Lessons from Local Leaders:
Joshua Schlotterbeck
Living in a Hard World With a Soft Heart: Joshua Schlotterbeck on the Book That Took 650 Hours, a Decade of Journals, and Every Hard Thing He’s Ever Been Through
Joshua Schlotterbeck has dyslexia, refused to read books in high school, and once believed emotions had no justifiable place in a man’s life. He just spent 650 hours writing one of the most emotionally intelligent books you’ll encounter this year. That’s the kind of journey this is.
The Day He Felt Nothing
It started with a moment that should have been joyful.
One of Joshua Schlotterbeck’s five children, he has them ranging from a 20-year-old in the Marine Corps down to an 11-year-old, had done something magnificent. Something that by any measure deserved celebration, pride, the warm rush of a parent’s love. And Joshua felt nothing.
“I started taking an inventory of myself and my emotions,” he recalls, “and I realized things that should have brought me joy didn’t bring me joy. Things that should have made me upset didn’t make me upset. Things that should have made me sad didn’t make me sad. I was just numb.”
He wrote about it in his journal. He wrote a blog post. And then he let it sit, for ten years.
This past summer, sitting in his car after dropping off his kids, Joshua noticed the familiar absence of emotional depth and was gripped by a quiet fear: had he put the armor back on? Was his heart hard again? So, he went back to that old journal entry, that old blog post, and he discovered something unexpected. He wasn’t in the same place. He had changed and he had grown.
“And so I spent some time thinking about how I got from where I was 10 years ago to now,” he says. “And that became the foundation for the book.”
The Anatomy of a Hard Heart was born from that moment of comparison, the man sitting in the car this summer, gripping the wheel, measured against the man who had written those words a decade before. And what Joshua found in that comparison became a book not just about his own journey, but about the journey every human being takes, whether they know it or not.
What a Hard Heart Actually Is
The phrase comes from spiritual tradition. In Christian circles, the concept of a hard or hardened heart is ancient and recurring. But Joshua unpacks it in a way that reaches far beyond any one tradition, grounding it in neuroscience, psychology, and the simple, universal experience of being hurt by someone you trusted.
“Every single one of us has experienced some sort of trauma,” he says. “And that’s really where it begins. A wound. A harsh conversation. A rejection. Being let down.” Most of our deepest wounds, he has found, begin in relationship, with the people closest to us, the ones who know exactly where we’re vulnerable. And the heart’s response to those wounds is not weakness. It is, initially, wisdom.
“Soldiers wear body armor not because they’re scared, but because they need protection,” he explains. “The hard heart starts as a defense mechanism. We slowly stack bricks or slowly put on armor to protect ourselves from that kind of wound.” The flight, fight, freeze, or fawn response, the chemistry of self-preservation, is your body doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
But here is where the anatomy gets complicated. What begins as protection, left untreated, becomes something else entirely. “What begins as a defense mechanism and protection, if gone untreated, becomes a prison.”
The tragedy isn’t that we armor our hearts. It’s that the armor eventually stops being something we put on and becomes something we can no longer take off. By then, we’ve often forgotten it’s even there.
The Three Sources of the Hardened Heart
Joshua identifies three primary origins for the hard heart, and he speaks to each with the specificity of someone who has lived them personally.
The first is our family of origin. Children have limited emotional vocabulary and limited capacity for regulation, and the wounds they receive, from parents, siblings, the earliest relationships that shape their sense of the world, become the templates for how they respond to pain as adults. “A lot of our responses to trauma as adults are born out of our experiences with trauma as children,” he says. Joshua advocates strongly for emotional literacy education in schools. He believes the world would be measurably better if children are taught to name and understand what they feel.
The second source is unmet expectations. We carry images of how life should look. From our faith, from our upbringing, from the implicit promises we believe the world has made us, and when reality doesn’t match, the gap becomes a wound. “We feel cheated. We feel let down. People who should have been carrying us drop us.”
The third source is the hardest to admit: ourselves. “A lot of the hard heart comes from self-inflicted wounds. We make poor choices for whatever reason, and we wound ourselves. And then we find ourselves in a place of shame.” The shame that follows, Joshua insists, is among the most dangerous emotional states. Not because it’s evidence of being broken, but because it whispers that we are. “You’re not broken. You’re not unlovable. You don’t have to be perfect to be loved, you don’t have to be whole to be loved.”
Why You Can’t Just Numb One Feeling
One of the most striking ideas in Joshua’s thinking is the interconnected nature of our emotional lives, and the hidden cost of selective numbness.
“When you numb yourself to fear, you don’t just have the ability to categorically put fear in a box and leave joy and hope and everything else on the feeling wheel,” he explains. “What ends up happening is that we start closing ourselves off to joy when we close ourselves off to fear.” Shut one door, and the others begin closing too. This is not a metaphor — it reflects what research on the nervous system actually shows about how emotional suppression works.
He extends the insight into leadership. As a business consultant, he’s watched organizations get undone by hubris. By leaders who consumed knowledge until they stopped being curious, whose competence curdled into certainty. “The more knowledge I get, the more likely I am to become prideful. And when I become prideful, curiosity takes a backseat.” A hard heart doesn’t just affect how we love. It affects how we think, how we lead, and how we grow.
The antidote, he says, is a question, one that a mentor once asked him at exactly the right moment, during his post-divorce years, when he was complaining about a relationship. The mentor interrupted him and asked: Is this a new behavior, or is this something you’ve seen over the last several years?
“That was the single most important question anybody had ever asked me.” Because curiosity always asks: is there more to the story?
The Trauma Bag & Harper’s Ferry
Joshua is not a man who does boring. He rock climbs, kayaks, hikes, and has summited seven 14,000-foot mountains, three of them with his children. When his 16-year-old was 13, they climbed the highest mountain in the Rockies together.
After a climbing accident in 2023, he began carrying what he calls a trauma bag on every outdoor trip: a first aid kit on steroids, loaded with tourniquets, splints, and everything needed to help someone on a trail. For two years, he carried it on every hike and river trip without ever needing it.
Until Harper’s Ferry.
He and his children had just finished a three-hour hike at the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers. While waiting for the shuttle bus back to the parking lot, a young woman approached him and asked if he had an ice pack for her mother, who appeared to have a sprained wrist. But when he looked at the woman’s arm, he realized she hadn’t sprained her wrist. She had broken it. The bone was visibly bowed.
He splinted her arm. They missed their bus. As they waited for the next one, his 11-year-old daughter turned to him and said: “I guess that’s why you carry it.”
“Think about this for a second,” Joshua says. “I had experienced trauma from a climbing accident in 2023, and because of that trauma, I carried this bag. Then somebody else comes along experiencing trauma, and the trauma that I experienced and worked through and prepared for is the very thing that allowed me to help somebody else in their traumatic experience.”
It is, he says, the metaphor of the entire book. None of us will get through this life unscathed. But if we do the work, if we carry our trauma in a way that has prepared us rather than imprisoned us, we become capable of showing up for others in their worst moments with exactly what they need. “I might not have what you ask for,” he says. “But I might just have what you need.”
What Compassion Actually Means
Joshua is, by his own cheerful admission, a word nerd. And one of his favorite exercises is tracing words back to their roots, because he believes that modern English has stripped the power out of language that was once genuinely profound.
Take compassion. Most people use it interchangeably with kindness or empathy. But the word comes from passion, and passion, traced to its Latin root, means to suffer. Which means compassion, in its true sense, means to suffer with someone. Not to fix them, not to cheer them up, and not to solve the problem. But to sit with them in their pain and let them know they are not alone in it.
He tells the story of a sixth grader whose father, in the middle of an argument with her mother, would stop and ask: “Do you want my head right now or do you want my heart?” What that father was really asking — Joshua explains to the class — is: do you need me to help you solve a problem, or do you need me to be present with you in this moment? “That is the most important thing for us to do as human beings for one another,” he says. “Slow down and ask: what do you need from me right now?”
For men especially, Joshua acknowledges, this kind of presence doesn’t come naturally. “As men, we are naturally inclined to be fixers. But we also have to realize sometimes people just need a safe place to unload.” The wisdom is in knowing the difference, and the courage is in asking.
A Word About Men and Emotional Armor
Joshua speaks with particular directness, and particular compassion, about the specific way the hard heart develops in men.
“Men have been particularly taught that emotions have no justifiable place in their experience. Boys are taught ‘don’t cry,’ ‘suck it up.’ So we’ve created a culture for men where stoicism makes you a man.” The result, generation after generation, is a population of men who cannot identify what they’re feeling, why they’re feeling it, or what to do with it. He knows this intimately, because it was his own story.
“I remember going through some training and they told me I needed to be more in touch with my emotions,” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? Emotions are silly.'” Then came the period of waking up, moving from emotional numbness to what he describes, with dark humor, as “drinking out of a fire hydrant of emotions.” Anger, frustration, bitterness, confusion, he couldn’t tell them apart.
The most isolated safe emotion for men, research suggests, is anger. But even that, he points out, is policed. Too much anger and you’re labeled abusive or narcissistic. Too little and you’re passive. The message men receive, consciously or not, is that there is no acceptable emotional expression, and the result is a generation of men who go silent and a generation of women who have spent decades in relationship with people who cannot tell them what they feel.
“I want men to hear this specifically: vulnerability is an act of courage. It takes courage to reveal the innermost parts of yourself to someone else.”
The Feelings Chart on the Dining Room Wall
Some of the most powerful moments in Joshua’s book — and in this conversation — come from his role as a father.
He brought a children’s book about emotions on a camping trip. He read it to his kids, forgot about it, found the poster inside it later, and stuck it to a whiteboard in his dining room for no particular reason. Just to get it out of the clutter. A few weeks later, his daughter came downstairs in the morning, walked over to it, pointed to an emotion, and said: “Daddy, I feel like this.”
“And I think it was sad,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, okay. Let’s talk about that.'” They pulled up a chair. He got curious. What’s going on? Did someone do something? Are you missing someone? The conversation that follows is possible, he believes, precisely because the language is already there on the wall, not forced, not introduced as a lesson, just present and available when it is needed.
He also asked his sixth grade class a question that he says stopped the room: what do you wish adults understood about you? One student’s answer: that we have feelings too.
“What an indictment,” Joshua says quietly. “What an indictment for us parents, adults, and teachers to be so wrapped up in our world that we don’t slow down to remember that children have emotions too.”
The Man at Karaoke, and the Husband Who Finally Felt Seen
Joshua did not publish this book to get rich. He is clear about that, almost sheepishly so. He published it because he felt he had to, because he was entering what he calls his “sage season.” The time of life when accumulated wisdom becomes something you have a responsibility to share.
He handed a copy to a stranger at karaoke one night. A few months later, he received a message from her on Facebook. She had put the book on a shelf and forgotten it until she and her husband were having a serious conversation about where their marriage was. She remembered the book and gave it to him. He reached out to Joshua because he wanted him to know: her husband said he finally felt seen.
“That’s all that I want,” Joshua says, and you can hear it in his voice — the weight of it, the meaning of it. “I want people to know that just because they’re hurt or wounded or entrenched, they can be seen, and it will be okay.”
He pauses, and then offers the detail that makes the whole story richer: he has dyslexia. He didn’t do well in English in high school, he refused to read books. The English teacher who helped him then ended up helping him edit this one. He taught sixth grade English last year. He spent 650 hours writing a book about the human heart — 650 hours, not counting the decade of lived experience that made it possible.
“There are so many layers of just gratitude,” he says. It is the only word he can find, and it is exactly the right one.
What He Wants You to Walk Away With
The goal of The Anatomy of a Hard Heart, in Joshua’s own words, is deceptively simple: he wants people to learn how to live in a hard world with a soft heart.
Not an invulnerable heart, not an unfeeling heart. Not a heart that is so thoroughly protected that it can no longer be touched. A soft heart — one that does the work, carries its trauma with intention, knows what it means to be wounded and what it takes to heal, and chooses, every single day, to remain open anyway.
“I want people to experience the fullness of life: To be honest, to be vulnerable, to be courageous, to be afraid, to be timid, to be nervous, to be free to feel all of the feelings, and know that just because I feel fear doesn’t mean something is wrong. Just because I feel anxiety doesn’t mean I am broken.”
And to anyone carrying a story they haven’t told yet — anyone sitting on something that feels too heavy, too private, too much — Joshua has a direct and personal message: tell it.
“If there is something in your heart that needs to be spoken or needs to be heard, and you feel like you have the platform to do it, do it. It is scary. But it will change more than you think.”
Find Joshua and The Anatomy of a Hard Heart
Blog: joshschlotterbeck.com. A twice-weekly blog that Joshua describes as “an extraction of my journal, a little more refined”
The Book: Available on Amazon
- Kindle Unlimited: free
- Kindle: $9.99
- Paperback: $17.99
Reviews on Amazon or Goodreads are welcome! Joshua reads them all.
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Joshua Schlotterbeck’s Website
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