The Beautiful Trap Behind Being Needed

BY JEN LOFGREN
In November 2019, I received my first WXN Entrepreneur award.

I remember feeling proud. I also remember feeling tired in a way that was harder to admit.

On paper, so much was working. I had a 12-year-old daughter, a thriving business, a full roster of executive coaching clients, a talented team of coaches, and meaningful board roles, including with the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. Incito was growing. My work mattered. People were calling. I was needed.

And yet, standing inside that success, I felt lonely.

Not ungrateful. Not unhappy. Just aware that the very thing I had worked so hard to build was becoming difficult to carry. I was proud of what existed, but I was also quietly worried about how I would keep it all going.

At the time, I did not have the language for what I know now. Being needed had given me purpose, success, and community. It had shaped much of my career and identity. But I was beginning to understand that being needed is not the same as belonging.

That realization came slowly, through exhaustion, decision fatigue, and the gradual loss of joy in things I deeply cared about.

I Had a Choice to Make

By DIANE CRAIG
A year after I started my business, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. He was 44 years old. Three months later, he was gone.

My son was 12. My daughter was seven. And suddenly, I was a single mother with a business I wasn’t sure I could sustain.

I had a choice to make. Do I go back and work for someone else? Or do I continue on the path I had just started? I chose to keep going.

Not because it was easy. But because it gave me the flexibility I needed to raise my children, and the belief that I could build something of my own.

When Loss Doesn’t Come Just Once

Four years later, I was away on business when I got a call. My daughter had been in a school bus accident. I flew home immediately. It was the longest flight of my life.

The next morning, the doctor told me there was no brain function left. She was 11 years old.

What It Took to Be Free

By MARSHA HERBERT
I wanted my daughter to be free.
And I wanted myself to be free too.

That thought stayed with me for a long time, long before I fully understood what it would take to get there.

Learning to Take Care of Myself Early

I came to Canada from Jamaica when I was 12, with my twin sister. We left our mom to live with our dad.

But things didn’t unfold the way we expected. One day, he told us we were moving to a smaller home. Then suddenly, he left. No warning. No conversation. Just gone.

By the time I was 16, I had made a decision. I left home. My sister followed.

I told her, you finish school—I’ll take care of us. So I did. I got an apartment. I worked full-time at a buffet restaurant. I figured it out as I went.

Use What You’ve Lived to Lift Someone Else

By AMANDA HAMILTON
When I think about the idea of using your voice to elevate others, I don’t think about a single moment. I think about everything that shaped me long before I knew I would need it.

I grew up in a small bungalow with one washroom and seven people. My grandparents, their four children, including my mother, and me. When people talk about “it takes a village,” I lived it.

It wasn’t always easy. Space was limited. Privacy was nonexistent. But what I gained from that environment was something I didn’t fully understand at the time: adaptability. And independence.

Learning to Navigate Change

By the time I finished school, I had attended more than 13 different institutions between Kindergarten and University. You don’t go through that without learning how to adjust quickly. How to read a room. How to start over, again and again.

I didn’t always thrive in change, but I learned how to move through it. And over time, that became a strength.

The Quiet Ways Courage Shows Up

By JACKELYN GILL
We tend to think of courage as something big.

A defining moment. A bold decision. A visible act.

But more often, it shows up quietly.

In the way you speak up.
In the way you keep going.
In the way you choose to show up, especially when it’s uncomfortable.

When we asked our Top 100 winners what courage looks like in practice, their answers weren’t dramatic.

They were lived.

Here’s what they shared.