The Coaches’ Chronicle is a recognition-driven editorial platform devoted to highlighting coaches and leaders who are sharing their work with depth, integrity, and heart.
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Doing It Scared: Mark J. Silverman on Recovery, Ghosts and the Peace Beyond Achievement
How one man's journey from homelessness to the C-suite became a lesson in leading from the inside out
By Jonathan Carroll, Coach & Founder | The Coaches' Chronicle™
Mark J. Silverman has been a quiet supporter of The Coaches' Chronicle™ for a while now, so it was a real pleasure to finally meet him. Mark is an executive coach to CEOs and senior leaders, the bestselling author of Only 10s, which has sold more than 75,000 copies, and the author of The Rising Leader Handbook. Long before any of that, he was a 27-year-old who arrived on his brother's doorstep in Washington, DC, weighing 135 pounds, broke and homeless.
What moved me most was his honesty. Mark speaks about addiction, recovery, a midlife collapse and a deepening spiritual practice with the same ease he once brought to closing multimillion-dollar deals, and he still admits to getting nervous before every interview. In our conversation, we talk about learning to do things scared, the ghosts that drive high achievers, why the nervous system always wins, and the peace he has found on the other side of proving himself.
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Little Old Homeless Me in a Hugo Boss Suit
Mark J. Silverman: After a couple of false starts, I got a job as a salesman. Picking up the phone and trying to call people and trying to sell was almost impossible for me. But when I figured out that it wasn't trying to sell them, but making a connection with people, the switch flipped. I started connecting with people and the connections turned into sales. I went from almost being fired to the number one sales guy in the organisation within two months. Then I got a job at another company selling another technology. Wound up doing the two biggest sales in the company's history.
They made me VP of sales, and now I'm making $120,000 a year. Then a friend of mine who worked at one of the big tech companies said, "Why don't you come work for me?" Now I'm making 250 a year. I go from this homeless guy to, my wife and I buy this house and I'm driving a sports car. From zero to 60. It was a bit of a whiplash, but it was every bit of the way just a little bit more.
Later on in my story you see the trauma that caused all the addiction that wasn't dealt with. Outside, my life was going good. Inside, there was still stuff that needed to come up, which tends to come up for us guys somewhere around 40 or 50. We've got to deal with that stuff that's underneath. And I didn't. So it blew up.
Jonathan Carroll: What did that period of your life teach you that you still use today in coaching the leaders that you coach?
Mark J. Silverman: That I can do anything scared. I've still not overcome fear. I am still scared all the time. I've done 800 of my own podcasts and hundreds of interviews, and I still get nervous. We're going to do this podcast and I'm a little nervous, right? I've never been able to get rid of that. What I have been able to do is learn how to be scared and go do something.
In the kind of tech that I sold, I had to speak to the CIO, the CTO, the whole C-suite. I'd have to bring my executives in and put those teams together. So little old homeless me, like inside here, had to show up in my Hugo Boss suit and put these people together and curate and quarterback these meetings. I would have the CEO of my company in my car and I would be coaching him on what I need him to do in the meeting in order to close this $5 million sale. All scared.
So when I became a coach, what I realized was all of these C-suite people are just people. What I noticed is middle managers are usually the roughest to deal with. Executives have learned a certain graciousness when they move up through the ranks. Even working at the Four Seasons, I waited on kings and queens and senators and presidents. So I've not been intimidated, because I coach people who are 100,000 times richer than I am, and it just doesn't mean anything.
Jonathan Carroll: So here you are bringing these executives, technical leads and stakeholders together to close multimillion-dollar deals. What did that teach you that you couldn't have learned elsewhere?
Mark J. Silverman: Personalities. Every book will tell you that you need to match people, match people's language, match people's cadence, their energy. I learned that naturally. I only learned afterwards that that's what I was doing, but I was able to connect with everybody on every level, know what every single person in the organisation needed, and know how to match them to get what they needed. That was a win-win-win in every situation.
Key Insight: "What I have been able to do is learn how to be scared and go do something."
Thinning Out Mark
Jonathan Carroll: You've spent decades in spiritual study and transformational work. Did that path begin with the recovery, and which practices that you've studied have stayed with you over time?
Mark J. Silverman: I read Autobiography of a Yogi in high school. I read Krishnamurti in my early 20s. I've always been attracted to the spiritual world. The spiritual and self-help kind of intertwined for me for years. Meditating and journaling have been with me since my crash and burn that led to me being a coach. That's a constant. I get up at 5:15 every morning, and have for a decade and a half, to meditate and journal every day. But the past few years, when I turned 60, is when I dove in in a very different way, in a very open way, in a very surrendered way. It's become probably the most important focus of my day-to-day life now. It's no longer, oh, I meditate in the morning. It's how I show up in my day, all day, every day, and how do I bring that through me as much as possible.
Jonathan Carroll: Is it something you need to actively focus on, or has it taken over who you be, so to speak?
Mark J. Silverman: Here's what I'll tell you. I used to be really sure of a lot of things. I was really sure of spirituality. I was really sure of good and bad. That broke apart. And now what I've learned is there is less and less Mark in everything I do. Mark gets in the way. Life knows better. You might call it God, you might call it life, you might call it consciousness.
It was actually Steve Hardison who started me on this over a decade ago. He introduced me to a thing called The Way of Mastery, which is somewhat of a continuation of A Course in Miracles. In The Way of Mastery there is a spirituality of thinning the ego, of thinning this personality of whoever you are. In my case, Mark J. Silverman. And that started me on this path of, I'm not going to add to Mark and make Mark better. I'm going to stop improving Mark and I'm going to start thinning out what Mark thinks he needs, what Mark is fearful of, the structures and beliefs that make Mark. And the more I thin that out, the lighter this existence gets, the more intuitive this existence gets.
I thought when I turned 60 and I did my first medicine journey that that was going to be a finite thing, and it's only gotten deeper and deeper and deeper. I've gotten every car I've ever wanted. I've gotten every job I've ever wanted. I'm basically Ariana Grande. And I've learned that there is nothing in this world, none of my desires, none of my goals, none of the things I could buy, none of my experiences will ever make me happy or fulfil me. I've come to the end of my rope of that. Existence isn't bleak. You can get nihilistic. But there's something more. What I learned by getting to the end of my rope is that there's an energy in life, something in life that's way more joyful, way more alive than anything I have ever tried to get from someplace else. I scuba dive. I'm happy while I'm scuba diving. Then I get out and I'm salty and I want to take a shower. This is something that is intangible and just beautiful and hard to explain.
Jonathan Carroll: Take us into this practice of thinning it out. What does that mean for you?
Mark J. Silverman: The hardest part is to not be the arbiter of good and bad and right or wrong. Letting go of being right for me was really hard. But mostly it's going down into the structures and the fears. And again, I'm a novice at this. I've talked for a long time in coaching about how everything we do is pretty much unconscious, from our fears, from our childhood. This personality is 90% robot. That's something we talk about in coaching all the time. But to find out how deep that actually goes, and how I can, as Mark, unravel this, I have to give myself to a teacher who can guide me through that. It's like jumping off of a cliff with no net, and then doing it every day, all day. For me to say, I don't know what God is, I don't know. I like being the guy who knows.
What's really nice is self-consciousness starts to fade away. Walking into a room wondering what people think, all that stuff just starts to thin out. And there's just a relationship with life that gets fuller and fuller each moment. All the clichés that I've been teaching in coaching all these years are becoming real for me. You're not in relationship with the world. You're in relationship with what you think about the world. I've said that a thousand times thinking I knew what it meant. And then I have an aha of, "Oh my god, that's what it meant." And then a week later going, "Oh, no, this is what that meant." It's super humbling, and it makes life so fresh and interesting.
Jonathan Carroll: I resonate with that deeply, the notion that we can intellectually or logically understand a phrase, a statement, a cliché, and then we can spiritually come to understand it in a different way. And even that understanding evolves over time because consciousness is infinite.
Mark J. Silverman: I started writing my new book. It was called All I Know So Far, and I had it almost written, and then I started on this. I was like, I can't write this book. I know less now than I did before. So that book is totally shelved.
Key Insight: "I'm going to stop improving Mark and I'm going to start thinning out what Mark thinks he needs."
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Only 10s and the Rising Leader
Jonathan Carroll: Your book Only 10s has sold more than 75,000 copies. For anyone who hasn't read it, what's the core idea and where did that come from?
Mark J. Silverman: When I first became a coach, my coach was Rich Litvin. When I had an asshole sales manager, getting things done was easy because I was afraid of being caught not doing things. When I went into business for myself, I couldn't get anything done because of the ADHD. And I would call Rich and I would go, "I can't get anything done." And he said to me, "Mark, when you wanted to run the Marine Corps Marathon, did you run the Marine Corps Marathon?" I said, "Yes." He said, "If a new iPhone comes out, do you get the new iPhone?" I'm like, "I'm first in line every time a new iPhone comes out." He goes, "So you can't get done what you want to get done is not true." And it clicked. I only do what I want to do. I don't do what I don't want to do.
I sat down to get a PhD in what's it like to be an entrepreneur with ADHD, and what I learned was that there were overlays again over everything. I didn't get to my stuff because of my overlay of being a people pleaser. It was more important to me to get the attaboy and the likes from other people by helping them with their stuff than getting my own stuff done. Everything on your to-do list has a qualifier, a reason it's there. You want to people please. You want an achievement. You don't want to look bad. You're trying to be all things to all people. As I picked off everything on my to-do list, the truth is the 10s were the things I want to do, the things that needed to be done, needed to be done today, and needed to be done today by me.
So I broke that down really small. On my whiteboard, there was usually only three things for me to get done that day, and then I could fuck off the rest of the day. I just had to get those three things done. And all of a sudden, I started getting so much done. I would get more than those three things done once I gave myself permission, because I also gave myself permission to do things I really wanted to do. Trust that intuition of I want to call that person, I want to start this project, I want to start a podcast. Only 10s sold 1,500 copies in its first day. I thought my mother and I would buy a copy. My ex-wife was like, "You don't have that many friends. Who's buying this book?" And that book just took off. I'm blessed. For a guy who has like a seventh grade reading comprehension to write some bestselling books is humbling.
Jonathan Carroll: Let's jump into the second book, The Rising Leader Handbook. For those that don't know, who's it for and what do you want readers to walk away with?
Mark J. Silverman: It's step by step how I coach. When I first get a client, I'm usually called by the CEO. It's usually a CEO says, "Mark, I got someone who needs help." So I want quick wins. First thing, how do you become a trusted advisor to your CEO? Second, leading across, leading on a team of other leaders. If you're on a leadership team, there's coopetition there. You want to all be rowing in the same direction, but you also want resources. You also want recognition. You also want your ideas to be heard. How do you play on a team in that way? Then there's leading your team, which we all coach on. And then there's leading yourself, which is how do you become the best version of yourself? So it's leading up, leading across, leading your team, and then leading yourself.
I wrote it for the C-suite executives that I coach. What we have found is that people are buying the book for first-time managers, first-time leaders, early leaders. We're selling four or 500 copies a month, and I thought, oh, I'm gonna be flush with C-suite clients. When we did the demographics, we're finding that it's been really, really useful to new leaders.
Jonathan Carroll: There's also a podcast of the same name, but that podcast has had an evolution. It has had three versions: Mastering Midlife, then Mastering Overwhelm, and now The Rising Leader. Has that progression mimicked your own journey?
Mark J. Silverman: It's totally been. Mastering Midlife was my passion project. What I saw when I first became a coach was us all destroying ourselves to be in the 1%, and also mostly men not listening to that little voice inside that says we want to be successful, but now we have to do it differently. Once you're 50 years old, things have to change. I'm 64. I can do anything a 35-year-old can do, but I need a freaking nap every day.
Then I was travelling all around the world doing my Mastering Overwhelm workshop, and that was going like crazy. So I said, "Why don't I match my branding to what I'm doing?" And then I quickly got really bored of being the Only 10s guy. I'm ADD. And then a friend of mine said, "Why don't you actually brand yourself for what you actually do for a living?" Which was coach C-suite executives. So then we switched all the branding to The Rising Leader. I've recently stopped The Rising Leader podcast because of that spiritual conversation we had before. I'm in an introverted exploration for now, to see what it is I want to do when I grow up.
Jonathan Carroll: You've interviewed a long list of thinkers, leaders and coaches. Is there one conversation or theme that changed how you coach and live today?
Mark J. Silverman: I would have to say Tom Mendoza. Tom Mendoza was the president of a company called NetApp. That was my first company where I became super successful, and he and I became friends way back then. I had Tom on my podcast a couple of times. He was the example of a leader that I held the standard for everybody I met. When you walk into a room, look for the person who's alone. We would go to these sales kickoffs, and this would be the president of the company, and he would walk in and there'd be 500 people in the room, and everybody would want to talk to him. And he would see someone standing by themselves over by the corner, and he would walk over and say, "Hi, I'm Tom Mendoza." That humility, that people-centred kind of person, was the standard I had for a leader.
Jonathan Carroll: That's such a great practice, to walk into a room, whether you're the CEO of a company or not, and you could be that person who changes their experience entirely.
Never Planned, Always Prepared
Jonathan Carroll: Mark, what's next for you? What are you most excited about right now?
Mark J. Silverman: The world is having its issues these days. My own personal life, though, is at its most peaceful it's ever been. Both my kids just got married. I have an entire Hawaiian ocean reef in my living room that I go sit in. Business has been phenomenal. This is again one of my best years ever. And my own spiritual development, my health, everything. It's just been so peaceful.
It was Rich Litvin who helped me settle into that. When we first did The Rising Leader, we were going to build it into a multibillion-dollar business and hire coaches and all that stuff. And he's like, "Do you really want that? How many clients do you have?" I said, "I have 12 clients." He goes, "How much do you make a year?" And I told him how much I make a year. He goes, "How many people in this room would kill for Mark's business?" And everybody raised their hand. And I was like, "Oh." He goes, "So why are you trying to build this thing?"
I've lost the drive to try and achieve something. I don't have to prove myself anymore. All of those things are gone. So every Monday I write my newsletter. I open a blank piece of paper and I put my hands on the keyboard and I wait, and I never know what it's going to be. Every Thursday morning, I take my camera out while I'm walking to the gym, and I never know what it's going to be. That's what the next phase of my career is going to be. I have no idea what's next. I'm just open to it all. Steve Hardison once told me, "Mark, I never plan a coaching session, but I'm always prepared." So I'm not planning the next chapter, but I'm totally prepared for whatever it is.
Jonathan Carroll: I love that. I was listening to Peter Sage speak recently about the levers of achievement versus fulfilment. So many high achievers are pushing on the achievement lever, hoping to extract fulfilment from it. So kudos to you for really milking the fulfilment from life, despite the great number of achievements you've already accomplished.
There's one final question I ask every coach on The Coaches' Chronicle™. If you had one piece of guiding advice for a new coach entering the industry today, what would it be?
Mark J. Silverman: It's changed so much. We've come full circle from The Prosperous Coach to building funnels and social media and all that stuff, and I think we've come all the way back to The Prosperous Coach, Steve Chandler and Rich Litvin. It's going to be relationships, relationships, relationships. I do not get clients from my podcast. I do not get clients from the thousands of books I sell. I do not get clients from my social media. They're all relationships I've built that have built a steady referral network. So build that network of people. Go out and meet people. Social media needs to be there for social proof. When someone is introduced to me and they look me up and they see I have bestselling books, that helps. But it's always the relationship.
Jonathan Carroll,
Coach & Founder | The Coaches’ Chronicle™
Jonathan Carroll is devoted to elevating the art and profession of coaching through depth, mastery, and conscious impact. As the Founder of The Coaches’ Chronicle™, he curates conversations that invite reflection, integrity, and a more mature expression of leadership within the coaching industry.
Through his work as a coach, author, facilitator, and strategic partner, Jonathan supports conscious leaders who feel called into greater alignment, coherence, and purpose. His approach emphasizes presence over performance, wisdom over tactics, and the long view of meaningful, sustainable expansion.
Jonathan’s work is rooted in energetic alignment, intuitive leadership, and an ongoing exploration of infinite possibility. He is particularly drawn to the intersection of time honoured mysteries and modern day mastery, where inner development and real-world leadership meet. Across all his work, Jonathan creates space for clarity, refinement, and a more grounded expression of what it means to lead in our modern world. Connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn
Read Jonathan's bestseller: Way of the Dragonfly: 101 Maxims for Leading a High Vibrational & Conscious Life
The Coaches' Chronicle is a monthly feature spotlighting one coach, one philosophy, and one meaningful conversation.