The Gold in What We Hide
By Danny Gutknecht
After my first day of kindergarten, my teacher pulled my mother aside to discuss an unusual incident. Throughout the day, she noticed I was walking slowly and on the outsides of my feet. When she pulled me aside to investigate, she discovered my secret: I had hidden chocolate chip cookies in my cowboy boots. Of course, the longer the cookies were in my boots, the further they fell - eventually filling the bottoms of my boots with crumbs. Which caused me to walk sideways all day to protect my stash.
When we are children, somewhere between one and two years of age, a radiant vibrant energy emerges. Language begins to shine a bright light on the dawn of our personality’s bright potential. But one day we start to see that adults don’t seem to like parts of our bright energetic selves. “Settle down, stop being so loud,” “You’re too much right now,” “Good children don’t get angry over such things.” We learn very quickly to hide the parts of ourselves that the adults don’t like in what poet Robert Bly calls the “the long bag we drag.”
But what we put in the bag isn’t always cookies we sneaked from the cabinet—sometimes it’s feelings or parts of ourselves. By high school, our bag is already heavy, and we’re not just hiding from adults, but from our peers as well. Our personalities take on a strange walk, weighed down by the contents of this bag, or the crumbs in our shoes. Psychologists call these “adaptive patterns” our blind spots—because by adulthood, we’ve often forgotten what we’ve hidden. These parts sink into the unconscious.
We all carry different bags: personal, cultural, national, relational. Why do we hide? To protect ourselves from rejection, control what others see, and preserve our sense of belonging. Social groups, companies, and cultures carry bags too. The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung called these unseen parts of ourselves the shadow. We often see our shadow in others—projecting our hidden qualities onto them. When we fall in love, it’s frequently the hidden good in ourselves we see in another. When we feel irritation, it’s often traits we’d rather reject than claim as our own.
Here’s the paradox: the “bag” of hidden parts isn’t just a burden—it contains real gold. This disowned self is a reservoir of our full humanity, holding not only our flaws and fears but also untapped empathy, hidden genius, and a greater capacity to connect with others. Our shadow carries our “largeness”—the richness of contradiction and the possibility of transformation.
We’ve seen this in organizations everywhere: teams that can’t access their creative potential because innovation feels ‘too risky,’ leaders who’ve hidden their vulnerability so long they can’t connect authentically with their people, companies that have collectively ‘bagged’ their capacity for honest feedback and bold vision.
This is what the Perfect Day exercise reveals. Everyone at Crossroads knows there’s untapped potential here—and often the most valuable parts are hidden in the bag. The question is: are you ready to help dig them out?
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