At the end of 2008 and fresh out of business school, I quit my (well-paid) consulting job at IBM to raise a search fund. Two weeks later my fourth child was born. Search funds were an American idea at the time, and European investors mostly had to have the whole thing explained to them from the beginning, which was a very challenging way to raise money in the teeth of the credit crunch. The research said the raise would take three months. It took ten, and then two more to build the legal vehicle I needed before I could start looking for a business at all. I mention the three months because I was the one who did the research.

Twelve months against a plan that said three is a difficult thing to keep explaining at home. My wife’s saintly patience and our savings account carried far more of that year than my optimistic forecasts ever did.

The headhunters rang throughout. They have a gift for finding you in the exact month you can least afford to be found, and what they were offering was the work I had just left: consulting roles I knew how to do, at a proper salary, at a point when I had no income at all and almost nobody else was hiring. Good opportunities. Real jobs.

My head was not turned once. Not in month eight, not in month ten, not at the point where we very nearly ran out of savings before the fund even existed.

At the time, I thought this was focus, or commitment, or possibly good old South African bloody-mindedness, and I was secretly pleased with myself about it. It was none of those. It was information. That passage had finished with me and I had finished with it, and neither of us had thought to mention it.

The tell is an absence

Nobody tells you when it is over. There is no email confirming the passage is closed and your capacity has been upgraded.

What you get instead is a thing that stops happening. For months you have been testing the old curve the way you test a bruise: push on it, see whether it still hurts, let it go. The role you left. The strategy you retired. The version of yourself that ran the last chapter and was good at it. Then one day the attraction is gone, and you did not notice it leave. You find out later, when something sends you looking for it, and there is nothing there to find.

The leaders I work with almost never announce this when it happens. It comes out sideways months afterwards, usually as a throwaway comment about not having thought about the old job, business, or identity in a while.

Notice what was true in my case. Nothing was working. The money was nearly gone, there was no business to buy, and the plan to even start looking was seven months adrift. The old curve had let go of me anyway. That is worth hanging on to when you are in the worst of it. Most people are waiting for the new thing to succeed before they will believe anything has changed. The release comes first.

When does this end

None of which is what anybody wants to hear. What they want is the answer: the piece of knowledge that will resolve the discomfort they are sitting in. They want to know when it ends. Every client asks eventually, usually about two-thirds of the way through a session, usually with a slightly apologetic laugh. “OK Ritz, so when do you tell me how to fix this? When do we get to the resolution?”

My answer is that they are starting to see the Matrix. The structure was always running underneath, and this is the passage where it becomes visible. It is a feature, not a bug. Nobody has ever thanked me for that answer in the moment. And to be honest, I have to be reminded of this too. I am still annoyed at myself every time I forget that this is how transitions work.

Uncomfortable. Unresolved. Messy. Contradictory. And yet: Generative. Juicy. Exciting. Alive.

None of which guarantees anything. Some passages never get finished, and the work you leave undone goes with you and is waiting when the next middle opens like a chasm underneath you. That is one branch of the fork, and most of us have taken it at least once without noticing at the time. This piece is about the other branch, the one where the work got done. That release was the first half of it. The second half takes longer and looks very different.

When the new curve starts taking off

Things begin to work. Unevenly, with gaps, but they work. A conversation lands that would have gone nowhere last year. An investor finally says yes (and the rest of the herd starts following). A decision gets made in an afternoon that would have taken a quarter. Something you have been pushing at for months moves without you pushing it. The new curve delivers what the old one could not, and often that is the only real evidence you get that it is a new curve at all.

None of that arrives by thinking about it. The results have to be produced, and you produce them by taking action and running experiments: small, deliberate, cheap enough to be wrong in public. You have to act as if it is already true and see what comes back. Like how you find out whether a jacket fits. By trying it on. Studying it on the hanger tells you nothing. Then treat the outcome as information rather than as a verdict on you. The new curve shows itself through a run of small things that worked, and none of them can work if you never tried them on for size.

Faith was the requirement at the start: commit to a direction you cannot yet verify. Now the verification starts to arrive. Small pieces of it, out of order, none of it strong enough to put in a board paper. It is still enough to change the quality of what you are running on. You are onto something … and it’s good.

The search fund money came together in the end. Finding a business to buy took another sixteen months. I bought it, and it was three years after that before anyone would have called it a success. None of it was guaranteed at any stage, and there were several points where it very nearly wasn’t.

Each experiment buys the next one

I put this method together years ago and worked out that the escalation is what builds the momentum. It has not changed since. Something piques my curiosity and I read about it online, which costs nothing. If it still has hold of me a fortnight later, I buy the book, which is ten pounds. If the book was interesting enough, I might do a recorded course on Udemy, which is fifty or a hundred. If that holds up, I might join a cohort-based course, which costs real money and real evenings, and which comes with the one thing the cheaper steps cannot supply: other people going the same way at the same time, and a ready-made community to boot.

Each step is bought by the one before it. The bet gets bigger when the last one pays off, which keeps the cost of being wrong lowest at the point where being wrong is most likely. Then somewhere in the sequence the momentum stops being something you have to generate. Do it for long enough and the next curve is underway before you know it. Every transition I have gone through in the last twenty years and more has followed this pattern. Your mileage may vary.

The second curve takes the weight

Handy’s sigmoid curve anchors this whole series and it marks one point clearly: the moment to start the next curve is while the current one still has energy and resources in it. It didn’t mark the other point, the one you are looking for now.

Somewhere on that diagram, the second curve starts carrying the weight. Before it, the new thing needs constant feeding and returns nothing or very little, while the old one still pays for your life. So you tend both, which is expensive, and which is also correct and necessary. The version of this where you get to tend only one doesn’t exist.

Afterwards, the load has transferred. You can leave the first curve untended and nothing breaks or falls over. You are not disciplining yourself away from it. There still isn’t enough evidence that the next curve will succeed, but nothing is pulling you back regardless.

I often liken this to putting a rocket into space. Almost all of the fuel goes into getting off the ground and up to speed. Then the burn stops, the ship is still travelling, and the thing that took everything you had to get past is behind you. There is no point going back for the booster. It is literally spent, and the rest of the flight was designed without it.

Done, or survived

Two leaders come out of the same passage. One finished it. The other endured it, kept the show running, waited for the weather to change, and reached the far side unchanged by it.

At the time, from the outside, they look identical. Same exit, same announcement. Both give the well-received talk at the industry conference about resilience under pressure. Both are, in the ordinary sense, fine.

Survival is not a moral failure, and I want to be careful here. Sometimes the conditions do not allow for more: a bereavement in the same year, a health scare, a divorce, several other transitions running in parallel. Surviving to fight another day is a real outcome, and occasionally it is the only one on offer. The cost is that nothing was banked, and the next middle opens on the same balance in the account.

The difference surfaces in the next passage, and other people see it before you do. The leader who survived meets it with the same equipment as last time, more tired, and privately suspecting they got away with something, and wearing several scars on their backside. The leader who completed their passage meets it with a range that did not exist eighteen months ago. Strength transfers between passages only when the passage is finished. That is why this one matters more than it feels like it should while you are inside it. The same person, but a different leader.

Handy’s other gift

I will always be grateful to Handy for the sigmoid curve - it genuinely changed my life. He left another idea that is potentially also useful here. In The Age of Unreason 1 he described work as a portfolio of five kinds: wage work and fee work, which are paid, and homework, gift work and study work, which are not. Added to and pared back as a life changes shape. He had lived it himself, moving from Shell executive to economist, then professor, broadcaster and writer.

I want to extend his idea, and I will take responsibility for it rather than put it in Handy’s mouth. The same structure describes identity. Who you are as a leader, and as a human, is a portfolio assembled across passages, and you maintain it by deciding what to keep and what to drop. This is true whether you end up with the quintessential portfolio career (as I have) or not.

Every completed middle retires something. In my case it was the option of being a known quantity. In consulting, people could place me in about four seconds, I had an easy answer for people asking me what I do, and headhunters had a neat category to ring about. Afterwards I was doing something most of the market could not name, and that particular safety net was gone for good. In the words of a former investor and mentor of mine: I had succeeded in making myself utterly unemployable.

Every completed middle also adds something you can only get by living through it. The ability to keep operating under uncertainty is the obvious one. The subtler gain is a better sense of what a genuine crisis looks like, which strikes a good deal of what used to qualify off the list.

The leader who keeps the same identity through every phase of a career calls it integrity, often with some pride. The people around them see someone answering questions the situation stopped asking. Both descriptions are accurate, which is what makes it so hard to see from the inside.

Completion does not make the change permanent. Whether it holds under the next round of real pressure depends more on practice than on insight. That is a body of work in its own right, and it gets its own essay further on.

What you carry out

The measure of a passage is the difference between what you carried in and what you carry out. One thing retired, one thing added that a calmer year could not have supplied. That is a portfolio under revision, one middle at a time, and with the curves arriving as fast as they do now, it is the only version of a leadership life that keeps up.

There is no certificate. There is an ordinary Tuesday when you notice the old curve has asked nothing of you in months, a new one that has taken the weight, and one more entry in the portfolio that only this passage could have put there.

Complete this one, and it becomes something you own. Leave it half done, and it becomes something you meet again.

Next: none of this was built for one person to carry.

New to this series? Here is the map

For over twenty-five years I have made the trip to a chalkstream that flows through three stillwater lakes in the Surrey hills, in a designated area of outstanding natural beauty an hour south of London (the picture above). It’s over two hours there and back, so it isn’t something I do on impulse, and for many of those years I thought I went for the trout.

Fly fishing is a unique discipline. It asks for total attention, and it penalises force. Too much effort in the cast gets you a tailing loop and a wind knot in your line. You cannot make the fish take. You can only read the water and conditions, pick the right fly, and drop it gently enough to look like the real thing.

Trout feed on whatever is hatching that day, not on what worked the week before, so you have to watch before you choose the fly: what’s coming off the water, what size, what colour, what stage of its short life. It’s called matching the hatch. Turn up with the fly that worked last time, but unsuitable for the conditions, and it doesn’t matter how well you cast it. The fish will spot the difference between what’s on today’s menu and what you are presenting and simply ignore it.

On the (too infrequent) days I manage to make the journey, the same thing tends to happen. The first couple of casts are poor, because I am still carrying the office with me. My mind is whirring - the board pack, the next steps for the new client, the message I should have worded differently, the thing someone said in passing, the bloody traffic on the M25. Then, somewhere around the third or fourth cast, the whirring stops. Not because I told it to, but because the water demands a kind of presence that leaves no room for extra luggage. And in the space where the noise was, the rest arrives: light off the water, the sound of the birds and stream, a fish rising under the far bank, the grace of a cast that flows out without effort and lands like a thought. Magic.

What I notice later walking back to my car, is what I am no longer carrying - and, just as usefully, what I still am. The weight that belongs comes back up the hill with me: the decision still needs making, the people still depend on it. But something else stayed by the waterside, and I never decided to put it down. It fell away on its own, the moment my attention was fully claimed by something real.

Weigh the load

The ride you are on is heavy, and it takes strength. But before you decide that all the strain you feel is the animal’s doing, perhaps you should weigh the load. Not everything you are carrying arrived with this passage. Some of it was strapped on so long ago you have stopped noticing the straps.

Some of the weight is yours, and it should be felt. The weight of decisions that will land in other people’s careers and mortgages. The gap between the leader you are and the one the next chapter requires. A gap you can feel on the days you are stretched further than before. That weight is the work arriving in its natural form. Feeling it is part of doing it, and I am not for a moment suggesting you feel it any less. Far from it.

Then there is the other stuff.

The weight that never belonged

Old identities still being performed for an audience that has mostly stopped watching. Roles outgrown years ago but never formally vacated. Expectations installed so early you don’t remember when they were formed - about what a leader must be, must show, must never show. Other people’s fears, adopted as personal responsibility somewhere along the way and never handed back. And the accumulated cost of carrying all of it alone, because asking for help would spoil the performance of invulnerability.

Some of this weight is so familiar it no longer registers as weight. It just feels like who you are. That is exactly what makes it hard to set down: you cannot release a thing you have mistaken for your backbone.

And none of this is theoretical. Borrowed weight is held in the body, not the diary - in posture, in breath, in the narrowed attention the people around you sense before they meet you. They read the load in seconds, below the level of anyone’s awareness. It’s written in your shape.

Whose life have you been living?

James Hollis, one of my favourite writers from the Jungian tradition, wrote a book whose title could sit over this whole series: The Middle Passage1. His main argument is the self that carries you through the first half of life is provisional - assembled early, mostly unconsciously, to meet the world’s expectations and win its approval. It works, which is the trap. The provisional self gets promoted. It gets funded. It becomes successful and gets a reputation to maintain. Then somewhere unexpected it stops fitting, and much of the discomfort you feel is the gap between the life you built and the person doing the carrying.

Hollis’s response is examination as a discipline. I would call it an indispensable leadership practice, not introspective navel-gazing. Take the load apart, piece by piece, and ask of each: where exactly did this come from? Whose voice is it in? What was I hoping it would get me, and did it deliver? Unexamined weight does not disappear because you are too busy to look at it. It shapes decisions, narrows range, and runs your relationships from below the waterline - all without ever being named. The most expensive things you carry are the ones you have never once held up to the light.

The size of your plans

The poet David Whyte tells of a visit from a monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast, at a point of complete depletion in his working life. He expected to be told to rest. Instead, he was given a gift of real wisdom (which I love): “the antidote to exhaustion is wholeheartedness“2.

Compare that to the load you are carrying. A good part of what is exhausting you may be exhausting precisely because it has nothing to do with your actual strength. It is borrowed weight, carried half-heartedly, because half a heart is all it can command. You are not tired because you are working hard. You are tired because so much of the load is someone else’s idea of you.

Whyte perfectly expresses it in his poem, What to Remember When Waking. The poem is about the first moment of the day, before the planning starts, and it contains a profound line that hits me right in the solar plexus every time I read it: what you can plan is too small for you to live. A life is bigger than that. Lived wholeheartedly, it makes its own plans, with an aliveness the scheduled self can never have.

Hollis seems to agree. The provisional self makes provisional plans - drawn early, to someone else’s agenda, for a client who no longer exists, or often for a parent no longer in charge. Much of what I am calling borrowed weight is just that: the maintenance of a plan made for a person you were expected to become, decades ago, by people who mostly meant well. You have been changing yourself to fit it ever since. In my experience, the conversation about what those plans left out is overdue for most senior leaders by the time they reach a passage like this one. It was overdue for me.

Telling the difference

So how do you tell one weight from the other, in the middle of a loaded week? By its texture, as your body already knows. Weight that belongs to this moment has a live quality. The felt sense of it hums, it asks things of you, it responds when you work it. Borrowed weight is static, inert. It sits pushing on the same spot it has always pushed, asking nothing except that you keep holding it. One is your work; the other is your habit.

Telling them apart requires slowing down, and slowing down is the last thing a loaded system wants to do. Speed feels safer. Speed is how the whirring protects itself from examination. Which is why this discernment almost never happens at the desk, and almost always happens somewhere the attention gets fully claimed. Whyte finds his opening in the first moments of waking, before the day’s planning drags him into the day. Mine opens at the water, around the fourth cast. Yours will be somewhere else - maybe playing a guitar, on a long walk, or wherever else the noise loses its grip.

A former investor of mine used to say it about a different kind of fishing, the search for a business worth buying: “sometimes, Ritz, there just ain’t no fish.” He didn’t mean that coming home empty was a good outcome. You can do everything right - identify the exact pattern the trout are feeding on, match it, present it beautifully - and they will remain wholly unmoved by your offer. That isn’t failure. That’s just some days.

On the water Bill’s saying works just as well, though it offers a consolation business does not. After a lifetime of fishing, I still get blanked some days. And it turns out not to matter much. Even on the fishless days you get all of it: the water, the presence, the head swept clear. The weight falls away regardless of what’s biting. Which carries its own lesson about the load: a fair amount of what I carry down that hill is attached to outcomes that were never in my hands to begin with.

What falls away

When borrowed weight actually goes - put down rather than suppressed, released rather than managed - the sensation can be surprising. Relief is not quite the word for it. What my clients describe instead is a change in the quality of what remains. The load that belongs to this moment is still there, still heavy, still consequential. But it is cleaner. It stops being tangled up with weight from other decades and other people’s lives, and at last you can get both hands on it properly. Leaders who have felt this tend to report carrying more afterwards, with less strain. The passage you are in can do this work for you. Staying inside it long enough is the price of admission.

The question

So, truthfully, and with no deadline attached: what have you been carrying that was never yours?

Hold it lightly. You do not have to answer it now - genuine answers to that question arrive on their own schedule, usually somewhere you weren't trying to find it. But the moment you can ask it without flinching, something begins to move. That is how the setting down starts. Not a decision, just attention on something real, until the rest lets go.

Next: all this setting down leads somewhere. Time to look at what arriving feels like.

New to this series? Here is the map

Building a business is riding a lion.

From the outside, people keep telling you how brave you are. Bold move. Real courage. Aren’t you strong. From the inside there is one thought looping in your head that sounds nothing like courage: how do I get off this thing without being eaten alive?

I encountered the analogy of riding a lion in a 2013 Inc magazine article and it has stayed with (haunted) me ever since, because it captures that gap - between what it looks like from afar and what is happening underneath - better than anything else I have found. The lion is the transformation you are leading and living through. Alive. Powerful. Wild. Dangerous. Under nobody’s full control, including yours. And you are on its back. Add your favourite expletive here.

The choosing and the committing are behind you - you threw your whole weight at a change already underway. What nobody tells you at the time is what happens next: the change you committed to is a living thing. It moves under you. It has moods and momentum and an agenda that overlaps with yours but is not always aligned. Committing was the start. Now you are hanging on for dear life, wondering what the hell you were thinking.

The first lion

Many years ago, I bought an established payments business and took over as CEO from its founder. On paper, a focused search and carefully considered acquisition by a qualified successor. In practice, a rookie chief executive leading a company through an overhaul from inside a transformation of his own - learning the job in public, at speed, with investor and family money and other people’s careers on the line.

I felt the fear and the exhilaration at the same time, most days, sometimes in the same hour. I made plenty of mistakes. I lived with the standing fear of making bigger ones - and underneath that, the fear of being found out. Found out by the team, found out by the customers and market, found out by the board and investors, and above all, found out by my family and losing their money. People used the word brave frequently in that period. It is remarkable how much braver you look from thirty metres away.

The clearest memory I have from that period is when HMRC (the UK government tax authority) threatened to shut the business down, after we had spent almost a million pounds to pay undeclared tax the business owed from before I bought it. In desperation, I wrote to my local MP, who happened to be the minister of trade and enterprise at the time, and pointed out that closing down small businesses probably was not Conservative government policy, especially when they had voluntarily declared and paid tax the government did not even know was owed. I asked him, as politely as I could, to get HMRC to back off. To his great credit, he did. And they did. It restored some of my faith in the British system of local representation, and the business survived to fight another day. It remains the single most frightening moment of the whole passage. That was the day it genuinely felt like the lion might eat me.

The story ends well, thankfully. A couple of years later the business exited strongly, and it thrives to this day. I am genuinely proud of that. But I want to be honest about the middle: it was a very difficult period, and it didn't get any easier with competence. It stayed present, at full intensity, the whole way through. Fear and exhilaration were the ride. Nobody rides a lion calmly.

There is no dismount

Every leader I have accompanied through one of these passages arrives, sooner or later, at the same private fantasy: getting off. Resign. Sell. Hand it to someone better suited. Find the version of this where the ground stops moving. I had my own variations, some of them quite detailed.

The fantasy is human, and naming it takes some of its power away. But it runs into a hard fact: there is no dismount. The decision that mattered was made when you committed, and part of it was made long before that, by the leader who kept saying yes to bigger things. You are quite literally onto something. Nobody mentioned the teeth.

So the question changes shape. It was never whether to ride - that one is settled. The only question left is how you become the rider who is not devoured by the beast.

What actually changes

The burdens of leadership at this level do not get lighter. A surprising amount of suffering at senior levels comes from expecting that they eventually will - that there is a future version of the job where the lion has calmed down and the rider can relax. There isn’t.

Some people take one look at the lion and choose the fence instead: the safer role, the smaller ambition, a life that never demands more than they already have. It is a legitimate choice - it spares them the fear, and it forfeits the ride. But I am not writing this for them. I am writing for the leaders who were never going to settle, who wanted the ride and chose it and would choose it again with the fear fully baked in. If you have read this far, you already know which one you are.

And the world is not about to ease off: the requirement for transformation keeps coming again and again, closer together each time, and that is now the permanent condition of the job. What must change, and change substantially, is the capacity of the person carrying the burdens.

Churchill’s advice points the same way once you look at its structure: hell, in his words, is somewhere you keep moving through. You don’t have to live there. The leaders who build the most capacity are rarely the ones who found a route around difficulty. They are the ones who moved through it - repeatedly, and all the way through - and came out each time with a slightly larger window of tolerance.

Neither bored nor eaten

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (try typing that without looking it up!) studied the state where challenge and skill meet, and called it Flow1: full immersion in work that stretches your abilities right at their edge. Athletes call it being in the zone. Too much challenge for the skill and you get anxiety, sliding toward panic. Too much skill for the challenge and you get boredom, sliding toward stagnation. Flow lives in the channel between the two - and the channel moves. As skill grows, it takes a bigger challenge to reach the same state.

This reframes the pressure. A certain amount of it is the impetus for growth - nothing alive can grow without load. But it turns toxic when it is unrelenting and unmatched by the skill and confidence to meet it. Diamonds are made under extreme pressure. Living things get squashed.

Nobody stays in the flow channel permanently. There will be stretches of boredom and stretches of genuine overload; the work is to keep both short, and to keep returning to the place where challenge and capacity meet. And a lion, on the day you mount it, is a long way outside anybody’s channel. Riding it feels optimal for nothing except a quick, messy death. The project of this passage is to grow until that stops being true.

How the strength gets built

Managing pressure and building capacity are different projects: managing keeps you on the lion today; building changes whether you get to stay on it.

Capacity is built one way: by being in the difficult conditions long enough for your nervous system to adapt to them. The management consultancy where I started my career called these CBEs - character building experiences. The trick, naturally, is to avoid the CDEs, the character destroying experiences.

That means getting exposure the system can actually metabolise: full contact with the reality of the ride, with enough regulation and enough recovery that the experience gets processed rather than merely endured. Pushing harder was never the mechanism, and neither is gritting your way through on willpower and calling it growth.

And the adaptation is never only cognitive - you cannot think your way through this. The strength you need on a lion’s back lives in the whole system: the body that has to stay regulated when the animal lurches, the relationships that keep you honest and resourced, the structures around you that either hold under load or add to it. Train one layer and you get a stronger idea of yourself. Train the whole system and you get a stronger self.

Strength transfers from one passage to the next only when a passage is actually completed.

The lions get bigger

Every business I have started or led since the payments years has felt the same way. Different sector, different model, different stakes - the same felt signature: fear and exhilaration arriving together, the ground moving, the ride demanding more than I had comfortably available. My capabilities were genuinely stronger each time. The challenges were different, and often bigger. I got better at lion riding. But the lions got bigger, and sometimes scarier too.

If that sounds like a bad deal, it is at least a deal of your own making - mine, in my case, five times over. The point is, it does not mean the work has failed, or that you made a mistake getting on this beast. The fear never stopped arriving. What changed - slowly, through exposure, in the body more than in the head - was my relationship with it. The fear takes up less of the available room now, and more of it shows up as excitement than dread. I can now hear other things over it: the people, the business, and feel the rhythm of it, rather than my prediction of the next lurch. That is what capacity growth feels like. The lion is bigger. But the rider is stronger.

Where this leaves you

You are still on its back. So am I - a different lion these days, with its own ideas. That is the honest picture of leadership through transformation: no arrival at a tamer animal, no future in which the ride settles into something a committee could sign off. The animal stays wild. The demands stay heavy. And you - if you do this passage fully, with your whole system in it - get stronger in a way no calmer decade could have built.

The lion under you is alive and powerful, and it was never going to be tamed. It turns out you weren’t either.

Next: the ride is heavy. Time to find out what you’re actually carrying.

New to this series? Here is the map

I learned a central lesson of this series in the water, decades before I had language for any of it.

Body surfing is wave riding stripped to nothing. No board, no leash, nothing between you and the sea. No equipment except a pair of fins. You swim out past the break at the bottom of Africa, into water cold enough to concentrate the mind, and you wait, reading the swell rolling up from a horizon with nothing behind it but Antarctica. When your wave stands up, you swim - hard, flat out - and at the exact moment it lifts you, you put your head down and throw your whole body forward, down a face you cannot see the bottom of.

That last part is the lesson. Everything before it is just swimming.

The physics of catching the wave

Body surfing can go one of four ways.

Full commitment: you match the wave’s speed, drop your head, put your weight down the face, and the wave takes over. You’ve caught it. You are suddenly moving faster than you could ever swim, carried by a power that was never yours.

No commitment: you duck the wave. You dive under the face as it arrives, deep, and all that power passes over you as a tug at your ankles. You surface behind it into open foamy water. When the surf is at its biggest this is the right call - trying to go over a big dumper that is already breaking gets you dumped. Hard. The clue is in the name.

Commitment with bad timing: you give it everything and the wave is not where you are - it stood up late, or you went early, and it rolls on towards the beach without you. A lot of hard swimming for nothing. Your pride and your reserves knocked a little. You catch your breath and read the next wave with a little more experience.

Half commitment: the worst of the four. You go for it, then chicken out inside the moment - just enough to be taken by the wave, but no longer committed enough to ride it. The wave picks you up, holds you in the lip for one long weightless moment, and then delivers its verdict.

I was around twelve when the sea first explained this to me properly, at Grotto Beach on a big spring tide. A wave stood up in front of me, bigger than I wanted. I went for it, and halfway into the catch I changed my mind - pulled my head up, leaned back, tried to un-choose. The wave had not been consulted about the revision. It picked me up, folded me in half, and smacked me into the seabed face-first. I surfaced coughing, carrying a fair percentage of the beach inside my swimming trunks, rattled and hoping nobody saw my embarrassing (albeit spectacular) wipeout.

Leaning back feels like the safe option. In the water it is one of the worst things you can do. The sea forgives commitment, even mistimed commitment, and it forgives the duck. It reserves its violence for the hesitant.

The wave you’re already on

If you’ve been reading this series, you know the terrain by now. The transformation is underway - not the planned one, not the tidy one that was supposed to be finished by this quarter. The one actually happening. You are not standing on the beach weighing your options. You’re out in the deep water, and the wave is standing up in front of you. That lifting sensation, the loss of the familiar bottom underfoot - that is what all the disorientation has been.

And the instinct, this whole time, has been to drive it. Set the pace, steer the outcome, make it go where the plan said it would. The sea is unambiguous on this point. Nobody drives a wave. You catch one, at the moment it offers, or you don’t.

This series has carried a trapeze with it from the start - the release, the flight, the catch. It remains the right image for how singular the moment feels. But I learned the physics somewhere wetter and much earlier, and the sea holds one advantage over the circus: it repeats the lesson every thirty seconds until you get it.

What leaning forward is

Full-body commitment to the transformation already underway. The one that started when the old approach stopped working, whether or not you had signed off on it. Leaning forward means orienting toward what is emerging rather than what is already gone - weight forward, attention forward, committed to the direction without gripping a particular outcome. It is a choice, and it is made physically, moment by moment, for as long as the passage lasts.

Effort belongs in this picture too. Pushing harder doesn’t work. Force is the wrong instrument in this terrain, and more of it makes things worse. Leaning forward adds no force. It changes where the existing weight is carried.

So does waiting. There is a difference between procrastination and the capacity to not act - between bleeding the discomfort off into the nearest available activity and staying inside it with your eyes open. Leaning forward lives on the far side of that line. It is what the staying is for. Oriented. A sprinter in the blocks is doing nothing you could point to, and nobody would call them idle.

Between frantic movement and passive waiting there is a third position, and it is the one this whole passage has been asking for: present, open, committed. That is the lean forward.

The right wave

But how do you know this one is worth it? What if you give everything to the wrong wave?

That question is where the paralysis lives. Not in the committing but upstream of it, in the choosing. Fear of the mistake keeps more people treading water than the sea ever has. Wave after wave stands up, steepens, and rolls forward onto the beach, and each one declined feels like good judgement. And then the tide turns, the water goes flat, and you are too cold and tired to keep swimming.

Look back at the four outcomes - the fear is aimed at the wrong target. Commit fully to the wrong wave and the result probably is still a ride. Not the ride of the day, but a ride - an ordinary wave fully committed to carries you anyway, because commitment is half of what makes a wave catchable at all. Mistime it and the wave goes without you: effort spent, pride dented, nothing broken, a little wiser. The wholehearted mistake is the cheaper one - it comes out as a ride or a lesson. The expensive one is the wave you go for without meaning it.

The duck deserves the same honesty. Sometimes it is the right thing to do - when the wave would break you rather than carry you, going deep is the wise call. But the duck is a commitment too, made all the way, with your whole body, and what passes over you with the danger is the ride itself - the growth the moment was offering, the responsibility it was asking you to take. And treading water is not the duck - that’s just a cop out.

The honest answer is that you can never know fully. This series began there. The gap of the messy middle has no guarantee in it, and analysis does not close it. Faith is a standing requirement in this terrain, not a phase you graduate out of. The reward for solving hard problems really is harder problems.

But the sea trains something that analysis cannot. Spend enough time in the water and you develop a felt sense of what a catchable wave is - the particular way the water draws back beneath you, the pitch of the face, the lift arriving through your chest before any thought has formed.

Body surfing is different from riding a board. You are in the wave rather than on it, part of it, its energy moving through you, and everything happens more slowly - slow enough to feel the wave properly, to appreciate it, occasionally to notice a penguin riding it alongside you (yes, really). That knowledge lives below the neck. It is built through exposure and nothing else, and it is the thing you actually commit to - a felt sense, not a forecast. And it works as a whole or not at all - commit to it half-arsed and you are back in the lip, about to be body-slammed into the sand.

If there is one confirmation the sea offers, it arrives only after the commitment. The power. When the wave is right and the timing is right, its power comes through you, and you know in your muscles that this was the one. You are quite literally onto something. It does not mean the ride will be smooth, or that everything from here goes well. It means you have found power beyond your own. In this terrain, that is the only confirmation on offer. It is the one that counts.

Why halfway is the expensive option

The body already knows all of this. Sustained uncertainty does a number on the nervous system, and one detail from that argument matters here: the nervous system does not stand down on a promise. It stands down on evidence.

One foot in each world reads, biologically, as threat unresolved. The pilot project run at half conviction. The new direction announced and hedged in the same breath. The old identity kept warm in the wardrobe, just in case. Each of these tells your own physiology that the danger is still live, and the nervous system obliges by staying activated - burning reserves, narrowing attention, degrading exactly the judgement the passage requires. Hesitation is not a neutral middle setting. It is the most expensive state available, invoiced daily, in the currency you have least of.

The physics in the water and the physiology in the body agree. Halfway costs more than all the way.

The threshold

Joseph Campbell spent a career tracing a single story through every culture that ever told one1. The shape repeats across thousands of years and every continent: the hero crosses a threshold without knowing what is on the other side. The story is not withholding the far side for suspense. The not-knowing is structural. If you could see the other side, there would be no threshold - just a doorway, and no one was ever transformed by a doorway. The crossing itself is where the change happens. The hero who returns is different from the one who left, and the difference was made in the passage, not at the destination.

The wave makes this almost embarrassingly literal. From the water, you cannot see over the wave that is about to break. There is a moving wall in front of you and no information behind it. You commit down a face whose bottom is hidden by the very thing that is carrying you. Every ride starts blind. What the ride is becomes known only to the people already on it.

The last freedom

Viktor Frankl wrote2, about circumstances that make every leadership difficulty look insignificant, that the last of the human freedoms is “to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances”. The setting he wrote from is part of the point. If the freedom held there, it holds everywhere.

You did not choose the sea’s mood this morning. The swell arriving at the tip of Africa was made by storms thousands of kilometres south, days ago, in weather you never saw. What is yours is the response. Frankl’s word for this was meaning: the decision that the passage is worth completing, that what lies on the other side matters enough to warrant what the crossing costs. Leaders who locate meaning in the difficulty, through it rather than around it, move differently inside it. Not more comfortably, but differently. Weight forward, attention out, spending themselves on the ride rather than having an argument with the wave.

Head down

So here it is, in the language the sea taught me. The swim out is done. The wave has stood up. You felt the swell weeks or months ago. The wave is chosen - whether or not you noticed yourself choosing. What remains is the one part the wave cannot do for you.

Go for it with all you have. Head down. Weight forward. All of it.

And then the part no amount of standing on the beach can teach: the wave takes your weight, and you are moving with a power that was never yours and is briefly, completely, at your service - carried, at speed, by the very thing you spent the whole swim out fearing. That is what the other side of the threshold feels like. No one has ever felt it from the beach. That is not a flaw in the design.

Next: Catching it was the start. The thing you’re riding is alive.

New to this series? Here is the map

There will be another one.

Whatever this particular messy middle is asking of you - whichever chapter is ending, whichever version of you is being renegotiated - another is already forming somewhere ahead, indifferent to how thoroughly you handle this one. I have counted mine. Thirty-three years, five ventures, a run of role changes I won’t reconstruct here, and the honest tally is: more than I recognised at the time.

For most of my career, I treated each of these passages as a one-off. Local weather. A hard patch with its own specific causes - this market, that partnership, the particular wrongness of that year. It took me an embarrassingly long time to notice that the hard patches shared a shape, and that the shape was telling me something the individual episodes never could.

Growth has a structure

Charles Handy’s sigmoid curve explains it best: everything that grows moves in S-curves, and the moment to begin the next curve arrives before the current one has finished. The corollary got less attention. If growth happens in curves, and curves end, then the gap between curves is not an interruption to the structure. It is part of the structure. Every jump from one curve to the next produces a middle. There is no version of a sustained, healthy, growing life that routes around them - only versions that pass through more or fewer of them, in better or worse condition.

Which changes what this passage is. Not an event that has happened to you, but a recurring feature of how growth is built. The disorientation of the messy middle has been on the map the whole time. You simply hadn’t been shown the map, and almost nobody is. We hand leaders the ascending part of the curve as the whole story and let them discover the gaps by falling into them.

The gaps are getting closer together

Handling transitions well is now a leadership-critical skill. The pace of change is only getting faster and more compressed. Cycles that once arrived every decade now arrive stacked, several at once. Unfinished work behaves differently under that timetable.

When passages came a decade apart, you could leave one incomplete and get away with it for a long time. There was fallow ground between them - years of ordinary operation in which whatever you hadn’t dealt with could sit hidden in the structure without being loaded. Compression removes the fallow ground. The next passage now arrives before the last one is settled, so the question is no longer whether you will carry unfinished work forward. It is how much of it you will be carrying when the next middle opens underneath you, and how many passages deep the pile goes.

Leaders today are not weaker or less capable than the generation before them; the terrain simply stopped scheduling recovery time between the hard parts.

What travels forward

The body carries the unprocessed weight of previous passages. Seth Godin’s The Dip1 supplies the structural half of that argument.

Seth maps three kinds of terrain. The dip is the long, hard stretch that follows starting anything worth doing - novelty gone, results not yet arrived - and it is worth crossing precisely because it is hard: the difficulty thins the field, and the value lives on the far side. The cul-de-sac is a dead end: more effort, no more progress. The cliff holds up right until you fall off its edge. Seth’s argument was never don’t quit. Winners quit constantly - the wrong things, early, without sentiment - so that everything they have is available for the dips that matter.

So, which kind of curve are you on? A curve past its peak, where the effort is real, and the progress has stopped, is a cul-de-sac. Ridden long enough, it becomes the cliff. In both cases, you should let it go and start the next one. A new curve that isn’t delivering yet, where the work is hard, and the results are still ahead, is a dip. Stay. A messy middle holds both at once - one curve ending, another barely begun - which is why both of Seth’s warnings apply at once: against gripping what is already finished, and against quitting what has only just started.

Seth spends less time on what the choice does to the chooser, though he notes in passing: quit in every dip and you become a serial quitter, good at starting and exceptional at nothing. Quit inside a genuine dip and you learn an exit; the next one finds you already knowing where your door is, and the door gets easier to use each time, at earlier points, for better reasons. Complete the crossing and something different compounds: you begin to know what a dip feels like from the inside, and its texture stops looking like evidence of failure and starts looking like information about where you are. The passage ends either way. What it leaves behind in you does not.

A lesson from the workshop

Quitting a dip rarely looks like downing tools, though, and I am not writing this for people who would ever consider themselves quitters. It usually looks like effort redirected to an easier layer of the problem, and my clearest lesson in that came from my workshop, where timber gives you feedback on a timescale a career never does.

Some years ago, I built a pair of Adirondack chairs - beautiful ones, the kind of project you keep going out to look at. They are the ones in the photo at the top of this post. I built them in softwood, and I knew perfectly well that softwood and a life outdoors are a poor match. I answered that knowledge the way I have answered it in more places than my workshop: with protection. Stainless steel screws and fittings. Coat after coat of marine varnish - the chairs were better protected than some boats. Every coat was, if I’m honest, an acknowledgement of the decision sitting underneath it.

They stood outside looking magnificent (even if I have to say so myself). Then this summer, my daughter and a friend of hers sat down on them and found the seat slats completely rotten. The rot had been working for seasons, quietly underneath the varnish. Water had found its way in the way water does - through end grain, through the screw holes, through the hairline cracks that open as timber moves - and the sealed surface that was meant to keep the weather out had been holding the moisture in. The stainless screws were immaculate. The wood they were fastened to was gone. The failure arrived exactly where the original decision lived, under the most ordinary load a chair will ever meet, and not one coat of that varnish had touched it.

The softwood was never really the problem. Softwood is honest about what it is. The pattern was in my hands, and it was there twice: first at the timber rack, where I chose the wood that was easier to work over the wood an outdoor life would demand, and then at the bench, where protecting that choice was always quicker and cheaper than correcting it. The same move at two moments - skip the fundamental work, then defend the skip. A quit that never looked like one - I never stopped working on those chairs. That is what travels forward. Not the chairs. The habit of the maker.

Recognition compounds

Naming the passage - knowing it has a structure and a way through - is the first-order gain. There is a second-order gain that only becomes available with repetition.

Cross this terrain once, properly and awake to it, and you recognise it sooner the next time. The early signals stop being mysterious: the particular quality of the disorientation, the familiar failure of tools that have always worked, the body’s early reports no longer ignored. In the workshop, the equivalent is questioning the choice of timber before the first cut, when changing your mind costs a trip back to the merchant rather than the whole piece rotting several years later.

Recognition doesn’t soften the passage. It changes when you know you are in one, and in a compressed world, when is nearly everything. The leader who recognises the middle in its second month is playing a different game from the one who recognises it in its fourteenth, with twelve months of pushing harder already spent. The middle takes what it takes; entering it knowingly means you stop paying the toll for entering it blind.

The identity of a learner

Carol Dweck’s research on Mindset2 usually reaches leaders flattened into a poster-ready platitude - believe you can improve. Her finding underneath is sharper. What Dweck documented is a difference in what difficulty is read as evidence of. For one orientation, difficulty is a verdict: proof that a limit has been reached, that the competence was never as deep as advertised. For the other, difficulty is the terrain where development happens - the working part of the process, doing what it is supposed to do.

Same passage. Two entirely different experiences of it, driven by the interpretation rather than the facts.

This is where Godin and Dweck meet. What decides whether to quit or complete in the dip is rarely the objective difficulty. It is what the difficulty is taken to mean. And for senior leaders, the fixed interpretation is an occupational hazard rather than a character flaw: decades of demonstrated competence is a machine for fusing competence with identity, and a messy middle threatens precisely the fused part. The identity will defend itself. The point here is more specific: the leaders for whom these passages compound are the ones who have found a way, under real pressure and not just in principle, to read the difficulty as curriculum.

Recurring education

What gets built inside a properly completed passage - the tolerance for not knowing, the ability to keep functioning under sustained uncertainty, the willingness to set things down - transfers. It is the same muscle next time, on a different playing field. Leaders who navigate these passages well do not get fewer of them. But they meet each one with more than they brought to the last.

You don’t have to start already loaded each time. That is the offer. The curves will keep coming, closer together rather than further apart, and each one will open a middle, and each middle will ask a version of what this one is asking now. Whether that arrives as recurring punishment or recurring education gets decided here, inside this one. The pattern is in the hands. Train it deliberately, or it trains itself.

Next: a map gets you to the threshold. Crossing it is a different kind of act.

New to this series? Here is the map

The instinct makes complete sense. That’s what makes it difficult.

When pressure increases, the operational response is automatic: more effort, more intensity, more of whatever has worked reliably until now. You didn’t build a career by stepping back when things got hard. You built it by finding another gear when everyone else wanted to stop. The version of you that got this far runs on that engine. The engine is good.

Which is why the suggestion that pushing harder is the wrong move initially lands as something between scepticism and irritation. You’ve been through hard things before. Hard work is what got you through them. And if the current approach isn’t working yet, the more plausible explanation is that you haven’t fully applied it - not that the approach itself is the problem.

I have made that case to myself more than once. The fact that I’m writing this essay is some indication of how it held up.

The force that opposes the work

Steven Pressfield calls it Resistance1.

Active, directed, and internal - Pressfield’s argument is that Resistance originates in the gap between the life you are currently living and the one the transformation is asking you to step into. The bigger that gap, the more organised the opposition. Which means it is at its most powerful exactly when the work is most important - when the stakes of the passage are highest, when the distance between where you are and where you need to go is greatest.

In a messy middle, it looks like reason.

Resistance knows your strengths and turns them on you. It presents itself in the specific language of your competence. The urgency instinct - which has served you well, which has made you the person people call when something actually needs resolving - suddenly surfaces with a list of things that cannot wait. The problem-solving drive finds a set of problems that look exactly like the ones you know how to fix. The bias toward action, which has always distinguished you from the people who hesitate, interprets stillness as failure and reframes any pause as risk.

All of it is legitimate leadership work. All of it, in Pressfield’s frame, is Resistance.

The team needs direction. The Exco needs a narrative. The decisions that have been waiting can’t wait any longer. There are real things that need doing, and doing them is not just defensible - it’s responsible. Every word of this is plausible. Most of it is true.

Ask what function the reasons are serving. If the activity keeps you from turning toward the actual work - the identity question, the unresolved uncertainty, the thing you already know but haven’t yet been willing to sit with - it is Resistance, regardless of how legitimate it looks on the surface, and regardless of how hard you are working while it runs.

Resistance puts you to (busy)work - at the thing that fills the space, at full intensity, with your best qualities, in exactly the direction that leaves the actual work untouched. Sisyphus was condemned to an eternity of something similar, with fewer meetings.

Why the tools stop working

The qualities that carried you here - decisiveness, the ability to sustain effort past the point where others quit, the forward motion that holds a team together in difficulty - are real. On an ascending curve, they’re often exactly what the moment requires.

In a messy middle, the curve is not ascending.

The terrain has changed, and the tools haven’t. Decisiveness applied under genuine uncertainty at an inflection point cuts off information before there’s enough of it to act on. Drive aimed in a direction that needs to shift reinforces the wrong trajectory. The forward motion that built the career burns energy at a rate the conditions can’t replace, and the conditions are already running the nervous system in the red.

The trap is subtle because the effort is real. You are working hard. The calendar confirms it. The exhaustion at the end of the day is not imaginary. What the calendar doesn’t confirm is whether any of this is changing the situation. The activity is genuine. The forward motion is, in some structural sense, sideways.

I had a period, several years into a career that had mostly rewarded more-and-faster, where I applied the same logic to my own professional reinvention. The thinking was: if this is a passage I need to get through, the correct approach is to get through it efficiently. Research, structured reflection, clear goals, a plan. I gave it the same quality of focused attention I’d bring to any challenging situation. And I was, for the record, thoroughly miserable.

A peer who’d watched me closely eventually made an observation that I found moderately unwelcome at the time. I was trying to manage a transition the way you’d run a project. Specific, deliverable, on a timeline. Which would have been useful if that were the nature of what I was doing. All the activity was producing something that felt like progress and wasn’t. I sat with that observation for a bit, conceded the point with some reluctance, and then spent another few months doing more or less the same thing anyway, because old habits have good lawyers.

What the inner game reveals

Tim Gallwey famously studied the gap between what a tennis player is capable of and what they actually produce when it counts2. More instruction didn’t close the gap. More practice sometimes made it worse. His finding, which arrived as a simple equation, was this: performance is potential minus interference.

The interference, in his frame, is almost entirely self-generated. The judging mind - the one narrating each choice in real time, comparing current performance to some internal standard, predicting the next failure from the last one - actively degrades the quality of what it’s watching. The commentary produces what it’s supposedly trying to prevent.

For leaders, this lands somewhere more uncomfortable than tennis. The constant monitoring of the passage - the self-assessment against where you ought to be by now, the scrutiny of every decision for signs that the approach is working, the second-guessing that runs as background noise through every meeting - is the load itself. The leader who cannot stop managing the process of transition is doing to their own thinking exactly what Gallwey’s anxious player does to their own game: generating interference in the shape of overthinking and over-efforting.

Which produces a specifically unwelcome implication: the harder you try to resolve this, the more of your capacity you consume in the trying, and the worse it gets.

The identity defending itself

Herminia Ibarra’s observation - that identity is built through action, not designed in advance - runs deeper here than it first appears. The next version of the leader, the role, the organisation - whichever transition is underway - doesn’t run on the same engine as the previous one. Which means some of what the pushing is protecting is a story you’ve been telling about who you are, for long enough that the story and the self have become difficult to separate. Setting that story down, even partially, even experimentally, doesn’t feel like making room for something new. It feels exactly like giving something up, as it should, and that is the passage working correctly.

The thing you’re avoiding by pushing harder - the uncertainty, the exposure, the not-knowing - doesn’t reduce under increased activity. It accumulates. The harder the push, the more the noise. The more the noise, the harder the push. This loop runs automatically until something interrupts it.

The loop runs until the system registers the cost. That’s what breaks it.

One question

What would it look like to stop pushing - not to stop working, but to stop the specific quality of forced efforting that is currently running the show - and start listening instead? To the moment. To what the situation is actually asking for underneath your response to it.

This is a genuine question. I’m not expecting an immediate answer, and I would be suspicious of one, as should you be. The useful version surfaces a moment later, with less urgency behind it, and without the certainty that marks a reflex rather than a considered response.

Gallwey’s equation is also the instruction: reduce the interference. Which requires knowing, accurately, what's generating it. In most cases it is the effort itself - the monitoring, the premature push toward resolution, the managed performance of someone who has it all handled. Withdrawing this interference is the work. It is more demanding than adding more, and considerably more precise.

Anyone who has spent decades being paid to make things happen will find that not a small adjustment. It is a different way of operating entirely. That’s kind of the point.

Next: these passages have a structure. Most people only see it from the far side.

New to this series? Here is the map

Richard Strozzi-Heckler1 has spent five decades making an argument that most leadership development still hasn’t caught up with. In his framework, the body is not simply a vehicle for the mind’s intentions. It is indistinguishable from the self. He calls it your shape - not just the posture you carry into a room, but the whole embodied pattern of how you think, feel, and respond under pressure, the physical contraction you default to when someone pushes back, the way you hold yourself when the stakes are high.

It is who you are. Not an output or symptom of who you are as a leader. The thing itself.

I find this stops people in their tracks when they let it land. The implication is significant: the body is not the delivery mechanism for the mind’s decisions, but the site where those decisions either have access to their full intelligence or they don’t. That leadership - how you actually lead, not the theory of it - lives or dies in the body before it reaches anyone else.

And yet. Walk into most conversations about leadership and senior performance, and the body is still being treated as infrastructure. Something to maintain well enough that it doesn’t interrupt the cognitive operation running on top of it. The physical signals - the jaw that won’t release, the breath that’s shallower than it should be, the pulled-up shoulders, the quality of sleep that’s technically fine but from which you don’t quite emerge rested - are treated as background noise from a system that doesn’t understand the strategic situation. Just stress. To be managed. Addressed later, when things settle.

The moment you start talking about the body in a leadership context, a category arrives that tends to close people down. Wellness. Mindfulness. Breathwork. Some version of getting in touch with your feelings, probably involving a workshop, possibly a gong.

I confess that I arrived at this work as a fairly unreconstructed sceptic - the kind of person who, when invited to “drop into his body” for the first time, mostly wanted to drop out of the room. I am not knocking any of it. The most transformational work I’ve personally encountered lives in that territory. But that is not what I am describing here, and I don’t want the category to get in the way of the argument.

There are no crystals in this essay. No protocol, no instruction to scan yourself with compassionate awareness, no invitation to love yourself more than you currently do. What I’m describing is biology - documented, well-researched, clinically grounded biology of what happens to a mammal’s nervous system under sustained unresolved pressure. The issues are in the tissues is not a wellness slogan. It is a fairly accurate summary of what van der Kolk, Levine, Maté, and a generation of somatic researchers have been showing us for thirty years2.

The assumption underneath all of this is that the mind runs the show - that thoughts, feelings, and decisions are generated upstairs and then handed down to the body for implementation. The neuroscience doesn’t support this, and once you see what it actually says, the infrastructure model doesn’t just seem inadequate. It seems backwards.

Your thoughts and emotions are your interpretation of your physical sensations

Most of the communication travelling along the vagus nerve - the primary channel between body and brain - is afferent. It moves upward from body to brain. The brain is not broadcasting to the body. It is, in the main, receiving reports from it and constructing its best interpretation of what those reports mean. Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work3 on how emotions are built makes this precise: what you experience as a feeling - anxiety, certainty, dread, the sudden feeling that something is wrong - is not a raw signal from some deep emotional centre. It is the brain’s current best guess at what the body is reporting - heart rate, muscle tension, breath pattern, the state of the gut - based on your past experience.

Which means that when you treat the physical signals as background noise to be managed around, you are not filtering out interference. You are discarding a primary source of the intelligence you need to lead. The mind that ignores what the body reports is not running at full capacity. It is running on a fraction of the available signal and calling the rest distraction.

You can run a version of this experiment in your next meeting that matters. Notice what your body is doing before you say anything - where the weight is, whether the chest is open or contracted, whether you’re actually breathing or quietly holding. Then shift. Sit fully into the chair. Let the shoulders drop. Take a breath that reaches the bottom of the lungs. Notice what becomes available in your thinking that wasn’t quite there a moment before. This is not a mindfulness exercise. It’s an empirical test of how embodiment works. Your body’s shape changed, your nervous system state changed, the quality of what’s accessible changed. That’s the mechanism, running in real time.

What the body actually does with unresolved pressure

Bessel van der Kolk’s work - decades of it, with patients carrying acute and complex trauma at the severe end of what humans experience - lands on a deceptively simple observation: the body keeps the score. Not metaphorically. As a literal description of what the nervous system does with experience it cannot complete. It stores it in muscle tension, in postural pattern, in the specific quality of hypervigilance that activates when something in the room shifts in a way you can’t quite name.

His clinical population is not yours. But the mechanism is. The nervous system doesn’t maintain a separate, gentler architecture reserved for professional pressure - it uses the same equipment for sustained uncertainty at work as it does for acute threat. The difference is degree, not kind. Which means the same process of storage and accumulation that van der Kolk documented at the extreme end is running, at lower intensity but across much longer time periods, in the leader sitting in that board meeting or carrying that investor relationship. Chronic and cumulative does its own work on a nervous system. The body keeps that score too.

Peter Levine approaches the mechanism from a different angle. Animals in the wild complete the stress cycle: activation, response, physical discharge, return to baseline. The gazelle that gets chased by a lion and escapes will, quite literally, shake. The activation moves through the body and leaves. Humans don’t do this. We activate, we manage, we get back to the email thread, and we carry forward what the body never got to finish. Not as a character flaw. As a consequence of operating in environments that require us to interrupt the cycle, repeatedly, across years.

The cost of this accumulation is not abstract. Under chronic activation, the nervous system shifts its operating mode: time horizon shortens, cognitive flexibility reduces, the prefrontal cortex, where the considered thinking lives, becomes less accessible. The system is solving the wrong problem - keeping you safe from immediate threat in conditions that require something considerably more nuanced. Which means that the leader who most needs full access to their judgement, in the messy middle of a transition, is running with a nervous system working against them.

The bill is heavier than you think

The body isn’t keeping score only on the current season.

Every previous transition where you kept moving before the last thing was properly set down. Every identity that was left behind in a hurry, rather than released with any kind of care. Every period of sustained difficulty that ended - or appeared to end - without being genuinely completed. Every feeling that got named long enough to be filed and then set aside because the next thing was already at the door.

The body holds all of it. Not as memory - as tension. As the place where you go quiet in a particular kind of conversation. As the reaction to some minor issue that is way out of proportion. As the braced quality you carry into certain relationships, years later, with no conscious explanation for it. As the pattern that shows up under pressure that has nothing to do with the current situation and everything to do with one you didn’t quite finish.

Gabor Maté’s clinical work adds a harder edge: the accumulated account, carried long enough without resolution, doesn’t just show up as tension or reduced performance. The body stops whispering and starts insisting. Physical illness shows up as the consequence of long-term suppression and unresolved stress.

Your nervous system is always reading the room

Deb Dana’s application of Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory4 adds something I think is genuinely underappreciated: the nervous system is not primarily a stress-response mechanism. It is a social organ. Below the threshold of conscious awareness, it is reading the relational environment constantly - tracking safety, connection, whether you are genuinely seen by the people around you. Under sustained uncertainty, and particularly under uncertainty carried alone or in the presence of relationships that feel risky rather than supportive, it settles into one of two states that leaders rarely identify correctly.

The first is hyperactivation. It feels like urgency - a fizzy, electrical quality, the pull toward action and decision and resolution right now. It can carry a faint irritability just below the surface, a difficulty sitting with ambiguity, a sense that staying on top of everything is the only thing keeping the situation stable. It can pass, and often does, for drive, engagement, high performance. From the inside, it frequently feels like competence.

The second is shutdown - the polyvagal system’s other defensive state. This one is considerably harder to catch. It presents as a kind of professional flatness: measured, consistent, unflappable. The person in it is functional, often impressively so. What’s missing is harder to name - a quality of genuine engagement, the ability to care about things they know they should care about, the sense of being fully present rather than slightly watching from a distance. Fatigue that doesn’t resolve with rest is a common companion. My wife calls this survival mode. It can look like composure. It isn’t.

The body is signalling in both states. The difficulty is that both signals have a professional disguise, and it is usually convincing enough that the person wearing it believes it, too. The people you lead can often see it better than you can.

The difference between management and capacity

Almost everything intelligent, self-aware leaders bring to sustained pressure is a management strategy. Sleep helps. Exercise helps. Holidays from which you return to the same conditions help less than they should. None of this is wrong. It’s just that management and capacity-building are different things, and what the messy middle requires is the latter.

Management is the intellectual distance you maintain from the emotional content of a hard period. The conversation you have about the situation rather than inside it. The reframe that leaves you feeling better without quite touching the underlying stuff. Compartmentalisation so refined it barely registers as a choice. All of these reduce the visible symptoms. None of them address the underlying account, which continues to grow while you are managing it.

I became genuinely skilled at this. I could sit opposite someone and give a thoughtful, reasonably candid account of a hard period - not without self-awareness - while remaining, at the level that matters, essentially untouched by it. I used to call this emotional intelligence. My (long suffering) therapist just called it armour. Not easy to hear but spot on, as she usually is.

The appeal of management is real, and I want to be careful not to dismiss it. It works. It gets you through. The problem is structural: the strategies that were sufficient at one level of demand become insufficient at the next, and the gap between what’s being asked and what’s genuinely available narrows, almost imperceptibly, across years. Which is why high performers who have managed well for a long time sometimes arrive at a passage like this one genuinely confused by how exhausted they feel. The discipline hasn’t slipped. The inputs are the same. The output is different. What’s changed is that the account has grown larger than the management strategy can contain.

Building capacity is a different operation entirely. It means allowing the nervous system to complete what it has been carrying half-finished - not by forcing it to tolerate more through determination, but by staying present inside the discomfort long enough for it to process rather than store. This is slower, less linear, and considerably less productive-looking than what you are used to. It does not have the satisfying shape of a problem solved. This is what “the only way out is through” means when you strip the motivational poster off it - not as encouragement, but as nervous system mechanics. The activation that isn’t discharged travels forward. The passage that is stayed with, fully, without performance and without premature resolution, actually builds new range. Completed in this sense, it becomes available in the next hard season rather than arriving as baggage.

You cannot think your way to this. You cannot optimise or plan your way to it. The body requires something more physical, more patient, and a whole lot less impressive than most of what has constituted your professional life until now. I continue to find this somewhat annoying, which is probably information. The very qualities that have made you effective - forward motion, cognitive mastery, the preference for resolution over uncertainty - are precisely what this asks you to set down.

Which is, candidly, a harder ask for the kind of person reading this than almost anything else I have said so far.

What gets carried forward

Leaders who reach the next S-curve carrying the unprocessed weight of previous passages arrive already loaded. This is why the pattern recurs - not because something is wrong with the person, but because the body brings forward whatever wasn’t completed.

The opposite is also true, and it matters. Each passage that is genuinely worked through - somatically, not just cognitively - adds range. The body that has learned to carry this particular weight, and has processed rather than suppressed it, can carry more. Not infinitely more, and not without cost, but more than it could before.

Completed transitions become capacity. Unfinished ones become cargo.

The score the body is keeping is not a punishment. It’s an accurate account. And accounts, eventually, have to be settled.

Next: the qualities that carried you this far haven't stopped working. They've just changed sides.

New to this series? Here is the map

Last time we got as far as the word. Not stuck - lost. Already moving, already committed, just unable to read the landmarks. If that landed, there’s a fair chance it dragged a second thought along behind it, quieter and a good deal less welcome.

If I’m lost, then I got myself lost.

Yes. You did. And I want to spend this whole piece on that one sentence, because it is the most hopeful thing I can say to you - and because it almost never feels that way from the inside.

The verdict you’ve already passed

Somewhere in the middle of a hard passage, capable people pass a secret verdict on themselves. It doesn’t announce itself. It settles in late, usually once the room has emptied out.

I should have seen this coming.

And underneath it, a worse one. I shouldn’t be here at all. A more careful person would have read the signs and gone around. The fact that you didn’t, and that you’re now somewhere foggy and exposed with no clear way through, looks like proof of some failure of judgement far enough back that you can’t even locate it to apologise for it.

I know that verdict well. I’ve handed it down to myself more than once, usually around three in the morning, with tremendous conviction and no evidence whatsoever. It’s a tidy story. It’s also, in nearly every case I’ve sat with - my own firmly included - wrong.

Because the people who end up here are not the cautious ones who stayed where it was safe. They’re the ones who moved. Who took the role that was a stretch, started the thing that might not work, said yes to the harder problem when an easier one was right there for the taking. You didn’t back into this. You walked in, on purpose, carrying more than most people would ever agree to pick up.

My earliest version of it still makes me wince. I started a mechanical engineering degree knowing it was the wrong choice for me. I told my parents as much before the first lecture, then went anyway, because a full scholarship is a persuasive argument for overruling yourself. I performed exactly as predicted. Then came the part that matters: I switched to business and computer science, my parents backed the change - to their great credit, since it meant repaying the scholarship - and the new degree paid off. The verdict says I should have seen it coming. I had seen it coming. Seeing it was never the problem. Authoring the correction was the part I had to learn, and it’s the part that counts.

How you got here

You were good at this. That’s the uncomfortable part. Not lucky - good. You read situations other people misread. You made calls under pressure, and they held. People followed you into things they couldn’t fully see because you were credible and, often enough, right. I am reminded of one hypergrowth stretch of my own: in charge of scaling operations while we went from seventy to over two hundred people, and tripled revenue in just over two years. It felt like underpinning a skyscraper that was adding a new top floor each month. Half the calls during that period had to be held before there was time to check them properly. Most of them did.

The reward for solving hard problems is harder problems. You don’t reach a sunny plateau and get to stay on it. You get handed steeper ground than the last lot, again and again, precisely because you kept handling it. The difficulty of where you’re standing now isn’t a sign that something went wrong. It’s a fairly accurate measure of how far you’ve climbed under your own steam.

Cold comfort at three in the morning.

Why this is good news

Picture the alternative. Imagine you really were a passenger here - that this had simply happened to you. Bad weather. A market that turned. Someone else’s decision landing on your desk. If that were the true story, you’d be entitled to your despair, because a passenger has no hand on the controls. Things are done to them. All they can do is brace and hope the conditions change.

That isn’t your situation. You are not a passenger. You authored the decisions that brought you here, one after another, most of them sound. And if you wrote your way in, then the same capacity that did the writing is still in your hands. The agency that built this is the agency available to carry you through it.

That’s the hope. Not that it’ll be easy, because it won’t be. Not that someone is coming to save you, because they’re not. The hope is that what this moment requires of you is not some quality you lack and have to go off and find. It’s the same quality you’ve been using all along.

A passenger waits for the weather. You’ve never been the passenger. This is a poor moment to start.

Herminia Ibarra spent years studying how senior leaders actually change - not how they plan to, but how they do it in practice. I found her work at business school and recognised my own first two career transitions in it immediately - I’d already been doing much of what she describes, without a name for it, well before I had her book in my hands. Her research1, stated simply, finds that identity doesn’t precede action. You don’t figure out who you need to become and then go and become it. You act your way into the new version, through experiments and moves that feel provisional while you’re making them. The reflection comes after. The clarity comes after. The person you’re becoming on the other side of this passage will be assembled from the decisions you make inside it, not designed in advance and then executed.

Which means the disorientation isn’t a problem to solve before you can start. It’s the condition under which the work gets done.

The bit nobody says out loud

There’s a feeling that comes with all this that is hard to name, least of all by the person having it.

Shame.

Not the loud kind. The low, background hum of it. The private sense that someone at your level, with your record, has no business sitting in this much uncertainty. That you ought to know what to do by now.

I’m a (recovering) perfectionist who saves his harshest reviews for himself. When I can’t immediately find my way through something, the first voice in my head isn’t curious or kind. It’s a critic with a clipboard and a bazooka, and it’s already drafting the verdict before I’ve taken a second look. The shame doesn’t make me work the problem better. It makes me hide that there’s a problem at all. And hiding it costs more than the thing it conceals, because now I’m carrying the difficulty and the performance of having no difficulty. Two loads where there was one.

The shame isn’t telling you the truth. It’s just the tax that capable people pay for never having been here before without an answer already in their pocket.

Agency, and the trap folded inside it

When the ground shifts, the instinct is to act. Do something. Respond, fix, reorganise, push. Action is how you’ve always met difficulty, and it has served you well. It also gives you a sensation that is very easy to confuse with progress: the feeling of being in control.

Sometimes that’s exactly right. Sometimes the moment needs a decision, and you’re the one who has to make it. But sometimes - and this is the bit that catches strong operators out - the action isn’t solving anything. It’s just keeping you busy enough not to feel what’s actually going on.

Joe Hudson has a great insight I return to often. Whatever we are avoiding emotionally, we are inviting into our lives, in the exact way we are avoiding it. He calls it the Golden Algorithm. In a messy middle, it works like this. The thing you’re avoiding is the loss of control - the not knowing, the exposure of having no map. So you reach for control: more activity, more plans, more motion. And you summon more of exactly what you feared. More noise. More depletion. More grip on the wheel, at the exact moment the situation was asking for something far less obvious than grip.

Anyone taught to drive properly knows this feeling in the body. The car starts to slide, and every nerve fires the same order: brake, yank at the wheel, do something hard and now. The trained response - the one that takes years to make instinctive - feels completely wrong while you’re doing it. Come off the pedals. Don’t touch the brake. Steer into the skid, towards the slide rather than against it, and let the engine slow you while the car settles back underneath you. Look where you want to go, not at the thing you’re about to hit. Every instinct you have is shouting for the opposite, and every instinct you have is wrong.

That half-second - the one in which a trained driver does not do the loud, forceful, obvious thing, and does the counterintuitive, correct thing instead - most of us don’t have it. The stimulus lands and the old reflex has fired before we’ve noticed a choice was ever on offer.

Procrastination is avoidance in slippers - the hard thing postponed because facing it is uncomfortable, the same trap in a more relaxed outfit. What I’m describing is the opposite: staying fully in the discomfort, eyes open, attention high, refusing to self-distract into the nearest available activity. Not doing nothing. Not doing the reflexive thing. Doing the considered thing, which tends to arrive a beat later than the panic would have.

You don’t build a career by sitting with things. You build it by sorting them out, quickly. So the capacity to hold that half-second - to watch a situation before pouncing on it, to let it show you what it actually is before you decide what to do with it - is usually the single muscle you’ve never had to train.

I’m a cautionary example here, which is precisely why I can describe the trap so well. Left to my own devices in a messy middle, I will reorganise something. I’ll restructure a process that was working perfectly well. I have, more than once, solved a problem nobody actually had, with real energy and focus, while the problem that mattered sat patiently in the corner waiting for me to run out of distractions. Action is my way of not feeling the gap. It took me an embarrassingly long time, and a couple of people willing to tell me the truth, to work out that the gap was where the actual work lived.

What you’re actually on the hook for

You made this moment. You are not on the hook for the fact that it’s hard.

You didn’t invent the way transitions work - the stretch in the middle of every curve where the old approach has quit and the new one hasn’t shown up yet. You didn’t design a world where growth runs downhill for a while before it climbs again. That’s just the shape of the thing. Everyone who ever crossed from one chapter into the next went through some version of it, including the people whose tidy biographies make it look like one clean straight line, up and to the right.

So the work now isn’t to fix yourself, because you’re not broken. It isn’t to win back a competence you’ve lost, because you haven’t lost it. It’s to meet what’s actually in front of you, which is a passage to cross and not a fault to fix. And, awkwardly, part of crossing it well is doing rather less of the thing you happen to be best at.

The close

You’re here because you can lead. Not because you slipped, not because you fell short, not because some more careful version of you would have dodged the whole thing. You’re here because you went toward something hard, and going toward hard things is simply what you do.

Which is why your own authorship of this mess is the most hopeful thing I can offer you. It means the resources you need are inside the tent, not out in the dark somewhere waiting to be found. You’ve already shown you have them. You used them to get here.

And both things are true at once. Some of what this moment asks is that you stop leading the way you’ve always led - that you loosen the very grip that got you this far, and find out who you are in the unfamiliar space where doing more isn’t the answer, and you don’t yet know what is. That isn’t a step down from leadership. It might be the hardest thing leadership has ever asked of you.

You built this, with your own hands and your own nerve. Which means you are the one equipped to find out what you’re made of inside it.

Next: the bill for all this doesn’t land in your diary. It lands in your body, which has been keeping the books the whole time, and fully intends to be paid.

New to this series? Here is the map

Almost everyone who arrives at this conversation says the same word. Stuck. I’m stuck. I’ve been stuck for months. I can’t seem to get unstuck.

I understand why the word comes first. It’s the one to hand. But it’s usually wrong, and being wrong about it is expensive. Stuck and lost are not the same condition, and they don’t call for the same response. Mistake one for the other and you spend your scarcest energy doing the exact thing that makes it worse.

Worth slowing down to understand the difference.

What stuck actually is

Stuck is inertia. You haven’t moved. The first curve still has its hooks in you, and some part of you is still holding the original trapeze with both hands, refusing the release. The role that no longer fits. The strategy that is stalling. The version of yourself that built everything so far and cannot quite believe it’s being asked to step down.

Stuck often looks like activity. Deferral dressed up as diligence. One more quarter on the old plan. One more conversation that postpones the decision rather than making it. The comfort of the familiar even when the familiar is plainly spent. Stuck people know, somewhere, that the curve has flattened. They just haven’t let go.

The work for stuck is release. Breaking the attachment to what is already ending. To what has already ended. That’s a real piece of work, and a hard one. But it isn’t the work most people in front of me actually need.

What lost actually is

Lost is different, and it fools people because it looks worse.

Lost is movement without orientation. You’ve already let go. You committed to the forward motion - deliberately, with your eyes open. The old way has stopped working, and you know it. You’re not clinging to the first curve. You’re out in the open air between curves, and you cannot see the landmarks.

And there’s a cruelty to it - lost feels like failure in a way stuck doesn’t. Stuck feels like waiting. Lost feels like drowning. Cortisol turns up before the alarm does. There’s a morning dread with no specific object, nothing you can point at and name. You read the disorientation as evidence that something has gone wrong with you.

It hasn’t. Those are navigation signals, not breakdown signals. Your system is telling you that you’re somewhere unmapped and moving - which is exactly what’s true.

Why the wrong diagnosis costs so much

If you believe you’re stuck when you’re actually lost, you reach for the stuck medicine. You try to build momentum. Push harder. Try more things. Generate activity, because activity feels like progress and stillness feels like the problem. You burn fuel.

But you’re already moving. You don’t need momentum. You need a bearing. So all that effort - the extra hours, the multiple new initiatives, the frantic hunt for the thing that will finally make it click - wears you down at the precise moment you most need to conserve yourself for the passage ahead. You arrive at the part that genuinely requires you already empty, having exhausted yourself solving a problem you didn’t have.

I’ve watched successful, capable people do this for months, and I’ve done it myself. It’s one of the most common and least necessary ways to suffer in a transition.

Early in my career, I grew steadily surer that consulting was the wrong path for me - sure enough to be properly unhappy, not sure enough to stop generating movement. So I prescribed myself momentum: a move to a tech major, a fresh badge on the same condition. The scenery changed. The lostness came with me, because I was solving for velocity when what I was missing was a bearing. What eventually worked was different in kind - a deliberate stop at business school, exposing myself to alternatives I couldn’t yet have named, which is where a direction worth holding first appeared.

Lost in the bush

Imagine it plainly. You’re on foot in the African bush. No map, no signal, the light going. What do you do? How do you get yourself unlost?

The two instincts are both wrong. Freezing feels safe and gets you nowhere as the sky goes blood red and the temperature drops. Running feels like action and drives you in a circle - only now you’re tired, it’s dark, and there are things out there with teeth and claws that have considerably better night vision than you.

What a skilled bushman does is neither. They move deliberately, working with what the bush gives them, which at dusk in flat Timbavati thornveld is almost nothing. A shift in the breeze. Campfire smoke from somewhere you can’t place. Animals moving in the middle distance, heading for water. It’s not much. They pick a direction on it anyway and hold it, past each arrival of doubt, long enough for the bearing to tell them something.

That’s the whole skill. Getting unlost is active. You do it, on purpose, while continuing to move. Clarity doesn’t arrive first and then permit you to set off. You move, on partial evidence, and the movement is what produces the clarity. You won’t see the destination. You’re not meant to. You’re holding a bearing.

The thing about not knowing

Here’s what I’ve noticed, in my own lostness and alongside other people in theirs. When the stakes are abstract, you drift. Sleepwalk. Half-attend. When you’re properly lost, and the light is going, that stops. The senses sharpen. You notice the ground, the smell of the air, the prickling on your skin, because something in you has worked out that getting this wrong has a real cost. Lost concentrates the mind in a way comfortable never does.

Most capable people have spent their careers in the comfortable version, where inattention carries no real penalty, and you can coast on pattern recognition. The messy middle removes that luxury. It demands you actually pay attention - to the terrain, to the body, to the small signals you’d normally walk straight past.

Not knowing is more valuable than it feels. It keeps you alert and reading the ground. The danger isn’t ignorance. The danger is “knowing” - the borrowed certainty, the old answer from the last curve, the false conviction that you’ve got this sorted.

There’s research on this: without an external reference point, humans in unfamiliar terrain naturally walk in circles - sometimes tight ones, sometimes spanning kilometres, always while convinced they’re going straight. The problem isn’t that they don’t know where they are. It’s that they trust that they do. “Knowing” is what causes the loop.

The moment you think you know, you stop paying attention. You put your head down and walk confidently in a circle. I have done a great deal of this and filed it under strategy. And as prone to not asking for directions as the next bloke.

Holding the bearing

Picking a direction is easy, and briefly satisfying. I’ve announced directions in a calm and reasonable voice and abandoned them inside a fortnight. The difficulty is staying pointed when your environment gives you nothing back.

You commit and take a few steps. Nothing confirms it - no clearing opens, no landmark resolves, and the doubt that was quiet at the start gets loud. So you change course, which feels like responsiveness, like being open to new information. A few steps later, same silence, change again. By nightfall you’ve covered an impressive distance and arrived nowhere, because you were never on one heading long enough for it to show you anything.

The bearing only works if you hold it past the point where it feels justified to hold. Until you come across a road or a riverbed to follow to civilisation.

And the attention - the sharpened, lost-in-the-bush attention - isn’t for endlessly re-examining the direction. It’s for one thing: noticing when you’ve genuinely come off the bearing. Not when it stops feeling comfortable - that happens almost immediately and means nothing. When something real has shifted.

The body signals it before the mind catches up - not as confidence, which is what gets you walking in circles, but as a specific wrongness with something you can name. Having been properly lost myself in the actual South African bush, I know what this feels like viscerally. The slope underfoot that’s turned wrong. The breeze that should be on your left and is now on your right. The chest that tightens not with ordinary discomfort but with the specific feeling of a direction you no longer believe. You hold through the first kind. You correct for the second.

What the bearing is not

It isn’t a line back to where you started. There’s nothing for you in that direction but teeth and claws. The place you came from is the spent curve, the burned ships, the thing you left for good reasons that are still good. The bearing points the other way - conscious movement toward something you can’t yet see, on the evidence you’ve got. The bearing was never the destination. You need enough orientation to keep going, and enough nerve to keep going when consistency is the last thing your nervous system wants.

What serves as a bearing when the unfamiliar landscape is a career, a company, or a marriage rather than actual bush? Rarely a plan - plans want detail the moment hasn’t got. More often something plainer. A value you won’t let go of. A question you keep returning to when the path blurs. A direction that feels right in the body long before you could defend it on a slide.

Not an answer. An orientation.

So which one are you?

I won’t give you a checklist. Checklists let you off the hook of actually feeling the thing.

Just the question, sat with honestly. Have you let go, or are you still holding on? Are you not moving, or moving without being able to see?

Most people already know. They’ve known for a while. They were just using the wrong word, and the wrong word was prescribing the wrong cure.

If you’re stuck, the work is letting go. We’ll get there.

But if you’re lost - already out there, already moving through country you can’t read - you don’t need to start. You need a bearing and the nerve to hold it until you find the landmarks. There’s no other direction on offer.

Next: This moment is of your own making - and why that’s the most hopeful thing I can tell you.

New to this series? Here is the map

There is a particular kind of morning that arrives without warning.

You wake up and look for the certainty that’s always been there. The orientation that has never really failed you. The confidence that you know what you’re doing and why.

And it isn’t there.

Not dramatically. No collapse, no crisis - just an absence where something solid used to be. Your chest feels slightly tight. There’s an uneasy feeling in your stomach that something is off. Your thoughts are moving but foggy, not landing anywhere useful. You get up, make coffee, and stare out of the window a little longer than usual.

You already know what this is. You just don’t want to name it yet.

And underneath all of it, a question you haven’t said out loud: did I make a mistake?

A word about the word

The word faith is loaded. Half the people who hear it think religion. The other half think wishful thinking. People who have spent decades building things, carrying other people’s futures, making hard choices and getting them right often enough to be trusted with harder ones - they tend to be suspicious of it. They deal in evidence. They trust what they can verify.

For the record: I hold a deep personal Christian faith, and it shapes how I understand this work. But that is not what I am writing about here. This is for anyone, regardless of what they believe or don’t believe about the nature of things.

Faith, as I mean it here, is stripped to its most practical form. The willingness to commit to a direction you cannot yet verify. To act as if the catch is coming before you can see it. To keep moving without proof that moving is the right call.

No theology required. Just an honest assessment of what this moment is asking.

What faith is not

It is not optimism. Optimism is an attitude, the warm belief that things tend to work out. Faith is a decision made in the specific absence of that warmth.

It is not hope. Hope orients toward a better outcome and then waits. This is not a waiting situation.

It is not confidence. Confidence is built from a track record. The version of you that emerges from this passage doesn’t have one yet. That is precisely the point.

And it is definitely not positive thinking - the coaching-speak version of pretending the difficulty is secretly a gift. I know this because I tried it. Enthusiastically. In my messy middles, with a coach and everything. My wife was unimpressed.

The difficulty is real. It costs something, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Faith is closer to what a surgeon does when they open someone up and find more than they expected. They don’t stop. They don’t wait for better information. They work with what is in front of them, make the best call available to them, and keep going. Not because they are certain of the outcome. Because stopping would be far worse.

Why this feels off

The people who arrive here are not, in any ordinary sense, struggling.

They are capable, high-achieving, accustomed to finding a way through. They have led people through difficult things and made consequential decisions under pressure. Built organisations, navigated boards, carried the weight of other people’s livelihoods without letting it show.

And here is the thing that often goes unsaid: they chose this. They are not here by accident. They did not stumble into this moment. Intelligence and determination brought them here. This moment is one of their own making - a path they stepped onto deliberately, with open eyes. They successfully navigated every previous inflection point, and that is what got them in this state.

Which is exactly why the disorientation is so disorienting.

When you have always found a way through, not finding one yet feels like evidence of failure. The private suspicion: that this is the moment you reach your limit. That the fog you cannot think your way out of is different from other fogs. That something is wrong with you that wasn’t wrong before.

It isn’t. But it feels precisely like that.

And the uncertainty is doing something active. Making you grip harder. Search more frantically. Push on approaches that are no longer working, because the alternative - stopping, feeling what is actually happening - feels too much like admitting it.

This disorientation is not a sign you made a mistake. It is what transition feels like from the inside. You are not broken. You are mid-flight. These are not the same thing, and the difference matters a great deal.

What faith actually asks

Three things. Not a sequence - they happen together or not at all.

Let go of what you carried in. The identity, the methods, the assumptions that built everything you have already built. They feel like assets because they are assets. Or rather, they were. What got you here is genuinely impressive. It is also, in an important sense, the thing in the way. The leader you are becoming cannot be assembled from parts of the leader you already were. This feels like loss because it is loss. Not a metaphor.

Stop trying to see the other side. There is an exhausting quality to how capable people handle uncertainty: they keep trying to think their way to clarity. One more analysis. One more scenario. One more conversation that might produce the map. The belief is that if they can just see far enough ahead, they will know whether it was the right decision after all. In a messy middle, this is not due diligence. It is avoidance wearing a very convincing disguise. The other side is not visible from where you are standing. Not yet. And the searching is itself what is blocking movement.

Commit fully to the change that has already begun. This is the part that surprises people. The transformation did not start when you decided to allow it. It started when what used to work stopped working - when the path you chose began asking more of you than you anticipated. You are not choosing whether to change. That is already underway. You are choosing how to meet it. Which means the half-measures have to stop. One foot in, one foot out is not a helpful holding pattern. It is just slower and more expensive than going all the way through.

What faith is not - the harder version

There is a particular temptation in the messy middle that I see often. In others, and if I am honest, in myself. The temptation to outsource the faith.

To the coach. To the process. To an AI. To the next session, the next insight, the next framework, the next piece of work that will finally make it feel solid underfoot. The secret hope that someone else has the answer you can borrow until yours returns.

This is entirely understandable. It is also not how this works.

There are no silver bullets. No one can finish this passage for you. What I can do - what good company in a difficult moment does - is stay, hold the weight with you, and keep asking the question that needs asking rather than the one that feels more comfortable. That is worth something real. But it is not the faith itself. The faith is yours. It lives in what you do between sessions, in the dark at 3 am, when no one is watching.

It is the step you take before the path is clear.

Where faith actually lives

It would be convenient if this were a mindset shift. A decision made once, held firmly, job done.

It is not. Faith in practice is remade every day. Often several times a day.

It lives in the body more than the mind. In the morning, where you get up and move toward the work before you feel ready. In the conversation you have before the words are fully formed. In the moment you notice the pull back toward what used to work - and feel it, and move forward anyway.

That pull is real and physical. Not metaphorically physical. It registers in your chest, your jaw, the place between your shoulder blades where you carry what hasn’t been said yet. The body keeps a score it will come back for, sooner than you think.

Faith is not the absence of that pull. It is what you choose to do in the presence of it.

I have hung mid-air in this moment more times than I can count - in my own life, and alongside people navigating theirs. The question is always the same. Not can I see the other side - you can’t. Not am I certain this is right - you’re not.

The question is whether you can commit to the direction, with what you have, from where you are standing now.

That is it. That is the whole thing.

The catch is coming. Move toward it.

Next: Lost, not stuck - and why the distinction changes everything about what you need right now.

New to this series? Here is the map

Every leader, every organisation, every human life moves in S-curves.

You begin something new. A role, a strategy, a company. At first it’s hard, and you feel like you are going backwards. Then something clicks, momentum builds, and for a while things work. You grow, you succeed, you get good at what you do. Then, gradually or suddenly, the curve flattens. What got you here stops getting you further. The energy of this particular chapter is spent.

Charles Handy mapped this in the 1990s and called it the sigmoid curve1 . I first met it at London Business School - the school Handy helped found - and by then I had already been riding these curves for years without knowing they had a name.

More than thirty years in technology businesses. A search fund launched in the teeth of the credit crunch, two weeks before the birth of my fourth child, to do something almost nobody in Europe had heard of at the time. The payments business I found, bought, transformed and sold. An online training side hustle that taught me mostly what doesn’t work. A B2B tech marketplace built to international reach and shut down by war. And since 2023, this curve: coaching, advisory, boards, a couple of chair roles, investing.

So none of what follows is theory I am recommending from a safe distance. It is terrain I have crossed repeatedly, and rarely elegantly. I am better at these passages than I used to be. They have not become comfortable. I am in one now.

Handy’s radical insight: the time to start the next curve is before the first one ends. When you still have energy, momentum and resources in hand. Not when you are already in decline and desperate. The leaders and organisations who sustain relevance are the ones who see the inflection point coming and make the jump.

The part that is seldom talked about is the jump itself, and the messy middle it puts you in.

What actually happens in the gap

Between letting go of the first curve and finding your footing on the second, there is a space. A passage. An in-between.

Anthropologists call it liminal space, from the Latin limen: threshold. You’re neither here nor there. What worked before has stopped working. What comes next hasn’t taken shape yet. The old identity, the old playbook, the old way of operating - none of it applies, and you know it. But the new one isn’t available yet either.

This is the messy middle.

It is deeply uncomfortable. Not because something has gone wrong - because this is what transition feels like from the inside. The disorientation is not a sign of failure. It is the process doing its work.

Most people read this discomfort as stuckness. In my experience, they are almost never stuck. They are lost. Stuck means inertia: you haven’t let go, the first curve still has its hooks in you. Lost means movement without orientation: you have committed, you are in motion, but you can’t yet see the landmarks. Lost people don’t need to start moving. They need to find their bearings and keep going.

You don’t need to see the other side to navigate toward it. You need enough orientation to hold a consistent direction - find the river, follow the river to the road, follow the road to something recognisable. Getting unlost is an active, dynamic process, not a passive waiting for clarity to arrive.

Why I believe this is now a leadership-critical skill

Early in my career, the big transitions arrived a decade or so apart, with time to recover, reorient and rebuild before the next inflection. They did not stay that way. The gaps between my own went from twelve years to seven, from seven to five, from five to three. Faster each time, and increasingly on top of one another.

The same acceleration is running through every leadership team I work with. The cycles are compressing. Leaders who used to face one significant transition every ten years now face several at once, with barely a breath between them. The curves are stacking. Liminality is becoming less of an exceptional passage and more of a permanent condition of leadership at this level.

This changes what the most valuable leadership skill actually is.

Knowledge is no longer the scarce resource. AI can synthesise and surface information faster than any of us. Knowledge has been democratised. It is effectively free. I built a career on knowing things, and I am telling you that advantage is gone - for me, and for you.

What remains scarce is the capacity to execute in conditions of uncertainty. To keep moving when you can’t see the next landmark. To stay present and functional when the nervous system is screaming for the safety of the familiar. To complete the passage you’re already in, rather than retreating to the comfort of the one you’ve already left.

This is wisdom, not knowledge. And it lives in the body as much as in the head - a lesson I came to later than I would have liked.

What execution in liminality requires

Naming the passage is the first move. It shifts the experience from I am broken and failing to this is what transition feels like, and there is a way through. That reframe alone changes what is possible.

Naming it is not enough. You still have to move.

“When you are going through hell, keep going.” — Winston Churchill

The instinct, almost universally, is to push harder with what used to work, or to retreat. I have done both, more than once. Pushing harder is how you exhaust yourself doing the wrong things with great intensity. Retreat is not actually available - the ships are burned, the first curve is spent, and going back only returns you to what was already ending.

The only direction is forward. Forward asks four things of you.

Stay present in the discomfort long enough for it to do its work. Not managing it, not eliminating it, not outrunning it. What you carry out of a messy middle is different from what you carried in - the identity, the capacities, the leadership itself. That transformation takes time inside the crucible.

Read the system and act on partial information. You will never have complete visibility in liminality. Waiting for certainty before moving is what gets people genuinely stuck. Find a bearing from the available landmarks, commit to a direction, adjust as you go.

Regulate under sustained pressure. This is more physical than it sounds. Under chronic uncertainty the nervous system shifts into threat response, and from that state good decisions get harder, relationships get harder, and the cognitive flexibility you need most becomes least available. The leaders who move well through these passages do not feel less pressure. They have built the capacity to carry more of it.

Let go of what you carried in. The hardest part, every time. The identity, the assumptions and the methods that built the first curve feel like assets. They are. They were. The second curve needs a different version of you, and that version only emerges once the old one is genuinely set down. You cannot drag the past into the future and call it transformation.

What this publication is for

The leaders who navigate the next decade well will not be the ones with the most knowledge or the most sophisticated frameworks. AI is a better framework repository than any human.

They will be the ones who recognise the inflection point before it becomes a crisis. Who begin the next curve with energy still in the current one. Who move through the middle without retreating or collapsing, come out with more capacity than they went in with, and then do it again - sooner, and less disoriented than the last time.

That is the nature of leadership now. Not one big transition carefully managed. A recurring rhythm of them, arriving faster, overlapping more, demanding more of the whole system each time: body, mind, relationships, culture.

Underneath all of it sits the question I hear from every leader I work with, in one form or another: how do I actually do this, without it costing everything?

That question is what this publication exists to answer, one piece of the passage at a time.

The question isn’t whether you’ll face a messy middle. You’re almost certainly already in one. The question is what you do inside it.

Don’t try it alone

This is yours to do. No one can complete it for you. But it is a mistake to try to do it alone - not a weakness, a miscalculation. The trapeze artist doesn’t catch themselves. The right company doesn’t rescue you from the middle; it keeps you honest inside it, holds the complexity without collapsing it, and stays until the work is genuinely done, and you become ready for what comes next.

New to this series?

This piece is the start of a much longer meandering walk. Fifteen essays, each taking on one piece of what it actually takes to move through a messy middle well. Read them in order or jump to whatever you’re in the middle of right now.

Naming what is happening

• Finding faith - what carries you when the old certainties don’t apply anymore.

• You’re not stuck. You’re lost - the distinction that changes what you do next.

• This moment is of your own making - how much of the middle you built yourself, and why that’s the useful part.

The mechanics of transition

• The body is keeping a score it will come back for - what happens when you run the transition on willpower alone.

• Pushing harder doesn’t work - why the instinct that got you here stops working precisely when you need it most.

• The unfinished business of growth - what happens to the parts of a passage you never actually finished.

• Lean forward - what full commitment asks of the body when the moment arrives.

Doing the work

• Riding the lion - why the demands won't get lighter, and what has to get stronger instead.

• Weight falls away - what's actually yours to carry, and what you can put down at last.

• Complete, not repeat - how you know when a passage is finished, and what it leaves you with.

The relational and systemic

• You shouldn’t do this alone - Upcoming

• The relational field - Upcoming

• Working with the whole system - Upcoming

Making it last and making it matter

• Integration: making the change stick - Upcoming

• What AI can’t do - Upcoming