Lindsay Leahy has been building things her whole life. A sales career. A movement, really, more than a business. A book. A community of people who are doing the hard, brave work of living and leading with intention.
And then, at the absolute height of all of it, she felt something shift.
She didn’t know what it was at first. It came as a word: beyond. And then as a phrase that kept surfacing during prayer, a mashup of two Bible verses that isn’t technically in Scripture but felt, to her, like a direct message: “Lay down your nets and follow me.”
What followed is the kind of story I didn’t know I needed to hear until I was sitting across from her (on Zoom!) recording it.
The Book, the Bestseller Lists, and the Two Dark Weeks Nobody Talks About
If you’ve been following Lindsay’s work, you know that Take It All Apart came out in October 2024 and hit the USA Today bestseller list…twice! What you might not know is what happened in the two weeks before the launch.
Lindsay describes it as a dark period. Fear. Nerves. The weight of having put personal stories into print, stories that involved other people she cared about, and the very real question of whether she had honored them well. All of it hit at once, right when it was time to go public.
“It was such a healing experience,” she told me. “I mean, it was terrible, and it was terrifying. But it freed me from another layer of needing other people’s validation, another layer of caring about what people think.”
That freedom, she says, ended up being the whole point. Not the bestseller lists. Not the sales numbers. The healing.
Since then, the ripple effect has been real. Client stories are coming back. People are thinking differently, leading differently, parenting differently. And Lindsay has built an ecosystem around the book: workbooks, small group discussion guides, a virtual workshop series featuring the clients who have actually done the work. The process inside the book (connection, intention, action) has become the throughline for everything.
The Word That Changed the Year: Beyond
Every year, Lindsay does a word of the year. This year’s word came early, arriving in the summer of 2025 instead of the fall. The word was beyond.
“Beyond what?” was her first response. And she sat with it.
What emerged wasn’t a to-do list. It was a new way of thinking about expansion: not more, but different. Beyond the patterns that had been. Beyond busyness and hustle. Beyond fear and limiting beliefs. Beyond distraction. And eventually, beyond what she had built.
From that word came a whole writing series on her blog, Grit Gratitude and Grace, and it is so worth your time. She covers practical, tactical tools for each dimension of “beyond,” and I want to highlight a few of them here because this is the stuff I keep coming back to personally.
Beyond Stress and Distraction: The Tools That Actually Work
This is the one that got me. We live in an era with limitless opportunities for distraction. And a lot of us (hi, I see you, and I see myself) have trained ourselves to always have something running. A podcast on the walk. The TV on as background noise. The next thing queued up before the current thing is even finished.
Lindsay says moving beyond stress and distraction starts with two simple practices she uses almost every day:
First, the dumping exercise. Get everything out of your head and onto paper. What’s on your heart, your mind, your to-do list. What needs attention now, what can wait, what needs to go on a calendar. It sounds simple because it is, and it works because we are not meant to carry all of it in our heads.
Second, a basic inventory. What is stressing you out? Who and what are the inputs causing the noise? Be honest with yourself, and then start removing them.
The goal, she says, is simple: get your mind, heart, and body to a place of calm. Because that is where your own voice can speak. That is where clarity comes from. And the hard truth is that most of us want the answer without being willing to do the quieting that makes space for it to arrive.
Beyond Busyness and Hustle: A Worthiness Issue
Lindsay loves to hustle. She says it herself. She feeds on it. But what she has learned, partly through the discipline of taking a sabbatical every year, is that hustle has a shadow side: it becomes mindlessness. Busyness for the sake of busyness. Filling the calendar because a full calendar feels like proof of something.
Moving beyond that, she says, is ultimately a worthiness issue. Who are you when you’re not doing? When you’re not contributing? When the calendar is quiet and nobody needs you right this second?
The practical tools here: journaling about what success actually looks and feels like for you. Mapping the gap between what you say matters and how you’re actually spending your time. And then, the one that I think is the most uncomfortable, inviting yourself to sit with your own mortality. You have one life. Limited time. How do you want to use it?
She said something that stopped me cold: work becomes busyness when we can’t even name what the priorities are or what we’re trying to accomplish. And so many of us hand that responsibility over to someone else, a boss, a culture, a sense of obligation, and then wonder why we feel so depleted.
Lay Down Your Nets: The Transition Nobody Saw Coming
And then we get to the part of the conversation I couldn’t stop thinking about.
Lindsay had been a volunteer on a planning commission inside the Archdiocese of Dubuque. Through that work, she got to know the leadership team, including the archbishop. When a new position opened, Director of Leadership Formation, part of a larger reorganization, they invited her to apply. Kind of as a courtesy, she sensed. Knowing she had a thriving practice and probably wouldn’t want to leave it.
And God said: trust me, and go through the process.
So she did. She dusted off her resume (her words). She went through the interview. She came out of that first conversation, she told me, completely inspired. By the radical honesty of the leadership team. By their willingness to name where things were hard while holding real hope for what was possible. She said it is rare to find that combination, and she has been in a lot of rooms with a lot of leaders.
She went into adoration and prayer. On her knees, asking the question she couldn’t stop asking: “God, I don’t understand. You’ve given me all this success, and are you really asking me to surrender it right now when it feels so amazing?”
His answer, as she experienced it: I gave you all those opportunities and experiences to equip you and make you ready for this one.
She took the job.
Your Definition of Success Doesn’t Have to Look Like Anyone Else’s
When Lindsay told the people closest to her, she got two very different reactions. Some said this is a no-brainer. This job was made for you. Others said, honestly, that she was crazy. A pay cut? Surrendering control? Starting over?
And Lindsay’s response to that second group was the most Lindsay thing she could have said: your definition of success and mine don’t match up, and that’s okay.
This is the whole thread of Take It All Apart, lived out loud. The book asks you to go through a process of getting clear on your own values, your own definition of success, your own vision for your life. And what Lindsay is doing right now is exactly that: choosing what is hers, not what someone else handed her.
She said: I have never been more excited about what’s next, and I have no idea. And I have never been happier.
That’s the destination. Not certainty. Not control. Just alignment, trust, and a willingness to keep going even when the path is unclear.
Find Lindsay
You can follow Lindsay’s beyond series and all of her writing at gritgratitudeandgrace.com and on Substack. Her book, Take It All Apart, is available now in paperback, ebook, and audiobook. And if you want to keep up with what she’s building in this new chapter, find her on LinkedIn and at lindsayleahy.com (coming soon!). Listen now to our full interview in Episode 254 of The Found Podcast or her past episodes from September 2024 and November 2021.
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