Stranger Things: Essence Is Named Before It Is Owned

Watching the finale of Stranger Things, I realized the story was never really about monsters, alternate dimensions, or nostalgia.

It was about something much more familiar.

It was about how often others know who we are before we do.

When I was a kid, we didn’t have many formal rites of passage. Yes, I had a Bar Mitzvah. And still, much of the deeper initiation into courage, identity, and belonging happened elsewhere.

What my friends and I had in the 1970s, before it became popular, was Dungeons & Dragons, a way of learning how to face the unknown together.

Looking back now, I can see that something important was happening at those tables. Not just imagination, but recognition.

We were seeing one another.

Essence Is Named Before It Is Owned

One of the most consistent patterns in Stranger Things is that a character’s Essence is named by others long before the character can name it themselves.

Will is called a wizard, not as a joke, but as recognition. His friends sense his sensitivity, perception, and attunement as innate. As the story deepens, that naming evolves. Wizard becomes sorcerer, not because Will has trained into it, but because it is revealed to be inherent.

A wizard learns magic.
A sorcerer is magic.

That distinction matters.

This pattern is not limited to Will. It runs through the entire group. From Eleven’s truth-exposing presence to Robin’s liberating honesty, each member carries a distinct Essence that the others recognize, rely on, and depend upon. None of these qualities are interchangeable. They are unique. And none of them fully recognize their own qualities at first. They are recognized, relied upon, and refined in relationship long before the characters themselves can articulate them.

This is the deeper truth the show keeps pointing toward: Essence is not invented through effort. It is seen, named, and eventually trusted.

This is the essence of Stranger Things.

The Leadership Blind Spot Begins Here

Most of us grow up with two versions of ourselves.

There is the version we know from the inside, shaped by our experience of being ourselves, our desires, feelings, thoughts, efforts, fears, successes, and the journey we’ve lived.

And there is the version others experience, often more clearly than we do.

Between these two versions sits a gap.

What is most natural to us is often invisible from the inside. Others feel it, rely on it, and organize around it. Without language, we dismiss it as coincidence, personality, or “just how I am,” or we quietly wonder what it is that others see in us.

This is where the leadership blind spot forms.

Initiation Reveals What Is Already There

In the Leadership Essence™ model, Essence has multiple origins.

Some aspects are gifted at birth.
Some are shaped by the life you’ve lived.
Some are learned to the point of mastery, until effort becomes instinctive.

Initiation does not create Essence.

It reveals, integrates, and stabilizes it.

The kids in Stranger Things do not gain their gifts. They learn to trust what is true and natural about themselves. They allow what others already see to become something they can stand in consciously.

That is real initiation.

Leadership Essence™ as Modern Initiation

In traditional initiation, the journey does not end with insight or survival. It ends with return.

You cross a threshold.
You are changed by what you face.
And then you come back to the community able to offer something you could not offer before.

Not performance.
Not proof.
But gift.

In modern culture, something essential is often missing from this process. People frequently sense one another’s Essence. They feel it. They rely on it. They may even build around it. And yet, they often cannot name it.

We are not taught to look for Essence.
And we are rarely given language for it.

As a result, what is most essential in a person is often acknowledged indirectly or vaguely. Leaders hear things like, “There’s just something about you,” or “People trust you,” or “You change the energy in the room,” without ever being given a way to understand what those statements are pointing toward.

Leadership Essence™ is designed to meet this moment.

It offers new lenses for seeing Essence and new language for describing what has previously been felt but left unnamed. It helps leaders recognize the qualities others already experience, integrate them consciously, and return to their organizations, families, and communities able to share their gifts with clarity, power, and integrity.

This is not leadership as self-expression.
It is leadership as right relationship with one’s gifts.

A leader who has completed this initiation no longer needs to over-function, hide behind role, or borrow authority from urgency or control.

They can name what they bring.
They can place it in service.
They can be trusted with it.

This is the return.

The Quiet Truth at the End

Initiation completes when you no longer need others to name your Essence for you.

Not because they were wrong.
But because you can now stand in it yourself.

That is what Stranger Things was pointing toward.

And it is what leadership, at its best, is always asking of us.

Final thought…

Leadership does not begin when you acquire power.
It begins when you return with your gifts.