The Lion is You (Lessons from The Wild on Coming Alive Again)

The Lion Is You is a field guide for anyone who senses that their life, no matter how successful it looks on the outside, feels like something is still missing inside.

After coming face-to-face with a charging lion in the African wilderness, executive coach David Gerber discovered a truth most of us quietly avoid. Safety and aliveness are not the same thing. You can build a life with solid walls, clear routines, and every external marker of success, and still feel the dull ache of a caged animal pacing inside you.

Drawing from real lion-tracking expeditions in Africa and his own journey through grief, fear, and renewal, Gerber invites readers into a radical reimagining of what it means to live with purpose and courage. In the wild, trackers move slowly through heat, dust, and brush, reading faint signs pressed into the earth. A scuffed leaf. A broken branch. A paw print already softening in the sun. Proof that something alive passed through recently and did not stay.

Life leaves tracks the same way. Restlessness. Longing. Discomfort. The quiet sense that you are circling the edges of a life you were meant to enter but never quite did. These signals are not flaws to correct or feelings to numb. They are invitations. Like hearing your own name called in the dark, they do not explain themselves. They simply ask whether you will turn toward the sound.

Part memoir, part spiritual adventure, and part practical map for personal growth, The Lion Is You helps readers break free from “1–10 living,” the narrow, socially acceptable version of life, and step into something far bigger, wilder, and truer. Through unforgettable stories, grounded insight, and soul-level questions, Gerber guides you to discover your first tracks, follow the string, and come face-to-face with the life you were always meant to live.

The lion you are searching for is not out there.

It is you.