Your Thursday Three Things for May 21, 2026.
Who are you when it all gets taken away? Dennis Connors on vulnerability, the “push through” ceiling, and nine months of relearning how to walk
I was on a meditation retreat when this one was recorded. Will held things down. And from everything that came out of the conversation he had with Dennis Connors, I’m glad someone was there to catch it.
Will opened with the question that frames the whole thing: “Who are you when everything you’ve built your identity on gets taken away?” For Dennis this was his life, twice over.
The short version: junior rock climber competing for the US national team. US Marine. Counterintelligence and human intelligence officer supporting special operations, running interrogations across 3 combat tours in Iraq. Multiple TBIs, none diagnosed at the time because the mentality was zero-to-one: you’re either fine or you’re in a body bag. Then PTSD severe enough that he was hallucinating an Iraqi boy in the street, an asset’s son whose fate he never knew.
Then March 2018: a plan to end it. His wife caught something in something he said, turned on the lights, and he broke open. Then a second stroke in 2020, partial paralysis on his left side, 9 months relearning how to walk. And on the other side of all of it: 2-time UCI Paracycling World Champion, 8-time US National Champion, and a Silver Medalist at the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games. Going for gold in LA 2028.
Here’s what came out of the conversation.
The “push through” mentality has a ceiling.
Dennis’s Marine t-shirt said it plainly: pain is weakness leaving the body. His early leaders told him getting hurt was part of the job. Just be tough. None of his TBIs got diagnosed until after he left the military, because toughing out was the only available category. Zero to one. Fine or in a body bag. No middle ground.
That mentality has a use and it has a cost. Dennis spent years of civilian life sleeping 2 to 3 hours a night, telling himself he was fine. He was proud of how little sleep he needed. By 2018, the PTSD was bad enough that he was seeing a boy playing chalk in the middle of a busy road, a hallucination built from guilt he had no language to hold. The body had been keeping a tally the whole time. The tally just hadn’t been paid yet.
Vulnerability isn’t about disclosing weakness.
When most men hear “be vulnerable,” the picture they get is confessing every insecurity to a room. Dennis says that’s not what vulnerability is. Vulnerability is having the courage to tell somebody something that either they need to hear, or that you need to say out loud. He calls it opening a conversational gate. Once the gate is open, you can step through it. And so can the other person.
He used a frame from intelligence work. You can run all the ops, do all the collection, get the exact nugget that changes everything. But if you can’t communicate it to the people who need it, it is 100% worthless. That’s his working definition of vulnerability as a skill: it’s the communication mechanism. The intel means nothing if it stays inside.
Self-worth and self-love run on different fuel.
Dennis draws a line between the two. Self-worth in most men is tied to the outside: the performance, the title, the physical capacity, the results. When those things get stripped, the self-worth goes with them. He’s been in that collapse twice. Once when the military identity ended and he couldn’t talk about what he’d done or who he’d worked with. Once when the second stroke took his ability to ride a bike, the one thing that had been keeping him together.
The shift came from a question he sat with in therapy after finally telling his friends everything. They’d just held him and said: Dennis, we love you no matter what. And what he kept coming back to: how can they love me for just being who I am, but I can’t love myself for the same reason? That asymmetry is where the work started.
Community is biological.
Dennis said it plainly: we are biological community. A human with zero help probably doesn’t survive. Finding community isn’t optional for long-term performance or long-term anything. The question is finding the right one.
He tried a mommy-and-me class at Nike when he was a stay-at-home dad. Eight weeks. Every week he stuck it out, and every week the conversation had nothing to do with him. He was honest enough with himself to say: this is a great community for someone. That someone isn’t me. The community that actually changed things was built around a shared passion, cycling and veterans, not just a shared category. And it was those people who finally said: Dennis, you know you ride like you have balance issues, right? Which led to the diagnosis. Which led to the paracycling eligibility. Which led to Paris.
The right community sees you more clearly than you can see yourself. That’s the thing Dennis kept coming back to.
The full episode is up now. Audio: pod.fo/e/41878f. Video is available on Spotify now and will be on the Valor Media Network YouTube channel later today, Thursday May 21.
This week’s newsletter has 3 practical tools below: the conversational gate practice, the funeral list exercise, and a reframe on tying identity to the journey instead of the result.
Quick word on the A2A course.
If your attention feels stolen most days, this is for you. The Awareness to Action course is live right now. Will and I built it for the people running hard, leading teams, and feeling like their brain is in seventeen places at once.
12 modules. Built-in videos, guided meditations, extra resources, and podcast episodes paired to each lesson. Full year of access, so you go at your pace. And you’re not doing it alone: there’s a real community in there, and live calls with me and Will.
2 ways in: text MTM to 33777, or head to focusnowtraining.com/a2a-course.
We’ve got a live webinar on May 27th at noon ET. Come ask questions and see what we built. And if you sign up within 48 hours of that webinar, you get 40% off the annual subscription. Here’s that link too:
