I Almost Wrote a Different Book

My friend and editor, Jurgen, has known me for over 30 years. Which means he knows exactly how I respond when someone challenges me.

So when he called after spending two months with my manuscript and said, "Roberto, we need to change this book," I was afraid of what that would mean.

The original title was The Tyrant in the Mirror. I had finished it and sent it to him, satisfied. I was, in my mind, done.

He had worked his way through the whole manuscript until he reached the Afterword, a personal note at the end, less guarded than everything before it. He called me and said the real story in the book was actually in those last pages. The title needed to change. The truth was hiding at the back.

He said, "What if we call it A Letter to My Exes?"

My exact reaction was: "You have got to be kidding me.”

But I knew he was right. So I agreed. We reworked the introduction and repositioned the book around that Afterword, and I thought we were done.

Then he called again. "There is one more thing," he said.

"You need to write the letters."

I said: What letters?

"To your exes. That is the whole title, Roberto," with that expression that said, you might want to hide, but I know you well enough, and I'm not going to let you.

I sat with that for a few days, and then I did what I now recognize as the most Roberto thing possible: I wrote three lines for each chapter. A brief "Dear whoever," a sentence or two, and then straight into the content. Minimum viable vulnerability. I sent it back to him, feeling like I had handled it.

He called me. "No," he said. "You need to write a REAL letter."

Notice this: I was writing a book about how dominant, controlling leaders resist vulnerability, give the minimum when asked to be honest, and call it “enough.” Yet I was repeating that same pattern here.

That innate resistance showing up again. That was me. But I knew better, so I sat with it. And then I wrote the letters, seven of them. Real ones.

Opening up did not feel like tearing something open. It felt like setting something down. The work I had done on myself for years had been pointing here. The letters came out from somewhere already clear in me. And they became the most cathartic part of writing this entire book.

When I read those letters out loud today, I still feel it. In my chest, in my throat. The way I have watched leaders feel it in my sessions, powerful, armored people who held everything together for years and then, finally, let something go. That kind of release, every time.

In Letter One, after admitting everything I had cost the first woman I wrote to, I ended with this: "I am sorry for the parts of me that made you feel small, that made you feel like you had to tiptoe around me. You deserved a better version of me."

That sentence took years to write.

This book is what happened when one man was finally pushed past his own resistance long enough to write what actually needed to be said.

A Letter to My Exes: How I Learned to Lead Without Being a Tyrant, publishing June 2026.

More soon.

Roberto

#TyrantNoMore

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