Alyssa Liu didn’t come back to figure skating because she had unfinished business.

She came back because she missed it.

That’s the part that gets glossed over in the highlight reels. Everyone wants to talk about the gold medal, the comeback narrative, the technical brilliance. But what Alyssa kept saying was something so simple it almost didn’t register:

I was having fun.

That’s it. That was her answer.

She’d walked away from the sport because something inside her went quiet. The joy she’d started with got buried under a mountain of expectation, judgment, and the relentless pressure to perform the right way.

When she came back, her coaches told her it couldn’t be done. People don’t come back! 

She went back anyway. On her own terms. Every step of the way.

What she wore. What her routine looked like. Which moves she chose because they lit her up. 

She returned to the reason she picked up a pair of skates in the first place, and she refused to let anyone take that from her again.

And then she did something even more impossible.

She won.

But she didn’t just win a gold medal. She showed everyone watching that it was possible to walk into one of the most judgment-saturated environments on the planet and come out more yourself than when you went in.

She became one of the most beloved leaders on the planet not by being the most technically perfect — but by being the most alive.

That’s what people respond to. Not the résumé. The radiance.

That’s the thing about untamed leadership. 

It doesn’t ask you to have all the answers. It doesn’t ask you to show up with a ten-point plan or a polished persona or certainty about what comes next.

It asks you to be rooted enough in your own why that you can stay present — really present — even when everything around you is noise, judgment, and a scoring system designed to rattle you.

The environments most of us lead in aren’t so different from that rink.

The metrics. The optics. The voices that tell you how it’s supposed to look, how you’re supposed to sound, whether you’re winning or losing by someone else’s measure. The quiet, constant pressure to shape yourself to fit something that was never built for you.

Most of us learned early to go quiet in those environments.

Not because we had nothing to express — but because expressing it felt dangerous. 

We did the math. We learned which version of ourselves got rewarded, and we shaped ourselves accordingly.

Alyssa Liu did that math too. And then she decided the math was wrong.

This conversation came up in Season 3, Episode 1 of Untamed Leader — where Brian Perry turned the mic on me and we got into what untamed leadership actually looks like from the inside. Listen on Apple podcasts, or watch on YouTube.