and the relief, almost every time, is enormous.
You write about stewardship and succession — releasing control so others can grow. What are the hardest practical steps someone must take to move from controlling to stewarding well?
The first and hardest step is internal: accept that you’re a steward, not an owner. Nothing you’ve built is ultimately yours to keep — the business, the title, and even being a parent are seasons you’re entrusted with, not a possession. That sounds simple. It’s brutal in practice, because most of us have quietly fused our identity to the thing we’re holding. Letting go of control feels like letting go of self.
The second step is to release early — before you’re forced to. I’ve watched families and boards cling to the founder’s old blueprint long after it stopped working. I call it Dead Founder Syndrome: “But this is how Grandpa did it.” Grandpa’s been gone for years, yet he’s still gripping the wheel from beyond the grave, and the next generation can’t innovate because no one’s allowed to deviate. The memory becomes a cage instead of a compass.
Third, stay in the passenger seat. The picture I use is a driving instructor: present, ready to offer guidance — but letting them make the actual moves behind the wheel and feel the heat of the turn. That means resisting the urge to grab the wheel the first time they brake differently than you would. Their job is to run their strengths, not your old playbook.
I’m walking a leader through exactly this right now. He’s a generous, capable man who, by his own honest admission, has always defaulted to productivity over relationship — wired to execute the task rather than build the team. When key people resigned while he was away, he came home to empty offices and a hard mirror. The work we’re doing isn’t about competence; he has plenty. It’s about learning to build a team rather than just execute tasks — to lead collaboratively instead of carrying it all. He told me he feels like Jekyll and Hyde, caught between caring for people and holding them accountable. That tension is the exact crucible where controlling becomes stewarding. You don’t resolve it by gripping tighter. You resolve it by trusting people enough to let them carry real weight.
Control is like a closed fist. Nothing can be handed to a closed fist — but an open hand is a release that allows others to give you a gift back — often for the first time in your life.
Which is why the last step is the quiet one: do your own identity work first. If your self-worth is fused to what you do, you’ll never release control cleanly — every handoff will feel like a small death. Release others to find their own gear, but only after you’ve found who you are apart from the wheel.
The book addresses identity beyond roles and achievements. How did you personally navigate rebuilding identity when outward success didn’t match inner fulfillment?
I had mastered one gear — the vocational one — and assumed that meant the whole engine was healthy. It’s an easy lie to believe when the outward metrics are good. But I started asking a harder question: what will it feel like in my final days if all my energy went toward outward achievement while the deeper gears — faith, family, health, purpose — sat idle?
The rebuild started with honesty in the mirror. I had to separate my core identity from my roles — the engine (my soul) from the paint job (my appearance). Achievement is paint: real, visible, and not the thing that moves you. Underneath the CEO, the builder, the provider, there had to be a person who was still someone if all of it were stripped away. For a while I wasn’t sure there was. That’s the uncomfortable middle of identity work, and you can’t skip it.
Two things carried me through it. The first was learning to release in order to rediscover — letting go of old identities that were familiar but limiting, even ones I was good at, to find out what was actually real underneath. The second was anchoring to convictions that don’t move when the circumstances do. I stopped letting outward success be the magnet that pulled me around and started letting conviction be the compass that pointed me. The fulfillment didn’t come from achieving more. It came from getting the order right — internal before external, who I am before what I do. That order is the spine of the whole book, and I had to live it before I could write it.
I had to go through my own valley of the shadow of death in order to till old sold and let new nutrients into my life.
You emphasize community engagement and moving beyond convenience. For busy professionals, what practical habits produce the most meaningful community impact?
Start with a mindset shift I call moving from ROI to ROR — return on investment to return on relationships. Busy professionals are trained to measure everything by efficiency and yield. Community doesn’t run on that math. The relationships that change you and change a place are almost never the convenient ones, and they rarely show up on a spreadsheet. You have to decide, on purpose, to measure differently.
Then name and retire the excuse of busyness. For years it’s easy to say no to deeper involvement — work, kids, exhaustion. Those are real. But the excuses thin out, and the honest question becomes: what now? The easy route is self-indulgence — “haven’t I earned the right to take it easy?” The better route is to press forward into people, not pull back from them.
The most practical habit I know is what I call the second hour. Most of us try to get all our connecting done in the first hour — the catching up, the updates, the surface. But the first hour is just the warm-up. It’s in the second hour that people actually go deeper. At our place, Petty Creek Mountain Ranch, that usually happens around the fire — a couple of guys, a cigar, no agenda, the conversation slowing down until somebody finally says the thing they came to say. You can’t schedule that into a thirty-minute coffee. It only shows up when you give it room and refuse to rush off to the next thing.
Stack a few small, stubborn habits on top of that: open your table and your calendar to more than just you; build at least one relationship with someone who doesn’t look like you, think like you, or share your experience; and create plain, unglamorous spaces where people make something together. At the ranch I’ve watched this with the simplest container — invite people to do real, hands-on work. Run the sawmill. Operate the excavator. Most have never touched any of it, and that shared, slightly awkward, hands-dirty work builds more genuine community in a weekend than years of convenient socializing. Real relationships get built when we step beyond convenience — and then stay long enough for the second hour.
