When Hard Things Become Your Best Teacher: What an ALS Diagnosis Taught This Leader About Resilience
Here's what most leaders don't realize until they're facing it: the crisis you're unprepared for doesn't ask permission. It just arrives. And when it does, everything you thought you knew about yourself gets tested in ways you never expected.
David Betts learned this on December 1st.
He's a theater-trained consultant who spent twenty-two years at Deloitte building healthcare transformation practices across twenty states. He cycled competitively. He climbed the French Alps. He did Ironmans. He'd built a career most people would consider successful, stable, planned.
Then came an ALS diagnosis.
What's remarkable isn't his response to the news. It's what he said to a colleague immediately after:
"I think I've been preparing for this fight."That single sentence tells you everything about the kind of person who builds things that matter when everything changes.
The Mistake Leaders Make: Avoiding Discomfort
Most leaders build their careers to avoid hard things. They optimize for comfort. They minimize risk. They create systems where uncertainty stays at arm's length. Then, when a real crisis arrives, they have no framework for handling it.
David did the opposite.
Before his diagnosis, he spent years deliberately pushing his body to the limit. Not for external validation. Just because he believed—genuinely believed—that hard things made you grow. So he rode his bike across Britain. He tackled monument climbs in Europe. He pushed himself to the edge of what was physically possible.
"I did hard things because they were hard," he says in our conversation, "and because hard things remind you that you're human. They teach you where your limits are."
Here's what changes when you know your limits: you stop being afraid of failing. You know what failure looks like. You've already survived it multiple times.
When the ALS diagnosis came, David didn't panic about capability. He'd already tested his resilience. He already knew he could push through things that seemed impossible. The hard things weren't wasted effort. They were training for the moment he couldn't have predicted.
What leaders miss is this: you can't build resilience in a crisis. You build it before the crisis arrives.
Why Your Organization Lacks Belonging (And What Actually Fixes It)
Most companies think communication is about transmission. A message goes from leadership down to employees. Information gets delivered. Check the box. Move on.
David spent years in patient experience research learning something different: communication without story is just noise. Story is where connection actually lives.
That insight became dangerous when combined with something personal.
He met a family in Montana. Darren was living with ALS. He had two young kids. One of them had never heard her father tell her a bedtime story in his own voice. Maybe never would.
David had built Talk to Me Goose—an app to help people with speech-limiting disabilities communicate. It solved the logical problem. Text prediction. Efficiency. But it missed the human problem entirely.
So David spent his entire 2025 vacation building one feature: a storytelling function. For one family. So a father could tell his daughter a story in his own voice.
That's when everything shifted.
"I couldn't get it out of my head," he told Foster. "Communication without story is just transmission. Story is where connection lives. Story is how you tell people they matter."
Now he's building Storyflight Labs around that principle. The technology uses classical narrative structure—Aristotle married to Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey—combined with Socratic questioning to help people tell their own stories. In ninety seconds to three minutes, someone can create a personalized narrative they might otherwise never get to tell.
The business applications are staggering. Organizations struggling with turnover. Teams lacking trust. Employees who don't feel seen. When someone tells their story in a workplace—when they're actually heard—self-efficacy increases. Emotional resilience builds. Belonging climbs.
The companies that figure this out stop losing people. Because people don't leave jobs. They leave stories where they don't see themselves.
The Morning Ritual That Changes How You Lead
David has a daily practice most leaders would benefit from stealing.
Every morning, he stands at the top of the stairs and takes inventory. One day, he won't be able to use those stairs anymore. He'll need the elevator instead. Today is not that day. But he doesn't assume tomorrow. He decides: What am I going to do with today? What actually matters?
Then, before he goes back upstairs at night, he asks himself the question his father posed at the dinner table decades ago: "What did you learn today?"
Not what did you accomplish? What did you learn?
This is where most leaders miss the point about intentionality. They talk about it in meetings. They schedule it on their calendars. Then they let the day happen to them anyway.
David doesn't have that luxury. When time becomes visible—when you know it's finite in a way most people never contemplate—you start making different choices. You stop filling your day with things that don't move you forward. You stop deferring what matters.
The morning ritual isn't philosophical. It's practical. It's the difference between leading reactively and leading with purpose.
What Gets Built When Someone Leans Into the Hard Thing
David has ALS. He's also actively involved in ALS research advocacy. He travels internationally. He's building two companies. He asks better questions every night because he's forcing himself to stay intentional every morning.
He's not waiting for a breakthrough to live his life. He's not deferring his presence.
Resilient leaders have tested themselves before crisis. They know their limits. They know how to be afraid and do it anyway. They know that hard things aren't obstacles to avoid—they're the only way to actually grow.
David figured that out on a bike across Britain. He's proving it now, every morning, at the top of the stairs. And he's building products for other people who need to know the same thing.
Listen to the Full Conversation
David Betts spent twenty-two years transforming healthcare systems. Then an ALS diagnosis forced him to ask a better question: what if the hard things I've already done were preparation for this?
In two episodes of Step Wise, David and Foster dig into why doing hard things now is the best insurance against the ones you don't see coming. Why story—not just communication—is what actually changes organizations. Why intentionality isn't optional when your time becomes finite. And why a father telling his daughter a bedtime story in his own voice changed everything about what David decided to build.
More About David Betts
David Betts is founder and board chair of Story Flight Labs, a public benefit corporation building technology that helps people living with speech-limiting disabilities and conditions tell their own stories. He's a retired principal at Deloitte, where he spent over twenty-one years in healthcare transformation. He's also a former professor of theater at Carnegie Mellon University.
When diagnosed with ALS in December 2024, he stepped back from consulting to focus on what mattered: accessibility, storytelling, and building organizations where people actually feel like they belong.
You can follow David on LinkedIn or Instagram (@debetts_berg), where he shares travel photography and reflections on time, intentionality, and what matters when everything shifts.
Continue the Conversation
What does resilience actually look like when you're building it on purpose?
If this landed for you—if you heard something that made you think differently about hard things, story, or what you're preparing for without knowing it—share it with someone who needs to hear it.
Set the table. Invite cool people. Magic happens.
—Foster