The Many 'With' the Questions: Tom Johnston on Faith, Recovery, and Leading 'Without' the Answers

Tom Johnston will tell you, without much hesitation, that the most important decision of his life had nothing to do with a balance sheet. It happened at a moment he calls his bottom—a moment when the only move left was to raise his hand and ask for help.

That single act of surrender became the hinge point for everything that followed: a recovery journey now stretching well over nine years, a return to the faith of his childhood on very different terms, a marriage he never expected, and a coaching practice, Talent Optimizer Group, built almost entirely on the lessons he learned in the process of getting well.

The Bottom That Became a Beginning

Johnston grew up Catholic, raised by a devout mother in a household where God was mostly a warning label. "See, God is watching you. God's going to punish you," he remembers being taught. "My perspective around God was that God was to be feared."

That fear-based faith didn't survive contact with real life. It took hitting bottom with addiction, and the courage to ask for help, for Johnston's understanding of God to begin to shift. Through a structured recovery program built on spiritual principles, belief slowly became feeling, and feeling slowly became a relationship that continues to grow.

"God brought me to the twelve steps, and the twelve steps brought me to God."

He's careful about how much of that story belongs to him alone. Recovery communities have long-standing traditions around anonymity and promotion that Johnston respects deeply. But the fruit of that season is unmistakable in how he leads today: intentionally, with humility, and with a daily practice of meditation and prayer he now shares with his wife.

"Meditation is God speaking to me," he says, "and prayer is me speaking to God."

From Fear to Love

Somewhere in the middle of his recovery, Johnston felt an unexpected pull back toward the church—this time without the dread. He found a basilica near his home in Denver and started showing up to Sunday Mass. Not long after, a woman joined him there. She's now his wife.

He also found himself in a priest's office giving what he laughingly calls "a sixty-year confession." The priest's reaction, the relief afterward, the way an old fear turned into an unexpected gift—Johnston tells the story with a mix of humor and reverence that captures exactly how his relationship with faith has changed. God, as he understands God today, isn't a distant judge. "It's in my heart. It's in all of us," he says. "It's just about love and kindness and compassion."

Building a Business Around What Recovery Taught Him

That same posture, curious, humble, and service-oriented, became the foundation of Talent Optimizer Group. Johnston works with founder-led companies generating between five and one hundred million dollars in annual revenue, helping leadership teams get the right people in the right seats using behavioral science, then installing an operating framework so the business can run without the founder making every decision.

The goal, as he puts it, is optionality: increasing profitability and driving enterprise value so an owner has real choices down the road, whether that is a sale, a transfer to family, or a private equity exit.

Johnston is a trained practitioner of Appreciative Inquiry, a change methodology built on the idea that organizations grow in the direction of the questions they ask. He is direct about why it matters now: old command-and-control methods don't work anymore. The world is changing faster than any one leader can keep up with, and when hard work and information become commodities, the advantage goes to the leader who can unlock the team's collective wisdom. So rather than walking into an organization with answers, Johnston walks in with questions, designing conversations where every voice is heard and people feel safe enough to bring their best thinking.

"My job is not to come in with the answers. My job is to be the person who has the questions. It's not the few with the answers; it's the many with the questions. That's where the magic happens"

Before he'll even take on a client, Johnston runs a kind of gut check. He calls it sussing out whether there's love in the organization.

"Love is that four-letter word, and it's okay to talk about love in business."

If it isn't there, he moves on, not out of judgment, but because he is protective of his time. That protectiveness traces directly back to Dr. Daniel Friedland, author of Leading Well from Within, and the question he asked: "What matters most right now?" For Johnston, the answer reshaped his entire career path. He turned down the next big executive title so he could guard time with his family, because, as he puts it, we don't know how much time we actually have.

The Relationship That Changes Everything

Ask Johnston what actually moves the needle inside a business, and he won't point to a framework first. He'll point to a relationship.

"The most important relationship you have in your business life, at whatever level, is your relationship with your direct manager. If that relationship is positive—if there's openness, if there's vulnerability—accountability becomes an act of love. I care about you. I want to see you succeed."

It's a principle that sounds simple until you realize how rarely leaders actually practice it. And Johnston is quick to draw the line back to faith: at the end of the day, he says, I am guided by my higher power. Every human interaction, every decision, every moment of leadership is an opportunity for influence—and Johnston believes the question worth asking in each one is simple: what would God do?

What This Means for You This Week

Johnston's advice for leaders trying to integrate faith and business isn't complicated, but it does require courage. Start by naming what matters most, honestly, and letting that answer shape your calendar—not just your mission statement. Next time you walk into a meeting, notice the energy in the room before you try to fix anything in it; people can feel apathy and love long before anyone says a word. And in your next one-on-one, ask more questions than you answer. That single shift, Johnston has found, is often where real transformation begins.

Above all, don't wait until you're desperate to ask for help. Johnston learned that lesson the hard way, and it changed the entire trajectory of his life.

"It's never, ever too late to raise your hand and say, I need help. The most successful people are the ones who ask for it."

A Life Measured in Time, Not Titles

Johnston has watched people chase the next deal, the next title, the next dollar—and never live to enjoy what they built. It's shaped how he now defines prosperity, and it's the note he keeps coming back to with the founders he coaches.

"We all get to define what prosperity and success looks like for us," he says. "Just make sure we remember what matters most."

For Tom Johnston, that answer came only after he hit bottom and had the courage to reach for something higher. For the rest of us, the invitation is the same one he received: raise your hand, trust the timing you can't control, and build a business—and a life—worth the time it takes.