It’s hard to say exactly what is the difference between a person who defers in matters where they need not, and a person who runs their own show. But you can feel it in an instant.

People who defer await critique. They ask, they check in, they wonder aloud. They seem unsure. They second-guess themselves. Sometimes they give more away than the moment calls for, making jokes at their own expense as they hand off authority they never needed to hand off. All of it asks: can I be trusted? They are waiting to be told, asked, or assured.

People who run their own show claim, decide, and do. They may ask — but they are willing to proceed. They confer, but out of genuine curiosity, not uncertainty. They are, if anything, more likely to state plainly what they want to know more about, because they aren’t afraid of being wrong out loud. It is apparent from their demeanor that they will act, especially in what primarily concerns them. What is in their power, they own. They do not shy away from the responsibility of their own freedom, and they do not try to put it on someone else.

What is that about? Other things being equal, what does the second person have that the first one lacks?

It Is Not Confidence

Self-authority might be mistaken for confidence, because confident people often seem to have it. But it is something quite different. Confidence is being sure of a decision. Self-authority is being sure of who gets to make it. It is a habit of character that tells the world, plainly, “I will do what I can do, even in situations of uncertainty or difficulty” — and it is a responsibility undertaken even in areas where the person has little confidence. You can be terrified and still self-authoring. You can be certain and still be waiting for permission.

Self-authority is not “I know what is right.” It is “I’ve got this. This one is mine to take on.”

It Is Not Control

Self-authority looks like it should be compatible with control — taking charge, running the show, calling the shots. It isn’t. Taking control doesn’t signal self-authority at all. It actually signals something more like anxiety. It asks: can others be trusted?

And so does the opposite of “taking control,” which is something like too much and inappropriate deference. Watch a controlling boss and a people-pleasing employee in the same meeting. One is gripping control, running the agenda, cutting people off, deciding in advance how the conversation will go. The other is scanning faces, anticipating objections before they’re raised, agreeing before they’ve actually thought anything through for themselves.

They look like opposites — one seizing opportunities, one disappearing into the views of others — but they are both reacting. Both are trying to control an outcome they don’t trust themselves to face directly — one that fundamentally involving the will of others. (What is the purpose of a meeting if it is not to hear from others?) Deference and control in the face of others’ authority are not opposites. They are two extremes that arise when self-authority has not been established.

Self-authority finds the boundary between self and others that allows us to work together and be ourselves. It doesn’t clutch or grab, and it doesn’t vanish at the slightest pushback.

A Boundary, Not Just Going Along to Belong

Self-authority recognizes the authority of others as much as the authority of self. It has to — that’s what makes it a boundary and not just a claim. It is sovereignty over this territory, which is mine, and not yours. And an essential part of that sovereignty is knowing what you may not do, to or for someone else, no matter how much you love them, no matter how connected, no matter how scared. That limit gets drawn again and again, in the ordinary, difficult activities and negotiations of life — in the conversations where you want to fix something for someone, or get them to a certain conclusion, in the decisions that are actually theirs to make and not yours.

Whose Story Is This

On one reading, self-authority is the moral-psychological cousin of what Robert Kegan calls “self-authoring” in his stages of adult development — the capacity not just to hold values, but to step outside the systems and relationships that were “handed you” as “your values,” and choose among them for yourself. It is a willingness to decide what story you are living, and how it goes next, without confusing your story with someone else’s. This means things will happen that will make you uncomfortable. This is life. The most uncomfortable part is knowing that a part of it is radically up to you. Telling your own story is perhaps the single most important thing you have authority over. It is not the same as doing whatever you want. It is living based on your own expectations of yourself.

Self-authority is sovereignty: not outsourcing what is yours to decide, to another person or a group, no matter the relationships of love or connection or any natural or social hierarchy. Because of your respect for all of this, and not despite it, you steer your own vessel; and you are willing to do it in full sight of others. That is, itself, a way of telling people who you are.

The Invitation

This is a large part of what coaching enables, and it is the basis for a deeper kind of wholeness than is possible without it. Not “know the right answer.” Not “be sure.” Just: take up what is already, unmistakably, yours to decide, to carry and to author.

So the question isn’t whether you’re certain. It’s whether you’re willing — to claim what’s yours, to leave what isn’t, and to bear all that entails.

Can life be trusted?

Cindy

Cindy Chance, Ph.D., is an executive coach, ethicist, and management consultant who helps thoughtful leaders become more powerful and organizations become better. She writes about leadership, power, ethics, and what it takes to create meaningful change.

Learn More About Working with Cindy

Some people feel they haven’t changed since high school, but research shows that we change much more than we actually recognize, most of the time in the direction of steadiness, reliability and “self-management.” On average, we change most before midlife, with most change happening in our twenties. We change mostly in response to what we must live through, not because of who and what we are trying to become. We change under pressure, like diamonds or coal, but our stories make us who we become, not the pressure itself. By changing our stories, we can change ourselves.

A friend’s mother, Margaret, a remarkable woman for many reasons, not the least of which was her keen intellect and remarkable uniqueness, died recently at a very old age. She had instructed her family to use the obituary she wrote, a very brief description of her life, loves and service. It reflected her loves and the significant events of her life, but did not get into “who” she was as an individual per se; that in itself said a great deal about her. Her children, while honoring her specific “request” to publish her obituary, published with it their own unauthorized version, a version that spoke exactly to who she was. She did not like making things about herself. Of course her family wanted to make it about her as much as possible.

This was, for me, a touching reminder that we get the powerful opportunity to tell our own story in our own way, most of all to ourselves, for only so long. When that time is done, others will make of our lives, or what they knew of our lives, whatever they wish.

(By the way, if you want to read about this remarkable lady, Margaret, from her own perspective and through the eyes of her family, please see here. It is lovely.)

What I know is that the stories we tell about ourselves, while based on fact, are also invented, and they have a sort of magic to make us who we become. The deepest stories are the most powerful. Stories of what we were really fighting for, whether we felt worthy, what we did with our fear, and why.

Knowing the power of our stories, it is worth considering carefully what we are actually telling ourselves from one moment, and one year to the next. This is a lot of what we do in coaching, unearthing the story that is shaping the experience. If you can see the story you are telling yourself, then you can decide whether it is true, and whether it is serving you. If not, it is never too late to start telling yourself a different story.

Often, we notice that our stories reflect harsh judgements of ourselves and what we don’t deserve. Why? Because we are creatures of habit and our thoughts are among the many behaviors that are habituated. Getting control of them is a superpower. Just recognizing the opportunity we have toget curious about the stories we are telling ourselves increases our power and agency. Margaret knew this, and she did not shy away from the opportunity to claim her own narrative one last time.

The single most effective thing we can do to change on purpose, in our twenties, thirties, into the middle of our lives and beyond, is to tell ourselves better stories.

Therapy is so helpful, but it doesn’t make meaning. Self-diagnosis is an impoverished version of powerful storytelling. This has turned internet-driven misunderstandings of pathologies into placeholders for who we are and what we share. How diminishing of our agency and power. We are more than that.

A good story, a story worthy of us, is not reductive. It is also not about perfection. It is most likely about transformation. The powerful stories that help us understand ourselves often have a similar form: I believed this way, then life confronted me with events that undermined those beliefs. When my old ways of thinking stopped working, I struggled. I discovered something new, and it transformed who I am. Now I am different, better, and I have a purpose. The Odyssey is a great example of a story that is a heroic journey.

What would your own hero’s journey sound like? Yes, you get to be the hero of your own story.

Let’s recommit to telling our own most powerful and honest stories and the stories of the people and places and things that matter most to us.

And when you are lucky enough to have someone share their story with you, please pay close attention. You are getting a window into how they make sense of living every day.

Stories are magic. What is yours?

Cindy

Cindy Chance, Ph.D., is an executive coach, ethicist, and management consultant who helps thoughtful leaders become more powerful and organizations become better. She writes about leadership, power, ethics, and what it takes to create meaningful change.

Learn About Working With Cindy

Rock Creek Park contains a roadway that can shoot you from one Northwest neighborhood to another, take you downtown, or carry you toward the Maryland suburbs with remarkable ease, especially since the roadway’s traffic direction shifts during rush hour to make that ease even easier. It performs the function of a highway, but it does not feel like one. Instead of dividing neighborhoods and dimming the beauty of the landscape, it follows the contours of a rough, living land, a glimpse of what used to be. As a child I thought it was “the land that time forgot…”

People are drawn to Northwest not only because it is convenient, but because it is beautiful. That beauty is not exactly a feature. It does not appear on a list of specifications. Yet it informs everything that was built there.

We tend to treat beauty as decoration: something desirable, perhaps, but secondary to function. I suspect the opposite may be true. Beauty can be evidence that function has been understood more fully. It can tell us that efficiency was not achieved by erasing what mattered: the landscape, history, or what people most valued.

Established in 1890, Rock Creek Park was only the third national park in the country and the first inside a major American city, a full sixteen years before Congress created most of the national parks people think of first. The Olmsted Brothers helped shape its rustic bridges, stone culverts, and winding roads in a style deliberately meant to look wild rather than designed. The road through it, Beach Drive, was built between 1897 and 1900 and named for Captain Lansing H. Beach, the Army engineer who oversaw its construction—proof that even the park’s most “natural” feature was surveyed, graded, and engineered on purpose.

This is a striking contrast to highways like I-395 and I-295, built during the disaster of “urban renewal”: ugly elevated roads that gouged their way through waterfront areas, destroying vibrant neighborhoods, including some of DC’s most treasured historically Black communities. The Southwest Freeway alone displaced some 23,000 people and leveled roughly 99 percent of the buildings in Southwest DC. Across the river, the Anacostia Freeway tore through the emerging Black middle-class neighborhoods of Anacostia, leveling homes, a community center, and a church, and walling the neighborhood off from its own waterfront. Both kinds of roads promise efficiency. But they embody radically different ideas about what—and who—must be protected along the way.

As a community we are still working to repair that legacy and replace it with a new vision. That new vision is coming alive in Southwest DC, where “The Wharf,” a sixteen-year, $3.6 billion transformation of that same urban-renewal waterfront into a walkable mile of housing, shops, and public piers, has stitched the neighborhood back to its river.

Decisions like these are at the heart of real estate development and change how we live, work, and play. Notice them and you start to see what is at stake when people shape the future of cities and towns with individual and public decisions.

The question is not simply whether something works. A highway works. A cheap development works. But a cheap development can lease every unit and still fail to make life better for real people in the way that it could have. Being proud of where you live — having it work well for you and look beautiful—matters too.

The aesthetics of the whole ask a further question: is this house, development, roadway, or transit system true to the life around it?

Is it real? Is it working in all ways?

Human beings care deeply about beauty and aesthetics that work, even when they cannot explain why. Maybe it is because we feel the difference between a real community and the performance of a community, between a place that is loved and and one that is tolerated, between a building or mixed use development that deepens our enjoyment and improves our lives and one engineered merely to satisfy a discrete need or goal of a few.

The deeper distinction may be between what remains whole and what has been reduced to serving a single utilitarian purpose.

Perhaps this is what we want most, even when we do not have the language for it: not beauty alone, not usefulness alone, not even goodness alone, but an experience in which the good, the beautiful, the useful, the purposeful, and the meaningful reinforce one another. A place we can move through and also belong to. A home, school, or mixed-use development that serves us and elevates us by turning our minds and hearts to the highest purposes of our lives and our connection to others.

The things we embrace most fully are often the things that improve life at more than one level. They answer an immediate need while also deepening our human experience. They give something back—to the person, to the community, to the landscape, and to the future. These places delight us because they reflect us at our best. No essential part has been sacrificed to make them “work.”

Beauty, usefulness, and truth are often discussed as separate qualities. But the places we love most suggest that they belong together. Perhaps the best things are not those that optimize one measure. Perhaps they are the buildings and spaces that intentionally balance efficiency, efficacy, and value with everything else that matters to us. How to do that is a question that requires the creativity and thoughtfulness of our best minds and our most talented makers and doers—architects, developers, builders, construction managers, engineers, city planners, public officials, corporate citizens, and the rest of us.

If we begin to think this way, we may ask more of what we plan and build. Not only: Does it work? Not only: Will it meet this specific need? But: What does it protect? What does it make room for? Will it inspire us?

Those questions open us to something more—not only in our planning and our building, but in our doing and our being. They invite us to stop treating beauty, purpose, and meaning as luxuries to be added when the practical work is finished. They are part of the practical work. They may be how we know that the work is well done and complete.

Ask those same questions of your own life and work: What are you protecting? What are you making room for? Are you building something whole—or only something that works?

Cindy

Cindy Chance, Ph.D., is an executive coach, ethicist, and management consultant who helps thoughtful leaders become more powerful and organizations become better. She writes about leadership, power, ethics, and what it takes to create meaningful change.

Learn About Working with Cindy

This familiar feeling is one of the ways we curate our experience of the world and it curates us. We experience the world in familiar patterns. What keeps happening has a very similar storyline. And yet these are different for each of us. We are each asking: Why does this keep happening?

When my son was quite young, six or seven, he faced a very difficult moment, news that a friend’s illness had progressed — news he had feared but wasn’t prepared to hear. Few children in our time would be. I told him that we needed to talk and he said “I don’t want to hear it.” I replied, “I know you don’t want to, but you must.” How I wish I would have been more gentle in that moment. How I wish I would have given him the comfort that he needed. Now I imagine myself back in that moment saying, “I understand. Let’s read a book or take a walk. There is time to hear it when you are feeling more ready.”

Of course he was afraid. We are each afraid to face so much of what we must, and fear increases when we feel pushed. On the other hand, events unfold, and often, we must respond. Best is to have support, choice, and to find ourselves becoming — big enough, strong enough, whole enough. The way opens. In that moment with my son, I didn’t respond more gently because I myself was afraid. What would happen to my son if he kept closing the door to sad news and hard moments? What happens to any of us when we keep closing the same door without anyone noticing or inviting or (even) insisting? What happens is a pattern develops — a pattern that traps us. We come to imagine this is how the world is.

The truth is this: the world has not arranged itself to challenge you in the same ways over and over again, you have arranged the world that way. And if you can arrange the world that way, then you can rearrange it too. This is the power of your agency, not your rational agency, but your emotional agency, your spiritual agency. The power of you glimpsing what is real and true and turning away again, or accepting what is familiar, even as you describe wanting something else.

In coaching, very often, the challenge for the coach is to listen very carefully for all of what is, paying close attention with the client’s good in mind. To be able to reflect to another person what they are actually believing, feeling, and doing, with no agenda, is a precious gift. But there is another element to coaching. There is the noticing when the client ignores something obvious that is offered. Noticing when it is a pattern. There is the sense that what is hidden or disowned wants to emerge. This is the truth and the possibility of greater freedom that the best coaches offer gently and without self-certainty or ego. It can still be hard to take.

Self-compassion helps.

If you could understand, truly understand, that when it comes to all the tricks you play with yourself you are no better and no worse than anyone else, just different, and if you could accept that the quality of your life will be improved mainly by deciding to stop playing those tricks, what could shift? What would be possible for you if you took the challenge of being more free within yourself as your reason for all you do?

The way that I have mainly contacted this vanishing point where I cannot distinguish the horizon from the ground is when I found an “I can’t” that felt real, solid and impenetrable to me, but was not a fact in any real sense. What is that? What for me had the force of a law of nature was a wall that was quite easy for other people to step around. I cannot leave. I cannot tell the truth about this. I cannot do this differently. I must protect them. I cannot try this. These are the tricks we play on ourselves that we can indeed change.

What is the story you are telling yourself that makes what you want to do impossible?

What you cannot do is what you must do.

Many coaches are trained simply to better understand the client’s motivations, beliefs, feelings, and to encourage the client to sit with these until they are recognized, then, and only then, when the intellectual understanding and the emotional and physical understanding coincide can something real shift for the client. This seems true. So many of us have incredible minds yet little to no insight on what is driving us and what matters most for us to know. Being for the client, which is a baseline for good coaching, means being for their greater understanding of themselves in this moment.

But there is something else a coach must be for, and that is the client’s greater freedom. And this is to take a position and to have a perspective. It is a challenge and not neutral. Clients can choose to see they are afraid, hiding, or armored, and they can choose to stay that way. Some coaches are truly able to be OK with that. It is the client’s choice and the client’s life. I am not OK with it. For me, the only purpose of a coach is to have a perspective on the client’s agency and power that it is good, available, and limitless. I cannot co-sign a client’s wish to stay small and safe, in their being, although I can understand. This can be hard to experience, this push, this challenge, but it is the work. Being free is the goal, and it is an achievement that involves struggle.

Staying small and safe is not any one thing. For some people, pursuing wealth and building business empires is staying small and safe. There is not one way to hide, just as there is not one way to grow. This is a make-your-own-adventure, and the outcome is not the goal, you are, in all of your potential and all of your truth.

If this resonates with you, and you are ready for an investment in yourself, I invite you to book a complimentary coaching session below. If you are not there yet, that may be something to notice with self-compassion and respect. Life offers many opportunities for the growth that we need.

Cindy

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Cindy Chance, Ph.D., is an executive coach, ethicist, and management consultant who helps thoughtful leaders become more powerful and organizations become better. She writes about leadership, power, ethics, and what it takes to create meaningful change.

Ultimately, we want a smooth path to achievement and intimacy and belonging. Not to be too surprised or disappointed, to choose our path, without insurmountable obstacles that will consume us, hurt us, or destroy our confidence. To choose our companions well and wisely, all while facing up to (think about that phrase “face up”) what life unexpectedly offers.

Is that too much to ask?

So the first thing to notice is that for all of us, the journey is the same. And for all of us, doing well means getting better at being human. We must struggle with who we are even as we become who we could be.

But coaching ourselves is possible. Here are simple (not easy) approaches to confronting the ways we most often fail ourselves and get stuck. Together, these practices form the beginning of a recipe for self-trust, self-authority, and contentedness.

Tell the truth — to yourself.

…to thine own self be true… — Shakespeare

If you have an absolute honesty policy — have it with yourself, not others. Others can only hear what they are ready to hear; you can get that wrong. But you need your own honesty, in fact, you owe yourself as much honesty as you can tolerate.

As you practice honesty with yourself, it will become harder for you to hide from yourself, harder to lie, and harder to let yourself down. Absolute honesty often fails in two distinct ways: allowances that ignore or minimize or avoid, or an excess of harsh judgement. As always, the best course is the middle ground between extremes. Not brushing the truth of what we do aside, and not sitting in judgement of ourselves, but something like the approach we would offer our very best friend for whom we wanted only the best — reflection, acceptance and curiosity will help you to cultivate honesty with yourself.

We are all being pushed by unseen forces, mostly beliefs, attitudes and patterns that are both known to us and hidden. Ask yourself: What is one thing that sits just beyond your field of vision that you would benefit from taking a look at?

When in doubt act

“If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl, but whatever you can do, you have to keep moving forward.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Taking action, moving forward is the only way we change and grow. We are never stuck although we often feel that we are. We are never powerless, although we often feel that, too. Any action is better than no action where we have a good goal in view. This may seem obvious, but equally obviously, humans mistake thinking for action. In this way, we get stuck in our heads or in our phones thinking that we are acting, when we are not. Sometimes we know we are not acting, but we believe that we cannot. We feel movement is impossible because the task ahead looks too big to take on. Inertia is not our friend, neither is relentless thinking or distracted doing without reason. If you are stuck for what to do, take the next smallest action that points you toward a goal. What is the smallest action I can take that will help me learn and grow?

Thoughts are a poor master but a great servant

“A thought is harmless unless we believe it. It’s not our thoughts, but our attachment to our thoughts, that causes suffering.” — Byron Katie

The problem is not that we have thoughts, but that we mistake them for reality. As we pay attention to the thoughts that arise, we notice patterns. Our patterns are different, but the fact that our thinking reflects patterns and beliefs that we are clinging to, that we have in common, and it has a tremendous impact on our lives.

If you think about the thoughts you focus on as a choice, you begin to harness your own power. Reality is quite other than whatever we think it is. Just ask someone else what is the story they tell themselves and you will soon see the range of possibilities. As long as you are telling yourself stories, you may as well tell stories that serve you. Ask yourself: What story are you telling yourself about the present situation, and what story would serve you better?

Feelings come and go

“This being human is a guest house. Every morning a new arrival... Welcome and entertain them all!” — Rumi, “The Guest House”

Feelings arise. We tend to push them down or focus so much attention on them that they become all consuming. Our feelings, as they present themselves, deserve to be noticed, but clinging to them is not helpful to us. Anger may tell us that a boundary was violated, or it may be masking sadness. We might begin to see a pattern. But clinging to a feeling will color our experience in a life altering way. Ask yourself: What feeling is present for you here now? What is it like? What would it feel like to accept it and let it pass through you like a wave on the ocean?

Honor yourself and your effort

“At the most basic level, self-compassion simply requires being a good friend to ourselves.” — Kristin Neff

Treating yourself like your best friend, loving yourself, having compassion for yourself, all of these ways of being with yourself will sound either like the most obvious possible advice or a genuinely crazy and even dangerous idea depending on how you have been treating yourself. But it will help you to balance your determination and effort with a healthy respect and admiration for who you are and what you do.

Celebrate wins, monitor how you talk to yourself and try to make that voice as positive and friendly as you can. Honoring yourself means recognizing your humanity, your weaknesses, your strengths, the whole messy miracle that is you at any point in time. A relentless positivity toward self may look excessive, and it may be, but a relentlessly negative and critical internal judge does not serve you. Ask yourself: What can you give yourself now that you would give a friend in the same place?

Wishing you balance and perspective enough for the challenges of this day.

Cindy

Cindy Chance, Ph.D., is an executive coach, ethicist, and management consultant who helps thoughtful leaders become more powerful and organizations become better. She writes about leadership, power, ethics, and what it takes to create meaningful change.

Learn About Working with Cindy

My coaching clients are brilliant, capable, and conscientious people. What is most likely to hold them back? They are. (Just like me. Just like you.) The culprit? Usually unhelpful, untrue beliefs about themselves and the world, reinforced by an emotional loop until they became so stable that it looks like “the way things are.” I think of it as a snowglobe — a snowglobe you live inside. (Like a birdcage, but with lots of information that shape your world.) The snowglobe creates the context for every moment. Your own personal reality. The strange thing is that you might think the context of your experience should be dramatically apparent — but it isn’t, not to the person living inside. You can’t see what you’re living in, not by yourself.

Your world was meant to protect you. Somewhere in your history, it is very likely that a younger, frightened, very clever and resourceful version of yourself decided something: about who you were, about who others were, about what worked to keep you safe. That became your context — your reality — the snowglobe you live in. The air you breathe. The narrator in your head. The challenge is this — to the extent that you are living in that old reality, you are not fully capable of seeing what is here and now. You are less than fully present, powerful, and aware of what is.

The places where we get in our own way, once brilliant strategies, have been the background for so long that they have become solid: truth, context, reality. But this is a lie. They are not reality, they are stories, not just any stories but our most impactful ones. But what cannot be seen cannot be changed.

David Foster Wallace famously described the importance of attending to the most impactful realities in a 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College, where he recounted a parable of two young fish who meet an older fish. The older fish nods to them and asks how the water is. The two young fish swim on, and eventually one asks the other “what is water?”

The lesson? What is hardest to see and talk about is the most important reality to attend to. You must find this in your own life. Do you doubt it? Surely not. You notice it all the time — in others. You watch other people live inside their own stories. You watch organizations do things that make no sense (lots of people are living inside a false story). You have a harder time generating lessons from your own life because it is harder to see the snowglobe you are living in.

And if you sense that the people closest to you do not want you to change, it may not be your imagination. They may not want to explore that wider context with you. The people around you can have an interest in being comfortable, which can work against your growth. So think twice when people push back on what looks and feels like growth to you. Get curious about pushback. Who is it coming from? Do you admire them? Do you believe they want your good? Do you want theirs? These are questions worth asking. If they are in this with you then they will want to participate in the conversation that is emerging for you. What becomes visible can be discussed, and discussion can lead to change — and people can become more powerful in their self-understanding and in their connection. It can be initially upsetting — we are risk-avoidant by nature. But it feels not possible only if you are not invested in the struggle that leads to a fuller, more fulfilled life.

Recognizing the force of the snowglobe context is hard. It means facing the norms and ways of being, the stories we tell about ourselves, the feelings we reinforce or avoid. But we have a drive to see what is true; we have a desire that runs counter to our risk-aversion to be free of constraint that does not serve us.

It is easiest to see habitual constraint when we look at others, especially as outsiders looking in. You felt it as a child at a friend’s house, wondering why everyone acted the way they did — not the way it was at your house, which seemed, of course, simply normal.

If you have ever worked somewhere with high agreement “going along to get along” and little honest contact with reality, you have seen this force operating across hundreds or perhaps thousands of people at once. Like the truth-telling child in Hans Christian Anderson’s “The Emperor has no Clothes,” you will not be celebrated for calling out “groupthink.”

On the other hand, organizations that thrive are more “self-aware” and explicit. Individuals who thrive are the same — they know themselves well — they can say what they value and how it is connected to who they are and what they do. Many of us have been through a lot of murky context and tough environments on the way to this clarity. The lotus needs mud to bloom.

So how do we confront our own snowglobe when we can’t see it? We can’t do it alone. This is not an inside job. You may have been taught that self-knowledge is available through introspection and individual effort. But the fact is you are the one thing in your life you can never get outside of. The fish will not find the water by concentrating harder on what it might be. It needs something that lives outside the water to say: look — you’re wet. The snowglobe looks like all of reality when you’re stuck inside it.

That is what another person can be. Someone attending wholly to you — deeply listening, with the purpose of evoking your best self. This person stands where you cannot: outside. They notice where you are stuck and get curious, and their curiosity is contagious. For a moment a vantage point on your own life emerges that is new. You stand outside. You see something. And what you can see, know, and feel is the beginning (and the limit) of what you can change.

Held in someone’s attention — someone who believes in you and wants your good and nothing else— you may realize for the first time that the fear of change that had stopped you is survivable, and eminently more pleasant than being stuck. You may decide it is worth a try, anyway.

Connection becomes accountability. If you promise to do the thing that scares you, and I witness your promise, you feel more accountable to yourself. If you do that thing that scares you five or ten times, you will learn that it was not as bad as you feared. You can build a tolerance for facing what you used to avoid. You may begin to see the stories you tell yourself as you tell them, in real time. The murky thick context clears; you understand what you are doing and why better and better.

We become more ourselves in the presence of someone who can see us. We are drawn out, called forward, witnessed into being. This is a beautiful birth. Freedom and connection are not a sequence, where you repair yourself in private and then you get to belong. Connection is how the repair happens. We grow more whole as we grow less dependent on our own story and less separate from everyone else at the very same time.

Buddhists call this “awakening from a trance,” and it can happen in small ways, over and over. If it is happening, you are on your way to a truer you — someone who looks less and less like the person your old protections were built to keep safe.

For a lot of coaches, this is why the work is more like a calling. You call a person forth by challenging their old understandings in the right way and at the right time. To be present in a moment that another person awakens to a new understanding of what is possible is to bear witness to the beauty of life, one choice at a time.

Wishing you connection.

Cindy

Cindy Chance, Ph.D., is an executive coach, ethicist, and management consultant who helps thoughtful leaders become more powerful and organizations become better. She writes about leadership, power, ethics, and what it takes to create meaningful change.

Learn About Working with Cindy

The pace of disruption has increased. The business model that worked for decades, in so many industries, no longer does. Even the institutions we relied on — the mission-driven institutions that felt like an extension of home — are having to look at their business models. The world has changed.

When the world changes enough, people’s desires change too. Before they know it, they want something different than they used to. Leaders of organizations and companies with value propositions that are no longer attractive face a simple decision. Protect and defend the past and preside over decline, hoping the world changes back and the downward trend reverses — or — look at what is working and what isn’t and change quickly. What do people want and need now? There is the opportunity to rebuild a new model of offering value while there is still time.

Fortunately, there is a whole segment built around quickly creating value that failing businesses should look toward for guidance. Private equity (PE) investors (and leaders) seek quick results and a business model that works. And that’s it. They are not tied to the way things have always been done. They are comfortable with the ways that work best for people now. Instead of looking to what they have done in the past, disrupted industries from education to professional services that have been rocked by fast-changing consumer preferences should be looking at what successful PE leaders do. PE leaders often take an existing, struggling, enterprise and remake it against an unforgiving timeline.

When your organization’s value proposition no longer works, your job stops being to steward what you inherited and becomes to rebuild it — and the people who do that best are not inside the disrupted industries at all. They are the private-equity-backed CEOs who take an existing, struggling enterprise and remake it, against an unforgiving clock. Their disciplines — clarity, focus, honest talent decisions, operating rhythm, candor, accountability, and speed — are the playbook for any mission-driven organization the world is leaving behind.

The mindset shift creates possibility, but it is no guarantee. Transformation under pressure is hard, and most people are not good at it. (Roughly half of PE-backed CEOs are replaced.) But because it is hard and high-stakes, it has been studied closely as a leadership challenge. We now have a fairly precise picture of what the leaders who succeed in this challenging environment do differently. These lessons offer a guide to leadership in disrupted industries.

Two 2026 Harvard Business Review studies show how PE-backed companies succeed. One, drawn from the leadership consultancy ghSmart’s assessment data on nearly 500 executives, identifies the capabilities that predict who will thrive. The other, the research behind the book The 5x CEO, studied a cohort of “super-performers” who returned an average of 6.2 times invested capital and isolated the behaviors they practiced consistently. Together, they offer a playbook for anyone running an organization the world is leaving behind.

The Difference May Be the Motivation

The profit motive in private equity clarifies the best choices in real time. Where there’s big money to be made with a quick exit, there are motivated, focused leaders. In a disrupted business the goal often shrinks to staying afloat — there’s often no pay-off, so leaders tell themselves surviving another year is the whole game. A college president avoids a vote of no confidence rather than fix the model, and years of deficits start to look like success; an association director calls a full annual meeting good enough, even with few new members; the professional services firm takes comfort in returning clients and ignores the drop in new clients.

These are the stories we tell ourselves so we can ignore the data and shut out the feedback from the world. The disciplines of a high-motivation environment — clarity, focus, honesty about talent, operating rhythm, accountability, speed — translate to a laser focus on “return” that disrupted businesses should borrow. Those that lack a clear profit motive need to care deeply enough about mission to do hard things.

The New Reality of Disruption

Some of our most traditionally stable industries are experiencing ongoing disruption.

Higher education is in a textbook disruption. As the number of college-age students contracts, the public is asking whether the investment is worth the results, and more than a hundred colleges are now at meaningful risk of closure or merger. Layoffs, program cuts, and hiring freezes have arrived.

Professional and trade associations are experiencing “the Great Association Reset.” Well over half have plateaued or declined in membership, even as most leaders still rate the value proposition as compelling. What they miss is that early-career professionals don’t want a private club anymore; they long for connection, meaning, and mentoring from people with experience.

Financial institutions face the new reality of continuous change. Customers’ needs are shifting, brick-and-mortar banks are closing, and the regulatory environment is disrupted, even politicized, with no end in sight. The core goals remain the same, but what counts as service, community, and security is a moving target.

Professional services have downsized and onboarded technology. The rise of AI has changed what it means to be in relationship with clients. Where operations that used to take a staff of five can now be run by one person with AI agents, the value of the human relationship, trust, and expertise must be proven; it will no longer be assumed.

Different industries, same story — and in each, diffuse governance and “the way we’ve always done things” is the enemy, because loyalty cultures do not survive disruption.

What Works When Reinvention is the Goal

What have we learned about the leaders who succeed when value creation is needed now? Transparency beats reassurance. High-candor environments create value. Move intentionally and swiftly. Here’s what the two Harvard Business Review studies together show.

1. Get clear on the few things that create value — and make that clarity visible. Turnaround leaders translate strategy into value now; they know which few levers actually move the outcome and adjust as data comes in rather than waiting for the five-year plan to play out. The best compress the plan into something a person can hold in their head — a single-page, three-year plan: why we exist, what winning looks like, the priorities. The test is how strategy translates into behavior aligned to goals. Everyone from the leadership team to the sales rep must know and be able to say where they fit and how they’re accountable. Focusing on three to five “big rocks” helps.

2. Do hands-on strategy at speed — pilot, evaluate, repeat. Leaders get into the work, translate direction into action, and revise quickly based on what they learn from the world. Consensus-building happens at pace. Piloting is the new planning. And strategy only becomes real through deliberate weekly, monthly, and quarterly routines designed intentionally, with progress tracked against the plan as rigorously as the budget, so a slip is caught in weeks, not discovered at the next board meeting. Leaders steeped in heavy governance cycles find this the hardest adjustment, and need it the most.

3. Take real risk on talent — and make the hard calls early. Successful leaders place selective bets, make trade-offs without perfect information, and own the consequences out in the open. It shows up most in staffing: hire and retain for where the institution needs to be in two years, not where it is today; fill the most critical seats with people who can carry it to its next stage; and make the hard calls early to avoid organizational drag — treating talent risk with the same seriousness as financial risk. In a mission-driven setting these are the hardest and most important decisions of all: is this team built for the institution we need to become, or the one we used to be?

4. Influence the whole system through presence, candor, and accountability. With diffuse authority and skeptical stakeholders, the org chart alone won’t carry the change. Confidence is earned by being present — time in the field, one-on-one with the people who move others, the same message repeated with questions answered — all while pushing accountability down and across the organization. Notably, the leaders studied kept a closer, more frequent, more unscripted relationship with their boards than they’d had in any formal corporate setting — less the quarterly performance, more the daily phone call — treating their board and most influential people as genuine partners, not an audience to be managed. And culture is what a leader tolerates: high expectations held with enough safety that people surface bad news, experiment, and own their mistakes. Values only change behavior when they’re made tangible in the daily work.

Leaders — Are You Energized by Reinvention?

The ghSmart researchers found that when a leader fails at this kind of transition, it is rarely for lack of talent. It is because of a lack of honesty about what the role actually required. The same is true for anyone deciding whether to lead an institution through disruption rather than simply preside over its decline. Questions turnaround leaders should ask themselves:

Am I energized by reinventing the model, or am I, in my heart, here to defend what we built? Can I cut through what is interesting to focus on the few things that matter? Will I actually make the talent calls, on a real timeline, instead of deferring them out of loyalty? Can I lead in genuine transparency, where the bad news surfaces early and often, rather than managing everyone’s comfort? And do I enjoy the building — fixing what’s broken, creating structure where little exists — or do I want the settled version of the institution that disruption has already taken off the table?

The honest answers matter, because reinvention is not stewardship. It is a different job. The institutions that come through this era will not be the ones that have been around the longest. They will be the ones whose leaders treated reinvention as the work itself — not as a threat to be survived, but as a new adventure.

Cindy

Sources

Primary frameworks

• Samantha Allison, Taavo Godtfredsen, and Nada Hashmi, “What the Best Private Equity-Backed CEOs Do Differently,” Harvard Business Review, April 9, 2026. (The “5x CEO” research and the five behaviors / initiatives.)

• Samantha Hellauer, Dina Wang, Heidi Smith, and Samantha Smith, “Making the Leap from Corporate Leader to PE-Backed CEO,” Harvard Business Review, July–August 2026 issue (ghSmart). (The five capabilities / skills, and the candidate self-assessment questions.)

Higher education disruption

• “Enrollment Cliff 2026: Higher Ed Challenges & Solutions,” AcademicJobs, January 14, 2026 (100+ colleges at risk of closure or merger; program cuts and layoffs). https://www.academicjobs.com/higher-education-news/enrollment-challenges-demographic-cliff-higher-education-2026-618

• “Higher Education Data: Charts That Explain College Trends,” The Boston Globe, April 2026 (enrollment decline, public-trust pressures, and the rise of AI). https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/09/magazine/college-trend-data/

Association disruption

• Marketing General Incorporated, 2025 Membership Marketing Benchmarking Report — majority of associations plateaued or declined in membership over the prior year; gap between perceived value and results — as reported in “Stop the Decline: Why Your Membership Strategy Isn’t Working,” ASAE, September 23, 2025. https://www.asaecenter.org/resources/articles/an_plus/2025/09-september/stop-the-decline-why-your-membership-strategy-isnt-working-and-how-to-fix-it

• Chris Vaughan, “The Membership Model Is Breaking Down — Here’s How Associations Can Rebuild It,” ASAE, November 20, 2025 (revenue fragility; uneven AI adoption). https://www.asaecenter.org/resources/articles/an_plus/2025/11-november/the-membership-model-is-breaking-down-heres-how-associations-can-rebuild-it

• “How Membership Behavior Has Shifted in 2026 (and What To Do About It),” Etherio, February 23, 2026 (the “Great Association Reset”). https://etherio.com/blog/how-membership-behavior-has-shifted-in-2026-and-what-to-do-about-it/

Professional services disruption

• Thomson Reuters Institute, 2026 AI in Professional Services Report (formerly the Generative AI in Professional Services Report), based on a survey of more than 1,500 professionals across 27 countries — organization-wide AI use nearly doubled year over year, from 22% in 2025 to 40% in 2026; a rising share of professionals now expect AI to materially affect jobs, billing, and revenue; the share of lawyers calling AI a major threat to the traditional practice of law rose from 36% to 50%. https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en/reports/2026-ai-in-professional-services-report and https://www.thomsonreuters.com/en-us/posts/technology/ai-in-professional-services-report-2026/

• Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind, The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts — the foundational argument that technology dissolves the “grand bargain” that protected expert gatekeepers; widely treated as the intellectual backbone of professional-services disruption research and updated in the authors’ more recent work on AI.

• The structural “billable-hour paradox”: professional services is one of the few industries in which efficiency gains directly reduce revenue, because price is tied to hours. As AI compresses research, drafting, document review, and analysis, firms are being pushed from time-based billing toward value-based, outcome-based, fixed-fee, and subscription models — a shift Thomson Reuters frames as an existential threat to hourly billing, and McKinsey documents in the compression of knowledge work. (Thomson Reuters Institute, 2026; McKinsey on generative AI in knowledge work.)

Financial services disruption

• McKinsey & Company, Global Banking Annual Review 2025 (”Why precision, not heft, defines the future of banking”) and the 2026 edition (”Precision with speed”) — after record post-2022 profits, the sector faces a likely reversion to the mean, with return on tangible equity already slipping (12.4% in 2024 to 11.8% in 2025). Without repositioning their business models, global bank profit pools could erode by roughly $170 billion (about 9%) over the next decade. Agentic AI threatens to dissolve the customer inertia underpinning deposit and card economics: McKinsey estimates that migrating even 5–10% of checking balances to top-of-market rates could cut industry deposit profits by 20% or more. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/global-banking-annual-review-2025

• Branch-network contraction (FDIC; National Community Reinvestment Coalition) — US bank branches peaked near 83,000 in 2012 and have fallen by roughly 15,000 net since, as transactions move to mobile. NCRC finds the network shrank 14.8% between 2017 and 2025 (from 86,469 to 73,649 branches), with closures concentrated in some regions even as a few large banks expand. https://ncrc.org/bank-branch-closures-slow-but-shifting-demographics-cloud-the-picture/ and “Which Banks Are Closing the Most Branches in 2025?,” U.S. News, December 2025. https://www.usnews.com/banking/articles/which-banks-are-closing-the-most-branches-in-2025

• Nonbank competition — McKinsey estimates fintechs now generate on the order of $650 billion in revenue, steadily capturing the most attractive slices of the banking profit pool (payments, wealth, and distribution), while private credit and wealth managers absorb others. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights

The “scaling,” has split coaching into two different things at the extremes. On one end, AI-enabled “coaching” tools now offer employees company-wide something like human optimization — stripping out the relationship and honing in on what to do and how to do it. On the other end, many companies have hired in-house human coaches, a model the TV show Billions popularized through performance coach Wendy Rhoades. And as Wendy’s crack-the-whip style suggests, it can be hard for an in-house coach to focus on the whole person when the organization is paying them to deliver quarterly results.

So here is the current state of coaching: it spans the space between human workforce optimization (with or without human intervention) and genuine human transformation. Which is better for people is the one that gives them more power and more choice; that is the latter — transformational coaching in relationship with real humans.

Optimization is fine — when you choose it

There is nothing wrong with optimizing yourself. I’m all about it. The more disciplined I am about my waking, my workouts, my meditation, and my thinking time, the better my results. (No hyperbaric oxygen chambers yet, but I’ll keep you posted.) The same goes for automating the tasks that don’t require my full brainpower. AI enables efficiency. I’ll bottom line it: optimization is great — when you are fully invested and in charge. Dedicated people doing everything possible to optimize their own performance often makes a crucial difference.

On the other hand, changing yourself for the wrong reasons hurts you. You may remember an old joke about a tailor who made a suit for a man, the only problem was that it didn’t fit him, the arms and legs were different lengths. When the man objected, the tailor suggested he pull his arm in a bit, extend one leg, and soon his suit looked beautiful, but he looked quite bizarre. This is the danger in optimizing yourself. You end up in a form that doesn’t suit you.

When you are being optimized without consideration for how the environment fits you, you are being used. Like a tool, you are being shaped for a purpose that is not your own. Think about that. It hurts for a reason.

Coaching that helps you sign on to be used better is not serving you. Coaching, at its best, puts you at the center in every way. The purpose of transformational coaching is about you becoming the fullest version of yourself and achieving the goals that matter most to you. The freedom to choose what you will do and whom you will be — that is what coaching, at its best, offers. The best coaches bring different backgrounds and experiences, and they are trained and practiced at evoking transformation in the client. The client sets the agenda. You are in charge of you.

In coaching, the client is understood as the agent of change in his or her own life. Their choice is the issue. Transformation happens because the client hears their own voice — often for the first time — and the coach reflects it; exactly how that works is part of the mystery of human connection. Perhaps a client in relationship with a great coach is safe to explore. It is likely that the deep curiosity of the coach, on the side of the client’s best self, plus the trust, commitments, and accountable action of the client in their real life, that relationship, creates the conditions for transformation.

Transformational coaching is countercultural in a good way

Transformational coaching — coaching at its best — is deeply countercultural. Our world trains compliance, submission, and passivity from a young age, moving us away from independent thinking and realizing our own uniqueness. In some ways, the “coaching as optimization” variant is an attempt to co-opt coaching: to make us fit more seamlessly into larger organizations and movements without the challenge of our individuality. But human transformation is not about fitting in. It is about creating, growing, and becoming. It is good for society to grow individuals, but hard at the same time.

Transformational coaching stands in contrast to three powerful social forces that push us toward conformity: the ubiquity of the therapeutic model of who we are, work that is increasingly alienating, and a social reality that leaves us isolated.

What therapy has done for us — and to us

Therapy is a lifesaver. It has mattered to me personally, and I would never diminish what it offers when mental health is at stake. But looking at humans through the lens of psychology has also done something to the culture, and to how we think of ourselves. It has medicalized the ordinary struggles of being human — encouraging us to interpret our individuality and uniqueness as pathology, and to discount our own agency in the face of life’s challenges.

The last fifty years have seen psychotherapy become the dominant socio-emotional framework for self-understanding in the Western world. Nearly one in four American adults now receives mental health treatment in any given year.¹ The language of diagnosis — anxiety, depression, attachment disorder, trauma response — has migrated from the clinic into everyday conversation.

When we locate the source of our struggles primarily in our stories of distress and difference, we frame what might otherwise be individuality — intensity, sensitivity, unconventional thinking, challenge, difficulty fitting in — as deviation from a norm to be corrected. Psychology asks, implicitly: how far are you from normal? Coaching asks something different: who are you at your best, and what is getting in the way of that?

The first question pulls us toward sameness. The second evokes our uniqueness.

Work used to be one path — not anymore

Fifty years ago, the hard part was getting well-trained and landing a good job. Once you had it, security was relatively predictable. Loyalty was rewarded. Change was slow and largely optional.

That world is gone. It is harder now to find a job and stay in it — and change is not only required, it is predictable and constant. Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report finds that only 20 percent of employees worldwide are engaged at work, meaning roughly 80 percent are either going through the motions or actively alienated.² The estimated cost of that disengagement: around $10 trillion in lost productivity every year.²

We have built an economy that depends on most people honing specific capabilities for their roles — while demanding a degree of conformity that leaves them unprepared to pivot when they must. The median job tenure for workers between 25 and 34 is now just 2.7 years.³ The fact is that the economy no longer rewards loyalty; it rewards a very high degree of adaptability. Yet the workplace, in most cases, actively trains people into “fitting in” and out of the very qualities that make them adaptable: independent judgment, risk tolerance, and a clear sense of who they are outside the job description.

The combination is concerning for individuals — and it is exactly why transformational coaching is a sound investment at any career stage.

We are more isolated than ever

The third force is social. We are isolated as at no previous point in recorded history. In 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General declared loneliness a public health epidemic, finding that roughly half of American adults report measurable loneliness.⁴ A quarter-century ago, Robert Putnam documented the collapse of civic and community life in Bowling Alone; since then, nearly every metric he tracked has worsened.⁵

What this means in practice is that most people have very few relationships in which they can speak honestly about what is actually happening in their inner lives. They have colleagues, family, acquaintances on social media. Many people are conditioned into conformity around identity groups that further constrain their honest self-expression. They may have people who need things from them, and people they need things from. If they are lucky, they have relationships built on shared history, shared obligation, shared interest.

What almost no one has is a relationship organized entirely, non-negotiably, around their own growth.

Why you usually can’t get this from the people in your life

Transformational coaching does not need or ask the client to be different from who they are and who they wish to become. It starts exactly where they are — and asks, with genuine curiosity, where they most want to go.

There may be a partner, a parent, or a friend who can offer that. Occasionally it happens. But what we want for the people we love inevitably gets tangled up with what we want for ourselves — and with what we need them to be. Love has stakes. Friendship has history. Family has role expectations built over decades. None of these are bad things. But none of them are neutral. The people who care about you may also care about how you are for and to them. Go figure.

A good coach has no stake in whom you become. They will not be hurt if you change. They will not need you to stay the same to protect their own sense of reality. They are not invested in any outcome except the one you are working toward.

The International Coaching Federation’s Global Coaching Client Study found that 80 percent of coaching clients reported improved self-confidence, and more than 70 percent reported improved work performance and relationships.⁶ Not because a coach fixed them — but because they finally had the space to hear themselves think clearly.

The new world of work

The coaching industry will keep growing, and it will keep including everything from optimization to support to genuine transformation. AI tools will keep improving. Behavioral coaching will keep producing measurable, defensible results that look good in a quarterly review. Your options and the need for your flexibility will increase.

If what you’re after is not optimization — if what you’re after is the freedom to become the fullest version of who you actually are — and flexibility — then relationship based transformational coaching is a worthwhile investment. You need a coach who is genuinely curious about you and willing to ask challenging questions to evoke your transformation.

That kind of coaching is countercultural. It does not see you as a problem. It does not see optimizing you for your present environment as the best choice unless it is your choice. And it insists — against a cultural backdrop of pathologizing difference, increasingly alienating work, and social isolation — that you are not broken, and that the most important work of your life is discovering how to be fully alive.

That is what I, and so many other talented professionals, are doing with our clients. And that is what I want for you.

Cindy

References

1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics. Mental Health Treatment Among Adults: 2019–2023 (MMWR QuickStats). The share of U.S. adults who received any mental health treatment in the past 12 months rose from 19.2% (2019) to 23.9% (2023).

2. Gallup. State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report. Global employee engagement fell to 20% in 2025; low engagement is estimated to cost the world economy roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity annually (about 9% of global GDP).

3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Employee Tenure in 2024. Median tenure for workers ages 25–34 was 2.7 years (January 2024).

4. Office of the U.S. Surgeon General. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation (2023). Approximately half of U.S. adults report experiencing loneliness.

5. Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (2000).

6. International Coaching Federation. ICF Global Coaching Client Study (2009). 80% of clients reported improved self-esteem/self-confidence; more than 70% reported improved work performance, relationships, and communication.

Ikigai insists there is a place for you — a unique purpose — found in the overlap of what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can get paid to do. Being human in a changing world asks you to look both within and outside to create a bridge that makes room for your talents in light of what the world needs and wants. This assumes that purpose is what you need, even more than resources or getting what you want, and purpose is what is missing in the difficult transitions. When we are finding our way into adulthood, becoming parents, taking on new challenges, retiring, purpose is the central question. In each moment, fear arises and your instinct may be to reject your real interests and talents or to push away real input from the world. Ikigai asks you to bear reality. Trust that there is a unique place for you to contribute.

The power of ikigai (a Japanese concept made up of the kanji for iki=life and gai=value) is the recognition of the space of being and doing where you find joy and meaning. For Japanese, this can be anywhere, working in your garden, tending your baby, painting a wall, or cooking in a restaurant. A daily source of meaning is ikigai.

Western writers have translated this sense of purpose into a practical framework for finding value within the western system at the intersection of what others value and what we are and have to give. This reframe recognizes that it is difficult to find purpose without security in our individualistic world. We are moral, epistemic and economic beings — valuers, knowers, and doers. We need others and we need ourselves. We are always becoming and honing our skills, and we are best off when our work is something we care about and do well, and in service to a greater community that will reward us for doing it.

The time in my life when I honestly felt a sense of purpose without any hint of reservation was when I became a mother, holding my child in my arms for the first time. In that moment, familiar to many women, I wondered why I had ever thought that anything else mattered. Knowing this was the result of my good fortune to have been served up a powerfully motivating chemical cocktail by my postpartum body does not alter the power of the experience of having my entire sense of purpose reordered by a tiny creature. And it is true that the world certainly needs mothers; many mothers and caregivers feel this love for what they do, and it allows them to endure with love, something the world needs, but which typically doesn’t pay much. This is an example of the power of purpose as a motivator.

The sweet spot for us humans is finding a resonant depth of experience and gifts with what the world as it is, a world of commerce, trade, and value creation, will reward. Ikigai is an explicit attempt to find purpose in a role you can play within society to create value for yourself and others and security and purpose for the individual. This sense of place within a community that is larger than oneself cradles you in a world that could otherwise be very lonely and dangerous.

Working with people during times of transition reveals that ikigai explains the reasons people feel adrift. Perhaps something that was working is no longer. You have left the structure of school and need to find your way. You have accepted that the job required you to do things that made you unhappy and unwell. Technology can do better what you were doing for a living. When you no longer love what you once did, when you aren’t good at it anymore, when the world does not need it, or no longer pays for it, your sense of purpose is lost.

Many people are there right now — wondering where they stand with respect to their purpose — the world has changed. In an AI-enabled world, many traditional ways of doing things are not needed anymore, even writing, even coaching, even teaching is being done for humans rather than by humans (perhaps not well, but it is being done.) The world does not pay us for what it used to.

The most important thing that anyone can do — whether a person starting to find their way in the world, someone launching a second career, or during a big life transition moment such as empty nest or retirement — is to take a very honest look at their own place in this new world. Many times we want ourselves or the world to be different and that desire drives us. Instead, cultivate an intimate acquaintance with reality. Let it sink in. Ask how best to operate within the world as it is.

Here are some simple steps for anyone seeking purpose and meaning:

Inquire about each of these categories separately from one another. Do not let one inquiry impact any other.

First, what are your talents and abilities? This requires you to know yourself more than just a little bit. This is hard for young people, and hard, too, for people who have been doing something for a long time. Don’t just reflect, stop and consider. Break the things you do into smaller tasks. Which parts of what you do are you just amazing at?

A tip — don’t leave it up to yourself — ask your best friend, your significant other, your mentor. What do others notice you do exceptionally well? What we are best at may be invisible to us because it seems ordinary. Know your talents and skills and be honest with yourself about what they are.

Second, what do you love? What delights you? It may also make you feel relaxed, safe, or alive. You may find what you love in the environment in which you thrive, in the qualities of people you prefer to be around, or activities that give you energy. Thinking about what makes pleasant moments pleasant, or what makes bad moments better, can be helpful. I love beauty, but my love of it is so much a part of the choices I make every day that it is hard for me to see. Values often reflect what we love. And no, people do not love the same things. We are each unique. Dig a little.

Third, what does the world need? This is a tough one, and it involves your values. What the world needs is real, changeable, and a values judgement. The world needs teachers, doctors, chefs. Does it need new products? Inventions? Does it need better weapons? A new understanding of history? Who and what the world needs depends upon how it is now and how it ought to be. The needs of the world can change, and quickly. Still, there is a sense of mission in this question.

Finally, what can you be paid to do? The fact that someone will pay another person who can palm a basketball (and reliably throw it into a loop of steel high on a pole) a tremendous amount of money is a feature of modern life that is accidental, delightful and a bit misleading. When asking what the world will pay you to do, it is worth doing some research. For every thing that we know people get paid to do, there are at least one hundred little-known things that people get paid to do.

The intersection of these is the sweet spot of ikigai.

Many of us didn’t ever ask these questions, not fully. Even if we did, we change and the world changes. We can expect more than one crisis of purpose in a lifetime. It is worth asking these questions again.

If you have come to the point of caring deeply about your purpose, consider yourself fortunate. This is a struggle, but a rewarding struggle if you take it up seriously.

Your efforts to understand your purpose will be rewarded by the person you are able to become and the quality of your contributions to the community you will be a part of.

Cindy

It is not loving yourself, or self-compassion. To love yourself, or to be compassionate with yourself, is a feeling and a mindset — warmth, kindness, a willingness to forgive and to be with yourself as with your dearest friend. To honor yourself is what that love looks like in action: keeping faith with what is true and important to you, keeping promises to yourself; being kind to the person you were — the one who acted in ways you would not now act, based on understandings you have grown out of. Self-compassion notices that your past self was trying hard to keep you safe; honoring is what you do with that knowledge. Even loving yourself, you can still betray yourself daily. Honoring yourself is the practice that keeps you on your own side.

It’s different again from trusting yourself. Trust is a form of self-belief — believing your own perceptions matter, that your judgments are worth paying attention to, that your intuitions are worth mentioning. Honoring commits you to some baseline of that trust, but it leaves room for doubt — for the times when you are vulnerable and prone to error, like everyone else.

So honoring asks two things of you: truth and loyalty. It asks for truth, because you cannot honor a person you refuse to see clearly and accept. And it asks for loyalty, because seeing yourself clearly and then abandoning yourself anyway is an affront. Loyalty without truth is delusion. Truth without loyalty is betrayal. Honoring is both at once, plus a promise: I will stand up for you, keep promises to you, understand and explain how you were feeling and thinking, have love and compassion for you, and tell you when you are misguided and can do better. Honoring yourself is committing to behave like the best friend you can imagine.

Here is what binds all of us who want very badly to do and be good: we spend our lives on the side of others — as workers, children, and parents — while abandoning ourselves in basic, critical ways. This can happen in small decisions. Taking other people’s views more seriously than our own. Prioritizing responsibility for others over responsibility for ourselves — not occasionally, but absolutely. The life of service can become a life of making yourself small, simply by not taking your own value to others and the world seriously enough. The opportunity of a life, for people trying to be good, is to stay on our own side, too.

That is the trap: the very decency that makes you especially good to others may keep you from being good to yourself.

Here is the comfort: although you are completely unique, you are not alone. Your uniqueness means there is no model for you. How to stay on your own side is yours alone to discover, and that part of the journey is solitary. But the fact that so many of us are in the same boat means we can witness and help each other — precisely because our challenges differ. We are not each caught in the same traps, but in different ones. By staying on our own side, we can embrace a fuller expression of ourselves. This is the beautiful possibility we can realize only together, with each other’s help, and with deep listening, humility, and honesty. It’s also a good reason to be skeptical of anyone who seems to have it all figured out.

We tend to fetishize achievement — money, fame, the appearance of confidence — because these things are valued and make survival easier in obvious ways. But achievement is not evidence of having figured it all out. You can arrive by every external measure and still never come into contact with yourself in any crucial way. Achievement can involve luck; it can come from raw determination to push through pain or fear. Or it can come from a state of total self-deception, or from an overpowering sense of responsibility, just as easily as it can come from self-understanding and enviable alignment. Achievement can offer status and safety, and those things are appealing, but they are not the same as wisdom. We talk as if they were, because we mistake achievement for a panacea. But achievement that is not in service to honoring ourselves — to becoming the fullest expression of who we are — is in service to something else: safety, status, quieting an old fear. And that can make the inner work even harder. Our admiration of external achievement can obscure the most important questions.

And we have only so much time to take up the most important questions. We live in a society that has reduced the risk of early death more than any in history. We have grown so good at it that we half-live as though death were not coming for us at all. But it is — and our fragility, our uniqueness, our impermanence are not the obstacles to staying on our own side; they are the reasons it matters so much. For those of us who are fortunate enough to reach mid-life and beyond, getting acquainted with what we are in service to is the work — this gives us the chance to honor our one unique expression and get right with ourselves and the people we love. What’s the biggest reason you can find to live your life well? What are you in service to? Freedom? God? Peace? This is the opportunity.

We often know this, deep down, but we get distracted. It is only when we have completed some of the business of life — raising kids, or creating some security for ourselves, in our forties, fifties, sixties, and beyond — that we have the luxury of turning to deeper existential questions. This seeking often comes after a crisis, a failure, or a success that left us empty. The hole where pride was supposed to be can open into a question: What was I looking for, and what did I actually find?

For those who find themselves at an early stage of this path, it is hard to map your own unique journey to honoring yourself, but easy to notice some pitfalls to avoid. The ways we honor ourselves are many and varied, but the ways we abandon ourselves are easy to see once we know what we are looking for.

The Ways We Abandon Ourselves

Taking the group’s side instead of your own. The easiest way never to be on your own side is to never consider your own opinions at all — to take your views, ready-made, from your community, your tribe, the majority. You may be rewarded for it. But you will never become yourself. The world will miss out on the one perspective only you could offer.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” — Mark Twain

To stay on your side, work to know your own mind.

Believing you are your failures — or your achievements. This is believing your own press, and it is wrong in several directions. None of us is all good or all bad, and none of us is fixed in amber by what we have done or failed to do. The story told about what you have accomplished is never the story you would tell, at your most honest, about who you actually are. Your true story is messier, less flattering, and far more tender. As long as you believe you are your achievements (or your failures), you will resist looking inside — where the actual being of you lives.

The same caution applies to other people’s press. What looks like effortless drive from the outside is often panic on the inside; what looks like clarity can be dissociation and blankness. Looking effective is entirely compatible with being unable to feel or name your own needs. We can change — but the key to change is self-acceptance. We have to see ourselves in our fragility and our smallness, as well as in our potential wholeness.

“It wasn’t until I accepted myself, just as I was, that I was free to change.” — Tara Brach

You are not your accomplishments, however proud of them you may be. You are not an object, a fixed thing you use for a purpose. You are a being, and your proper “mode” is becoming.

Living in fear. Fear is a normal part of being a mammal — a survival mechanism built on fast responses: fight, flee, fawn. It serves us less well now, because we mistake a threat to the ego for a threat to the body, and that makes us biased and unreliable. We become habituated early to one response, and the habit narrows what we can even perceive as possible. The child who hid or pleased when her parents fought becomes the adult who fawns. Knowing this, we can learn to pause when fear arrives and place a space between the feeling and the reaction — long enough to take care of the part of ourselves that fears. Long enough to sit with what the situation requires. Long enough to choose.

To stay on your side, remember that the old response is a habit, and habits can change.

Mistaking rumination for contact with what is. This one is hard, because it disguises itself as the very inner work I have been describing. The mind gets busy, and we mistake the busyness for progress. But spinning the same thoughts about what was, or might have been, or might yet be, is not the same as making honest contact with what is. Rumination is not moving anywhere; introspection is different. The test is whether it leads anywhere — toward a truer view, a quieter mind, or an actual experiment in doing something different. Almost nothing is clarified by thought alone; we have to try things and see. And settling the mind is itself a form of doing — which is why meditation, prayer, and introspection may be the most important actions there are: ways of proceeding from intention rather than reflex.

To stay on your side, don’t mistake the loop for the path.

Failing to govern your attention and energy. Losing your attention means squandering your energy. Focus is a gift, and the flow state — where energy is directed and self-awareness falls away entirely — may be the greatest gift of all. The irony is that we may be most ourselves when we are least conscious of ourselves. Honoring yourself includes directing your attention, on purpose, from one present moment to the next, however long the moments last. Time takes on a sense of unreality when you govern your attention.

In the end, staying on your own side is just this: inhabiting your own life so fully that you — your whole, complete self — are actually present in it.

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” — Oscar Wilde

It is a great gift indeed to have the chance to live.

Cindy

Mission statements tell you what an organization aspires to value, but they can’t tell you what an organization actually values. To understand that, you have to experience the culture in practice.

Values live in what actually happens in the day to day actions of leaders, and especially when there is responsibility to take, and a cost to pay. What leaders do under pressure — whom they protect when something goes wrong, what they tolerate, what they refuse, who gets heard, and who does not — these decisions reflect and create organizational values. Over time, those choices teach everyone in the organization what is real, regardless of what the mission statement says.

Wherever you are working, you are feeling this every day. This is why values alignment is such a big part of leadership. The values leaders hold become the values of the organization.

Leadership begins with your values, not a strategic plan.

If a leader has not done their own values work, the organization will be at odds with itself. In the worst case, it will not reflect any values at all.

Most of us think we know our values. Often we don’t.

I taught ethics for years before I came to organizational leadership and coaching, and one of the first things I learned is that most people make no serious attempt to examine their own values. My students used to say (and believe) that values were “made up.” That’s a cop out. It’s easy to say they are made up if you’ve never thought about what you stand for and what matters to you. Values are all we have, many times. They are no more made up than mathematics. They are a way of discerning what is real and true and what matters.

The truth is, people live their answers to questions about what is worth caring about, but they often don’t want to examine what their behavior reveals. Aligning your values with what you do is the rarest thing. It takes self-knowledge, commitment, and honesty.

Not really living our values, feeling alienated, is a failure we are all set up for.

We absorb values from our instincts, our families, our cultures. Some we hold because we get used to them. Some we hold because we are afraid not to. Some we hold because no one ever invited us to ask whether we still believed them. Most of us are running on a lot of values we have not actually chosen, but simply inherited.

When something really hard hits, it may be a challenge at work where you need to stand up for something, or it may be life going very differently than planned. And suddenly, you are in a crisis. Do I protect myself or do what is right? Is my instinct to act a good one or a self-protective one?

Very often if we haven’t been paying close attention for a long time, we will fall back on what we were trained to do rather than what we would choose here and now if we are doing our best thinking. Inherited values may drive your behavior, but they will not feed you. They are how you were trained, not who you are. Chosen values inspire you. They have weight. They pull you forward because something in you recognizes them as worth reaching for.

Both are operating in you, often at the same time, often in conflict. The peacemaker in you may be at war with the truth-teller in you, and you may not even know it. You may be praised for one and undone by the other. Where these conflicts go unexamined, you feel a chronic low-grade lack of integrity — not because you are dishonest, but because you are unconsulted.

That feeling is information. It is worth taking seriously.

Values are not discovered. They are achieved.

We talk about values as if they were well known to us, waiting for the right moment of reflection to propel us forward. They are not well known to us. What will surface, if you sit quietly, may be a familiar set of words — integrity, family, excellence. But if they haven’t been put to the test, you do not know. And very often the values you are actually living look more like self-interest, self-protection, and self-deception.

Aristotle understood this two and a half thousand years ago. (No, we haven’t changed that much.) Values become real through practice. Put another way, what you do is what you become. You become courageous by doing courageous things, again and again, until courage is your disposition — the thing you reliably do, not the thing you wish you would do. Aristotle called this habituation. The fact is we often habituate ourselves to values we may not want to own, upon reflection.

The values that are real for you are the ones you have practiced into being. The rest are aspirations or shadows. Aspirations are fine. Just do not confuse them with character. Shadows are good to shed light on.

The good news is that you can begin this practice at any age, at any stage, in any role. No one can do it for you.

What this means for leaders

If you are leading anything — a team, a company, a board, a family, yourself — your values are already shaping it. Whether you have examined them or not. Whether you would endorse them or not. The people around you can feel the values you actually live by long before they hear the ones you claim.

This is why a leader’s first work is internal. Not because internal work is more important than results, but because results that come from an unclear leader are unreliable and often costly. Strategies built on murky values drift. Missions held by leaders who have not done their own work get diluted, to say the least. Sometimes the mission does not hold together at all.

The opposite is also true. A leader who knows what they value and lives from it can hold ambiguity, lead through change, make hard calls, deal with difficult situations, and stay grounded when everything around them is shaking. Not because they have all the answers, but because they know what they are willing to be, and what they refuse.

Organizational mission, vision, and strategy rest on values that are lived. Without it, they are scaffolding around an empty center.

A starting place

I created this Values Discernment Instrument for the leaders I work with, and I am sharing it with you as an invitation to look more deeply into what matters most. It is not a quiz. It is not a personality assessment. It is an invitation to look honestly at three things:

Where your values have already shown up — in moments of peak aliveness, real cost to you, and regret.

Which values you actually want to be known for, and which you have been carrying without choosing.

And where the gap is. Not the gap between you and someone else’s idea of a good life, but the gap between the values you hold and the life you are currently living.

That last one is where most of the work is, and where most of the freedom is, too.

Do not try to do this perfectly. Sit with it. Come back to it. Bring it to your coach or a trusted friend. Notice what you avoided answering, and treat that as a starting point for curious exploration.

The work of knowing and living your values is among the most important work of a human life. I hope this serves you.

Cindy

Some of the most psychologically unsafe, ethically compromised, and structurally abusive environments are not chaotic organizations with no governance at all. They are highly regulated systems overflowing with policies, procedures, bylaws, compliance protocols, reporting structures, and credentialing requirements. The problem is not rules themselves — healthy organizations need rules oriented toward mission and goals. The problem is that rule-heavy systems, when combined with weak ethical culture, lack of focus on outcomes, and concentrated power, create conditions that sophisticated manipulators exploit with practiced effectiveness.

Rules Create Cover

Most people imagine predators as impulsive, reckless, or visibly aggressive. In professional environments, the predators who thrive are those who weaponize rules. The most dangerous individuals are frequently controlled, slick, tactical, and deeply knowledgeable about organizational process — they might even be the developer of the rules or the resident expert on them. They learn early that institutions tend to confuse procedural compliance with ethical behavior, and that confusion is useful to them. From the predator’s point of view, if a box was checked, a meeting was held, a committee approved something, or a policy was technically followed, integrity has been preserved — they cannot be called out. Good people are often genuinely confused by this behavior, because they would never think to use the rules that way.

Research on the “Dark Triad” — narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy — helps explain why some individuals are particularly adept at exploiting this gap. Studies consistently find that people high in these traits are more willing to manipulate others for personal gain, less constrained by remorse, and disproportionately drawn to environments organized around status, influence, and institutional power. More troubling, research by organizational psychologist Gerhard Blickle and colleagues found that Machiavellian individuals with strong political skill are often rated favorably by coworkers and supervisors even while engaging in self-serving or harmful conduct. Skillful manipulation looks like professionalism to people who aren’t as slick. Expertise in working the rules becomes protective cover.

The Catholic Church abuse crisis revealed this dynamic in devastating detail. In many dioceses, allegations were routed through internal review systems, personnel procedures, legal processes, and hierarchical reporting structures that appeared orderly on paper — while those same systems prioritized institutional preservation over vulnerable individuals. As abusive priests were moved from one diocese to the next, the system was functioning as designed. The same pattern appeared in the Larry Nassar case. Athletes, parents, trainers, and medical professionals raised concerns repeatedly. Within a highly credentialed sports and medical bureaucracy, those complaints were minimized, redirected, or procedurally managed. The institutional structure protected the abuser.

Bureaucracy Exhausts Healthy People

Highly procedural systems disproportionately reward individuals with unusually high appetites for control, conflict endurance, and strategic manipulation. Healthy, empathic professionals generally enter organizations to build, solve problems, and contribute meaningfully. They typically assume others are operating in good faith. Manipulative individuals operate differently. They are more willing to weaponize ambiguity, exploit procedural loopholes, manufacture confusion, file excessive complaints, overwhelm opponents administratively, and use delay as a form of power. In heavily bureaucratic systems, this creates a brutal asymmetry: ethical people become exhausted while manipulative people become energized.

Research grounded in trait activation theory confirms the pattern. Highly politicized organizational climates — where advancement depends on political navigation rather than mission performance — create especially favorable conditions for antagonistic personalities skilled at reading and exploiting institutional power structures. Sociologist Robert Jackall documented this in his landmark study Moral Mazes, based on extensive fieldwork inside major corporations. Jackall argued that bureaucracies diffuse responsibility downward while concentrating power upward, creating conditions where accountability becomes almost impossible to trace. Success inside these systems depends as much on impression management and institutional alliances as on competence. Competence, in fact, is not required. Over time, many capable people disengage entirely — not because they lack ability, but because constant procedural warfare and obviously poor decision-making consumes energy that should be going toward actual work. The organization loses precisely the people it most needs.

Rule-Heavy Systems Reward Image Management

In many institutions — especially prestigious ones — maintaining the appearance of stability becomes more important than confronting underlying dysfunction. This creates fertile ground for individuals skilled in impression management, and even for unskilled ones who focus on appearances to the exclusion of actual work. These individuals cultivate alliances, attach themselves to institutional language that has been drained of meaning, and present themselves as defenders of professionalism — framing critics as disruptive, rule-breaking, or difficult. Because rule-heavy organizations prioritize decorum and procedural control, individuals raising ethical concerns can appear more threatening than the underlying misconduct itself. The whistleblower disrupts harmony. The manipulator protects appearances. Institutions that focus on rules reward self-protection.

Psychologist Jennifer Freyd’s research on institutional betrayal captures what happens next. Freyd found that when institutions respond to reports of wrongdoing with denial, minimization, or retaliation, the betrayal compounds the original harm significantly. This response tends to follow what she identified as the DARVO pattern — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — in which institutions don’t merely fail to protect those who speak up, but actively mobilize procedural systems against them. Research on whistleblowing reinforces the chilling effect: one study found that 87% of employees who witnessed organizational wrongdoing failed to report it because they had already seen retaliation happen to others. Freyd also drew a crucial distinction between compliance-based “training” cultures and genuinely ethical cultures grounded in critical thinking, transparency, and accountability. Institutions cannot regulate themselves into moral courage through additional procedural layers. The rules are not the answer to the problem the rules help create.

This pattern surfaced in the corporate scandals surrounding Enron and Wells Fargo. Both organizations had extensive compliance systems and internal governance structures. Neither stopped the malfeasance. In both cases, institutional incentives surrounding growth, reputation, and internal loyalty eroded the safeguards from within. The issue was not the absence of rules, but incentive structures that told everyone what to notice and what to ignore.

Complexity Protects Power

The more complex a governance system becomes, the harder it is for ordinary members, employees, or stakeholders to understand how decisions are actually made. This opacity benefits insiders. Political scientist Anthony Downs observed decades ago that bureaucracies naturally tend toward expansion, internal self-protection, and procedural complexity — that rules originally intended to create accountability gradually evolve into mechanisms of insulation. Layers of committees, legal structures, technical language, and procedural barriers make meaningful oversight increasingly difficult. In these environments, harmful conduct can survive for years — not because nobody notices, but because responsibility becomes so diffuse it’s nearly impossible to pursue. Everyone is involved and no one is responsible. The system protects itself.

“The System Would Stop a Serious Problem”

One of the most dangerous assumptions in professional cultures that have lost their connection to mission is this: “If this were truly serious, the system would stop it.” History repeatedly demonstrates otherwise. Institutions can tolerate harmful behavior for astonishingly long periods when the offender is high status, financially valuable, politically connected, legally sophisticated, or structurally useful. The more status a person accumulates, the more difficult institutions find it to confront them — not because the evidence is unclear, but because the social, financial, and reputational cost of accountability is too high.

The downfall of Harvey Weinstein exposed how entire professional ecosystems can normalize silence around known misconduct when influential individuals control opportunity, status, and access. Many people inside the industry were aware long before public accountability arrived. Institutional incentives favored accommodation over confrontation. They usually do.

Healthy Governance Is Simpler Than People Think

Healthy organizations do not merely add rules. They build ethical cultures where people are encouraged to take responsibility and ask hard questions. The strongest institutions are not those with the thickest policy manuals — they are those that preserve transparency, distributed accountability, psychological safety, independent oversight, ethical courage, and the ability to challenge power without fear of retaliation. Research on ethical culture and whistleblowing consistently finds that employees are far less likely to report wrongdoing when they fear retaliation or believe leadership prioritizes institutional protection over truth. Those findings describe most large institutions. Creating clear, objective reporting paths and protecting whistleblowers is not complicated. The decision not to is a choice.

Ultimately, it is the character of leaders that matters most. No procedural system substitutes for that. Governance complexity can entrench and reinforce cultures of intimidation, silence, and self-preservation. The question is not whether an organization has rules. The question is whether those rules include genuine transparency and accountability, and whether they uphold the mission. If not, the mission has become subordinate to the preservation of power itself.

Cindy

Like fish unaware of the water, we live unaware of the opportunity right in front of us — to take responsibility for ourselves, to claim our freedom, to choose what we actually pay attention to. We have never had more opportunity. And yet, we find ourselves in a rapidly changing world engineered to capture and hold us in a daydream within someone else’s real dream that becomes, for us, what buddhists call “samsara,” a sort of sleepwalking through our lives. At work and at home, hectic doing keeps us from living our lives with sense, purpose, or understanding.

We can choose differently. We can learn to be in the moment. We can build the discipline we need to lead ourselves. We can pull our attention away from the sparkly objects— really more like mosquitos — dive-bombing nuisances trying to eat us alive. And they will consume us, bite by bite, if we let them. The question is whether we will choose this fever dream or our deepest selves. Because most of us, most of the time, are not deciding. We are being acted on, and we are reacting, and it hurts us.

This is not a small problem. It is the defining problem of this moment.

The Water We’re Swimming In

We do not need to be constantly reactive, constantly scrolling, constantly bracing for the next thing. We need to attend, fully, to be in this moment. And if now is a moment for action, then we must do what is actually our priority right now, in this moment — the only moment in which we can do anything at all. That is it. That is the whole game.

Instead, most of us are staring into our phones or laptops, feeling more isolated and more agitated, absorbing a steady stream of images, thoughts, and messages that alarm us and push us to act. We are adjusting, slowly and with suppressed sadness, to a life with less choice, less growth, less connection, and ironically, less efficient goal oriented work. The tools are taking over, and we are calling it change, and progress, and inevitable.

Let’s not blow the opportunity to experience this one precious life because we forgot we were in charge.

You Are in Charge of You

Yes, change is constant. The disruption is real. The pressure is real. And you cannot control the outside. But you can control the inside.

Elevate yourself by taking charge. Take responsibility for your thoughts, your feelings, your beliefs. Not as a productivity hack — but as an act of self-respect. Doing so will not only slow things down inside you, it will make the stress manageable, and, over time, it will make you an example for others, someone who is living well, someone you can trust, someone who can be trusted by others. In a distracted and fragmented world, the trust between human beings is the most valuable currency there is.

Here is how to begin.

Technology Is a Tool. You Are Not.

There is a critical difference between relying on technology and being dependent on it. Reliance means you reach for a tool when it serves you. Dependence means the tool is running the show.

Use the technology. Don’t let it use you.

This matters beyond our personal lives, too. Leadership — real leadership — is human, and it is based on one human trusting and being inspired by another human. In our zeal to be efficient, we have started imagining we can optimize ourselves and other people. We cannot. We should not try. You are a heart, a mind, and a spirit. You are nourished by meaning, values, and vision — not by a better productivity system.

The current conversation, whether about AI or neuroscience or performance psychology, tends to treat human beings as machines to be tuned. Working out gives you a dopamine hit that elevates your mood. Technically true. But that is not how any of us experiences it, and it is not how we move ourselves to live well. Speaking in human terms — about purpose, about connection, about love and meaning — brings us back to who we are.

Let’s not try to optimize people. Let’s understand them. People who will succeed in this new world will offer encouragement, vision, and compassion alongside goals and discipline. Human leadership means supporting the growth of every other person. And it begins with leading yourself.

How to Lead Yourself

Quieting the crazy is an act of self-respect and self-care. When you genuinely respect and care for yourself, you can extend that same respect and care to the people around you. This is not soft. In fact it is hard. It is the only solid ground, the foundation of everything. Put yourself first.

Build your life around what you love. Psychologists call these recovery experiences. I call it what matters most to you. The research is unambiguous: non-work activities, real life experiences, restore us. Exercise, hobbies, creative pursuits, time with the people who matter most, deep rest. Not scrolling. Not half-watching something. Actually being somewhere, doing something, in the real world. These are the experiences that restore your energy rather than merely burning through time, with the very same stress and agitation in your being.

Believe that you can grow. We all have our natures, our histories, our ingrained ways of being. This is true. And we can all change. This is true if we believe it. Carol Dweck at Stanford has spent decades studying what she calls a growth mindset — the belief that abilities can be developed through effort, learning, and persistence. It is not just an attitude. It is the difference between people who adapt and people who don’t.

Be kind to yourself. Treating yourself with kindness during difficulty — rather than with harsh self-judgment — is not indulgence. On the contrary, self-compassion builds resilience by making it easier to recover from setbacks. Kristin Neff at the University of Texas has shown that people who recover most effectively from failure (a normal part of each of our lives) are those who are kind to themselves. They recognize that struggle is part of our shared human experience rather than evidence of personal deficiency. Self-compassion is a skill. Practice it.

Return to your values. Reconnect what you do to what matters most to you. We differ in which values we hold, but we are alike in needing them at the center of all we do. Your why, your reason, your purpose; these are all ways of describing your values. You may work to support your family, or to express your unique capabilities, or to make a difference in the world, or to honor your faith. Whatever gives you a sense of purpose and makes you more alive— honor it. Honoring your values will make you feel better, perform better, and become better. Not because it is a technique, but because it is what we are here for.

The deepest insight is simple: we are meaning-makers. The meaning of your life comes from your connection to your values. This helps you to find and connect to people worthy of your respect and trust. Your internal clarity is the foundation of everything good.

Technology: Use it Well

Here is more good news: used intentionally, technology can support all of this as never before.

Use it to protect your time and attention, not to fragment it. Calendar tools and focus apps can carve out space for reflection, recovery, and deep work. AI tools can reduce the need for you to turn your attention to low-value tasks, leaving more energy for the high-value human ones — the relationships, the judgment calls, the creative thinking that no system can produce.

Think of technology as a capable assistant who works best with clear direction from a focused boss. When you know your values and lead from them, you give that assistant a mission. When you don’t, the assistant sets the agenda — and that is how distraction, stress, and chaos become a way of life.

The people thriving right now, in every disrupted industry and every corner of life, are not the ones who surrendered to the tools. They are the ones who doubled down on what makes them irreplaceable as humans: trust, judgment, empathy, genuine connection. Technology amplifies those qualities when you are grounded. It undermines them when you are not.

As you center what matters most your wellbeing will grow. Not because you optimized it. Because you chose yourself.

Build a life that is good.

The tools are there to help you do exactly that. But only if you stay in charge.

I would love to hear how you are navigating these challenges; what helps you?

Cindy

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My father’s dementia became real to me the day his friend, a loyal to the core Vietnam vet, called to tell me that dad had driven from his home in Richmond to Washington DC (where I live)—by mistake, and that after spending the night in the Pentagon parking lot, he had driven back to Richmond. Why didn’t he call? He didn’t call because he didn’t know how to use his phone. Four hours later, in Richmond, I found that, for him, dementia had begun a long time before. The post-it notes, the index cards, and the rituals (”When the paper hits the door, it’s time to get up!”) were clear evidence of months upon months of making visible the systems of organization normally hidden in the mind. His mind could no longer manage the details of life. The dining room table was covered in paper bills, carefully categorized, and held by paperclips. My father’s reality had become unmanageable, and he had concealed it effectively, even managing not to miss a bill.

After much cleaning, discussions with doctors and friends, and a moment when he declared his assent to my taking responsibility for him “if you are concerned, I will do as you wish,” I brought him to my house to care for him as long as I could. Even with everyone pitching in and help, a year in, it had become too much. (Please do trust caregivers to say when it becomes too much. You cannot care for another if you are not strong and well.) I was lucky, he had resources; I found a place nearby, and moved him in. He was very angry, but by that time, I was the parent. I did what good parents do, I held my ground on behalf of someone in my care who knew less and needed my clarity.

Now I spend a lot of time visiting a locked down “memory care” space. It looks homey, living room, kitchen, and gathering spaces, with individual rooms as spokes around the circle. It sits in a building on an impeccably landscaped campus (yes, it is called a campus). This is not your grandmother’s nursing home. It is a little village. For those who can enjoy activities, which is everyone, they offer music, art, gardening and more.

What I have learned as a daughter/mother navigating this foreign landscape has surprised me. Dementia isn’t what I expected it to be. Losing oneself holds a special place of dread for me, attachment to self, I suppose. Still, watching it happen to my father and other people has taught me that what is happening requires most of all a willingness to accept and adapt (with all the supports that can be brought to the situation), much like mothering small children is not the stuff of fantasy, but the hard work to bring yourself into their new reality again and again and again.

The first lesson: it’s their world, you’re just living in it. As I write this, it reminds me of the world of a young child. Those with dementia are often, again, alone with little shared understanding of the world outside them. For this reason, there is little point in bringing them up to speed on your version of reality. As with a child, they are better off with what they can take in. It helps to be curious, flexible and to adjust the way you talk about things. Small stories are perfectly OK if they create greater peace, calm, and coherence. You are trying, always, to elicit more of the person they are at their best. The difference from young children is that these are people who have lived. They have lots of special knowledge and ways of being. The artist is still artisting, the doctor is still doctoring — in some ways. You see it if you are paying attention, how they learned to frame the world. Adults have personalities and expectations based on the lives they have lived. And unlike with children, your job is not to prepare them for a future in which they will have to understand the world and engage with it. Your purpose is to accompany them in their reality now.

The second lesson—what hurts people most is to feel alone and unheard. It use to bother me when experts —psychologists — talked about “cognitive changes” and “the transition.” It sounded like pretense, as if this was not what it was, a steady, inevitable decline unto death. But what I realized is that it is a transititon, for the person experiencing it. What people with dementia experience as most distressing is the lack of respect and attunement to their reality. Being with them matters a lot. Confusion, anxiety and fear can be part of their condition, but it is exacerbated by a feeling of not being understood or treated with respect and compassion. My father called his neurologist “mean,” for asking him questions he didn’t know the answers to. And of course, I would have felt that way, too. It is inconsiderate, at least, to continue pressing for answers when a person has given every indication of overwhelm. At some point, accepting what is, and dedicating yourself to finding the most dignity, grace, and joy in this experience is the way.

The third lesson: there are as many trajectories of cognitive/emotional changes as there are people. Different disease paths and physical causes, happening to very different people, with different abilities and personalities to bring to the challenge. They say “if you know one person living with cognitive changes, you know one person living with cognitive changes”—and I have found this to be true. It is a journey that does not admit of generalizations, in general. This makes sense. Why would the moving away from what our brains hold and process in the normal ways not be as unique as we are? The elements of caring and mothering that hold a person who is going through this are nonetheless the same—flexibility, an orientation toward the person—being without judging, and openness to what can help them in their experience.

The biggest lesson—accepting what is—as with children—requires courage to face reality, knowing that you don’t know what will happen next, but you will do your best.

People who are facing decline and death, and those who mother them, are wise to commit to standing in the now, not the past, and not the future.

In my youth I was but the slave of the high tide and the ebb tide of the sea, and the prisoner of half moons and full moons. Today I stand at this shore and rise not nor do I go down. —Kahlil Gibran

This advice applies to all of us humans facing anything that feels really hard.

When a person loses their memory, they regress, perceptibly. In this moment, you can see the beginning, and the end. You see the child that they were. When a person loses so many memories, their internal landscape loses markers. The memories you have to lend them become treasures, found anew, and lost again. Painful memories can be the same. Their heart stays.

The values and feelings that were closest to people are not lost. Another way of looking at this—children are all becoming, adults facing cognitive changes come into deeper contact with who they have become.

And that is the big lesson. Who we made ourselves is who we are, and it often stays. It stays much longer than we imagine it does. All of it. The love, the frustration, the anger, the fear, the acceptance, the humor, the balance—it stays. Who we are isn’t only our memories; it is deeper than that. It is how we experience the world in this moment now.

If you are looking for a reason to be in the moment, to address what you have been meaning to address, here it is. There are parts of yourself that you will not outrun.

The best way to overcome it [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. —Bertrand Russell

I have met so many people who are living and dying with dementia. And I see who they are, even as they lose their words, even as all pretense of who they were falls away. Much of who we are remains until the end. Sometimes, distilled into its purest form.

Turn your face toward the sun.

Allow yourself to be drawn to what is yet unknown that can be learned. Trust that what you are is beautiful and worthwhile and deserves to enjoy your fullest possible expression.

Blossom here and now.

Who are we choosing to be?

Cindy

Authenticity, in my view, is an achievement. It is not just who we happen to be but who we aspire to be.

The departure is significant with authors like Brené Brown who think of authenticity as self-acceptance, locating it in vulnerability — letting yourself be seen, embracing imperfection, believing you are worthy of love as you are. Her framing is therapeutic and relational. For me, the structure of what others want can often be a deep challenge to our authenticity.

In my view, authenticity is not found by accepting the self that already exists, although this is an important part of the work of self-acceptance which makes real growth possible. Authenticity is built by our growth as we make choices over time to become better.

What makes this hard is both our weakness — change and growth do not feel comfortable — and the social structures we inherit or chose long ago to fit into. The contexts in which we operate do not have our development as their primary goals. Our organizations, our friend groups, even our families usually have a built-in interest in us not changing too much — especially when how we are is working well for them. Others often have a narrow view of our usefulness and purpose. We may take this on as clothing we cannot shed. The most successful employers are adept at putting people into categories while claiming “authenticity” as a value. The truth is you have to fight to become who you can be, and you have to work to occupy a different space in an organization; all of this requires you to take a stand on yourself, not a reactive stand, not a power play, but a resonant commitment to becoming.

Robert Kegan, the developmental psychologist, found that roughly 65% of adults never achieve self-authorship — the capacity to hold their own position independent of others’ approval. Kegan’s final stage of adult development, the self-transforming mind, is achieved by roughly 1% . This spectrum is the space of authenticity, sitting beyond mere socialization. People do not fail to become the authors of their own experience because they lack intelligence or ambition, but because the sustained effort required will reliably put you at odds with the part of yourself that wants to fit in and be accepted.

Becoming self-authoring is learning not to abandon yourself, even when it costs you a feeling of belonging. Many people think of the alternative to self-authorship as caring, loyalty, or being a team player. Often it is something else — fear, comfort, and playing small. If you can’t stand up for yourself, you can’t stand up for others either.

Respect for self is not selfishness. It is not self-promotion. It is not the relentless self-optimization that fills LinkedIn feeds and self-help shelves. Those are performances of self-regard. The audience is other people. The self answers to their judgment, not its own. Respect for self is rooted in a deep sense of purpose — a conviction that you are meant to become all you can be.

What authenticity actually is: the gradual process of becoming a wholly distinct self — with your own judgment, your own commitments, your own voice. Not the voice you inherited from your family or your community or the culture you grew up in. Not the voice that says what others need to hear. Your own. The one that knows what you actually think, what you want, what you will and will not do — and can hold that position even when the people around you disagree. You as creator and creation.

The people who will try hardest to talk you out of this journey are the ones who most need to take it themselves. Find companions who want you to grow — and take note when that is not part of the program.

Here is what the journey toward authenticity includes in practice — not as a personality test, but as a set of commitments to be chosen and defended. Ask yourself which of these resonate, and which are important but missing from your life.

Character Integrity · Honesty · Transparency · Wholeheartedness · Reliability · Trustworthiness

Doing — over time, despite difficulty Courage · Perseverance · Resilience · Grit · Vulnerability · Initiative · Risk-taking

Authoring your own story Independence · Self-authorship · Self-expression · Autonomy · Uniqueness

Growth and competence Achievement · Ambition · Excellence · Competence · Learning · Knowledge · Growth · Creativity · Curiosity · Openness · Vision · Leadership

Self-regulation — living within your own standards Balance · Humor · Moderation · Confidence · Adaptability ·

A few virtues worth naming specifically:

Pride — earned self-regard, appropriate acknowledgment of what you have done and who you are. Aristotle considered this a virtue, not a vice. The person who deflects every compliment, who insists they are nothing special — that person is not appropriately proud. Proper pride is the honest accounting of one’s own worth.

Wealth/Abundance/Capacity — a mindset, not resources: competence, capability, opportunity.

Self-respect — your own inner standing, the sense of self-worth that does not require external validation. Distinct from respect as what you give and receive in relationship with others.

Self-Control — managing your own environment and circumstances, directing your own life. Distinct from control as safety through order and predictability and management of others.

The work of deciding who you really are and what you really care about is the work of a lifetime. The question is not which of these values appeals to you. The question is which ones you most want to commit to living — and which are you hiding from.

Cindy

Not the words themselves — most of us have plenty of those, but the space before the words. The moment between what happens and what you say in response. That space is where you can increase your agency and improve your life by being more intentional and deliberate.

This might feel uncomfortable. Try it anyway.

Say No to Automatic Responses

One way we live more fully as ourselves is to attend to how intentionally we communicate with others. There’s a way of communicating that feels automatic. Often it is what you consider safe or polite. You say “please” and “thank you.” I have been known to apologize to doors. That’s good programming, in a way. Not so good when someone bumps into me and I quickly apologize before registering what happened. Programming can guide behavior irrespective of whether it is good for us.

I was on a flight to Tampa last week. A tall thirty-something man and I boarded into the same row, an empty middle seat between us. He nodded at me, said hello. He had a still, unrevealing face and airpods and seemed absorbed in what he was listening to. As the crew of the full-ish flight tried, with increasing urgency, to encourage boarding passengers to stow their luggage in the rear of the plane, several customers became engaged in a game of “this luggage must find a home in this nearly-full overhead bin.”

I watched, amused, as an ever-larger group of helpful people filled the aisle trying to shove what appeared to be a too-large bag into the crowded overhead above us. My aisle-mate seemed not to notice. They were now holding the bag overhead and discussing scenarios for placement while one person shoved bags here and there — group tetris — airplane style. Finally, without addressing anyone specifically, the young man said in a clear and firm voice: “You’re gonna have to put that in the back now or we’re not going to get out of here on time.”

They immediately did exactly what he said. It was like a magic trick. Talk about leadership.

I was impressed. Would I have been able to do that? I don’t know because I didn’t try. But something told me he does this all the time; he was good at it. There was nothing automatic about his words. They came from a place of truth and confidence. There was no edge. Just an observation.

What would it be like for all of us to communicate more intentionally? To say what we wish to say, the way we wish to say it, when we wish to say it more of the time?

Another way of asking the same question: what power do we give up when we communicate “automatically” — because of what others say or do? When we do what feels most comfortable, people who are good at controlling a situation through their communication will use that to their advantage. They might continue to interject unhelpfully in a group conversation. They might ask questions that seem appropriate to others but are clearly driving a narrative. In a sense, people who control conversation successfully are running you, using your automatic script as their ally. Ideally, you want — as much as possible — to be running yourself. Not reacting, not submitting, not controlling, but choosing to express yourself clearly.

If we accept whatever feels comfortable long enough, we might start to think that honesty is not possible.

A friend of mine broke this spell recently. My friend, let’s call her Marta, found herself in a situation where someone who had really wronged her — badly — behaved in an overly friendly way with her around other people. Let’s call this “social friendship performance theater.” She came in for a hug, fully committed to the performance, putting Marta in the socially awkward position of looking like she was rejecting the warm embrace of a dear friend. In the moment, Marta felt something like anger or worse, and this was her signal. The hug was a clear communication, and a misleading and false one. Marta decided to respond. She pulled her adversary aside and said: “We are not friends. Please don’t pretend we are just because we are around other people.” Uncomfortable, but necessary.

The false friend was amazed. “What will people think?”

Marta’s wise response: “They will think we are not close, which we are not.”

Initiating a very specific and inappropriate style of communication, like this person did, is a performance of power and control. Responding as expected — as designed — serves their purposes, not yours. Give yourself a moment to consider how you want to respond, especially in social or high pressure public settings. Be willing to make things uncomfortable when it matters or is in service to what is more truthful, intentional, and meaningful for you.

By the way, Marta felt great about what she did. She asserted herself, establishing a boundary. She feels better knowing that she is less likely to have to face the same behavior the next time since it did not achieve the desired result.

Say Yes to Silence

When someone asks you a question that is a setup, silence can be an effective response. Taking a long pause to consider what they’ve just said gives you power. Just that moment will make another person think about what they just asked you. You can leave it at no verbal response.

More intentional responses might include: “What are you hoping to get out of that question?” Or: “That’s not the question — this is.”

For all of our school years, and perhaps for our whole lives, we have been trained to politely respond to questions. That doesn’t mean that you have to. You can change that. It doesn’t have to be rude, just unscripted. You can choose.

Say Something Different Than What Is Expected

Lacan called automatic social communication parole vide — empty speech. The space it fills leaves us comfortable, but often deeply alone. You don’t have to accept small talk.

When someone asks what you do, you don't have to answer with your job title. Maybe you juggle. Maybe you sing show tunes in the car. Maybe you took an improv class five years ago and it changed something. These things are almost certainly more interesting than whatever the social prompt is asking for. And when you offer people something real, they tend to respond with something real.

In situations where the potential for conflict is high, saying what is unexpected can disarm and open new options. “Why did you make that decision? What the hell am I supposed to do now?” sounds like the beginning of a heated conversation. But you can respond simply by noticing. “I see it is really impacting you.” You might even get curious. “I’d like to hear more about how.” You have the opportunity to build trust from this place. There is time enough to explain your decision when the person you are talking with is actually ready to hear about it.

More is possible with more thoughtfullness and space.

Listen

Sometimes listening well reveals a deeper truth than any response can. Listening is communicating — the most important part. What does the person speaking with you actually want or need? What are they really trying to convey? When you don’t practice deep listening, it’s easy to miss what matters most — to miss understanding someone, helping them, creating more trust. Poor listening compounded over a lifetime creates depths of self-imposed aloneness. You move through the world surrounded by people whose inner lives stay opaque — and of course in such a world, there is little room for your own.

Make space for what matters most by listening well.

Here is something that happened recently that stays with me. I was in an Uber and asked the driver what was going on with him. He mentioned his daughter was graduating from college. My first instinct was to think of my own kids — how this related to my own experience. I noticed that, and I didn’t go there. Instead I got curious and asked: “What did that mean to you?”

He then described his whole journey to the United States — why he emigrated from Ethiopia, what he hoped for, what he and his wife did to prepare their children for a good life, the scholarship his daughter earned that made college possible. Her graduation was the fulfillment of his life’s dream in many ways. It confirmed, for him, his faith in God.

If I hadn’t listened with curiosity, I would never have known his story. And my life is better for knowing it.

The Invitation

Fuller agency — based on intentional choice of your words, your responses, your silence, your attention — is available to you in every interaction. And it gets better as you practice. It requires only that you pause, just long enough, to ask yourself: what do I actually want to say here?

That pause is where you find more of yourself and come into contact more closely with what can be.

Cindy

We learn to lie young. Not because we are bad children, but because we are smart ones. Lying is a normal human skill. We learn quickly that we can keep something to ourselves. The truth has consequences and some stories get us what we want. Soon, we learn that we can tell ourselves stories, too, to protect us from pain. The stories we tell ourselves help us shoulder what we must to survive. (Do you remember deciding on a story as a child? I do. The story felt true because I needed it to be.) By the time we are adults, we have been telling ourselves stories, all kinds of stories, for a good long time. We forgot they were stories. Now we believe them.

I am not talking about the obvious ones. Pointless self-serving delusion — the kind that is known to everyone except the person living it. (No, he doesn’t have a drinking problem. Yes, she thinks always and only of others.) I am talking about a more insidious kind of story. This is the story about our motivations and reasons that messes us up over and over again in ways that others may never understand. We often don’t understand the purpose our stories serve either.

When I am coaching a client and they are experiencing the tender beginning of a real breakthrough, this almost always happens: a sabotaging voice arises to confront the client from this breakthrough. It is too hard, too scary, too silly... This happens to us all when we are brave enough to pierce through the parchment veil of a long-accepted story. When it arises, I call it a “saboteur,” but really it is a child’s voice. A voice internalized to ensure the child was protected from long ago. Often, the voice is terrified and seeks to terrify the client into just staying the same.

It is my job to know with certainty that the saboteur is lying. This is the heart of self-deception. This is not the most honest voice of the client sitting before me now. The stories of the saboteur sound like this: I can’t do it anyway, why bother trying. Who do I think I am, anyway. I need to stand by her no matter what; it doesn’t cost me that much. This keeps happening to me because I am unlucky, not because I am unwilling to hold other people accountable... and so on. That little person who pipes up to share an old story deserves a pat on the head and a cookie — they don’t need to decide what happens next forever. Once the saboteur is comforted and reassured that you’ve got this, they can color and relax and the client can run their life. Directing your own life based on what suits you best now is the job of the fullest expression of the person you are as agent, architect, and artist — telling the truth always. And the truth is that you are far stronger, more capable and creative than you now imagine.

Here is what I have learned, both from my own experience and from working with leaders and organizations for many years: the gap between who we think we are and who we actually are is not just larger than we realize — it is the area where the smallest effort on our part makes the most difference. And the cost of that gap — to our relationships, our leadership, our organizations, and our wellbeing — is huge.

The good news is that all our efforts to be honest with ourselves pay off. But it requires something most of us resist: a genuine, ongoing practice of self-examination. Change takes time and practice. A self-compassionate practice of self-examination asks, with real curiosity: what is actually true here? What am I not seeing? What story am I telling myself? What is it costing me?

How do you check yourself?

Pay attention to your defensiveness. Defensiveness is almost always a signal worth investigating. When someone’s observation sounds to you like an accusation — even when you can see they took pains to deliver it gently — ask yourself why. The things that make us most defensive are what we most need to look at.

Look at your patterns, not your intentions. We are very good at explaining our intentions. We are much less good at seeing our own patterns. Look at yourself from the outside. If you find yourself repeatedly in the same kind of conflict, or repeatedly making the same kind of choice that doesn’t serve you, your intentions are not the point. The pattern is the point. You are probably at the root of your problem in some way. What is really happening here? is an important question. What is the story you are telling yourself about it? is also important.

Find people who will tell you the truth. Not people who agree with you. Not people who need something from you. People who are committed to your actual growth and can bear your displeasure when they say something you do not want to hear. This is rare. It is worth protecting fiercely when you find it.

Watch what you avoid. Avoidance is information. The conversations you keep putting off, the feedback you don’t seek, the numbers you don’t look at, the relationship you don’t examine — these are not random. They are the places where the story you are telling yourself is most at risk of being disrupted. Which means they are exactly the places worth going.

Notice the difference between self-compassion and self-protection. Self-compassion says: I am human, I made a mistake, I can learn from this and do better. Self-protection says: I didn’t really make a mistake, or if I did, it wasn’t my fault, or if it was my fault, here is why it was justified. One opens you up. The other closes you down. They can feel the same in the moment. They are not.

Here is what the research on self-deception tells us: we are not objective observers of our own behavior. We consistently rate ourselves as more ethical, more competent, and more self-aware than we actually are. This is not a character flaw — it is a feature of how human cognition works. At the same time, we are driven by fear. Our brains are built to protect ego and to maintain our sense of safety — even over what is clearly in our self-interest and an expression of our highest good. Our stories will work very hard to make the evidence fit whatever we already believe about ourselves.

This means that becoming more honest with yourself is not a one-time achievement. It is a practice. A discipline. The same way that becoming more courageous, or more generous, or wiser requires daily effort and honest feedback, becoming more truthful with yourself requires the same.

Try not to pay so much attention to what other people are doing. Focus on what you can do. If you become just a tiny bit more honest with yourself every day, then every week your actions will be better. You will push yourself in the best direction, not just the direction of your old stories that no longer serve you. You might even become a force for good far beyond yourself.

Because the way forward — for all of us — is through.

Don’t wrap the comfortable story around you like a blanket. Go deeper. Find the most honest truth you can tell.

Make self-honesty a practice.

It is hard to get there alone, so find a courageous friend, find a coach, or find a 12-step program — one of the all-time great places for honesty.

This is the most important work any of us will ever do.

Cindy

Sadly, this is not the norm. It happens far more than you might expect that an organization has shadow values around self-protection or “the way we’ve always done things” that muck up the works and keep them from their mission.

Values fail for one of three reasons.

One way values failures show up is at the level of operations, goals and vision — when the organization has no singular identity beyond whatever the individuals who are running it bring with them. When individuals are left to substitute whatever they personally value or feel like doing, an organization lacks values. Personality driven organizations feel off. You can see right away this creates identity (brand value) and goal accomplishment problems.

A second type of values problem is when multiple interlocking values have been subsumed under one value that is inadequate to the complexity of real challenges — “achieving revenue” being the most likely — violating the integrity and purpose (the value) the business could and should have. Any business coloring outside the lines of other values stakeholders would insist on, like operating well within legal and ethical norms or with full transparency to stakeholders, is in this category. These are the organizations most likely to be investigated or closed down for engaging in illegal activity or fraud.

A third type of values problem occurs when some legacy culture is operating in the shadows, so the stated values and goals of the organization are not what are actually motivating leaders. They know, but don’t say, what is truly valued. There might have been a merger or acquisition, or a shift toward a new purpose that never took hold. There may be a power struggle. Often there are centers of control moving the organization away from an aspirational direction that is needed and demanded by the marketplace — donors or tenured faculty may act from legacy values in higher ed, influential board members often act from legacy values in associations, or staff in an acquired organization may act from legacy values following a merger. A boat can’t row in two directions at once, and an organization can’t uphold legacy values and current values at the same time.

You can feel values problems before you identify the cause. When you ask an employee what the organizational values are, they will roll their eyes or give a truly terrible answer — “do whatever I’m told,” or “it depends who is asking, ” or “follow the rules whether they make sense or not.”

Values are not a pretty list of words chosen to describe the ideal. They are the principles that actually guide choice and best describe how the (important) work gets done. Mission is what you are trying to achieve. Strategy explains how you plan to do it. Values are principles governing cooperation along the way when there are conflicts and options. Values explain how you choose when there is pressure and something is at stake.

The key test of values is not what is said, but what is evidenced in actions. Values that are real and lived explain who gets hired, what gets prioritized, what gets funded, what risks are taken, what gets disclosed, what gets tolerated, and what gets ignored.

Values are visible in decisions particularly those taken under pressure, during conflict, and when there is a cost.

Pay attention to what organizations do, not what they say. The worst organizations hide what is really happening on purpose. A lack of transparency is the universal sign of an organization that has lost its way — it undermines the conditions for participation and operates without accountability.

Organizations, at their best, align around values that extend human agency, allowing people to do hard things together in ways that benefits them all. You can feel when an organization is functioning well. Everyone is telling a similar story. There is contentedness. Conflicts arise and they are resolved in ways that people understand. No “difficult people” drive the action. Drama is not the norm. And there is progress toward established goals.

The risk to you personally is real. Here’s a simple diagnostic to help identify real values:

The drama of shadow values can be an entertaining substitute for goal achievement for some people, just as the shadows on the cave wall substituted for the real world for Plato’s prisoners. Thinking of an organization as an organism is useful for those of us who try to avoid such places. If an organization exists, and especially if it has been around for a while, that means that the form it has right now has worked for some purposes so far. Ask yourself: what must be true for this (exactly what is being done) to count as “working”? If you don’t see value being created, or at least not enough to explain why the organization exists as it does, then there is value that is hidden. Values generate value. There’s a handy phrase to help you find your way. The hidden motivations, outputs, and beneficiaries will reveal themselves if you look carefully at what is actually being valued.

So before you go all in with an organization, ask not just what they say they value but what they show they value. What are they actually committed to in their deeds?

Without values alignment, alienation is the best outcome you can hope for. You might end up just going along — to avoid getting in trouble or to achieve your own small advantage — but your efforts will be disconnected from any larger goal of value creation. Committing to a values-hollow organization costs you: your sense of integrity, your personal power, your wellbeing. This is no way to live, particularly in what is surely the best time ever to be a solopreneur and live your own values.

Nearly every company and organization would benefit from greater values definition, clarity and alignment. We can achieve more together. This is the promise of earnest collaboration. Values are the enabler, the differentiator, the power play for creating value. Not what we say, but what we do when it matters.

Cindy

As an ethicist I was taught a very different way to identify values. Values were distinguished from desires by their greater significance. Not just what you wanted, but what you most wanted to want, values reflected the rules or principles that stopped you from doing whatever you wanted to do in the short term.

Aristotle located values in the mean between extremes of behavior lived as habits over time — courage is the mean between rashness and cowardice. Kant thought there was one rule, not unlike the golden rule that functioned as a universal standard of respect for rational beings. Violating it was forbidden.

“Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.” — Kant

John Stuart Mill argued that there were many rules, adopted because better consequences arose from their adoption: don’t lie, respect liberty, do not harm others.

“The creed which accepts as the foundation of morals, Utility, or the Greatest-Happiness Principle, holds that actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness.” — John Stuart Mill

The leadership literature has lots of other answers, but in general locates values in human capabilities or preferences that create patterns of observably different behaviors. Some people value control, others safety, others individuality or aesthetics. Brené Brown is in this camp, providing a long list of value words that include all kinds of things ethicists might not normally think of as values — from humor to curiosity to intuition and job security — inviting people and organizations to choose what matters to them most. There’s nothing wrong with this, except it loses the sense that values are aspirational or incomparably more important and impactful than mere preferences. In the philosophical literature, this is a defining feature of values, that they are not mere preferences. You may love ice cream, but your attitude toward justice must be that it is more important — incomparable, in some important way — to your feeling about a dessert you prefer (or any other mere preference). You might die to protect freedom, but not chocolate ice cream.

Aristotle cautions against conflating true happiness with short-term satisfaction, since the sort of resilience on which happiness depends requires the lifelong cultivation of virtue.

“One swallow does not make a summer, neither does one fine day; similarly one day or brief time of happiness does not make a person entirely happy.” — Aristotle

When it comes to rules that create happiness, Mill takes pains to distinguish lower from higher forms of happiness. He was not advocating calibrating preferences downward to make morality more easily attainable.

“Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” — Mill

Here’s what I would suggest. Picking values by pointing at words is not enough. But neither is tying yourself to the mast of someone else’s definitions without development of one’s own preferences and commitments. There is a depth that is necessary to having values at all. Being a person of virtue (or rules) means being a person of a certain kind, and it is an achievement — it is not expertise in one area, but expertise in being human, and maybe in being a human of a certain kind, a wise individual.

In defining values, Martha Nussbaum, a contemporary Aristotelian, adopts a capabilities approach, asking what a person needs to live a fully human, dignified life. Being able to live, bodily health, senses, imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliations and relationships, as well as control of one’s environment are essential to living in her view. Values emerge as the conditions required for dignity and human flourishing — such as control, education, and stability.

Considering the range of classical and contemporary treatments of values, a clear distinction emerges: there are accounts of values that locate them in human dignity and flourishing, more or less naming what is needed for us to respect ourselves and one another, and there are treatments of values that locate them in our individuality as it is developed in a full life. This is deeply telling.

Values encompass the two elements of human life most worth valuing and noticing:

• The basis for dignity: what we share in common with all other humans and

• The basis for respect: the ways in which we are unique and different — at our best and most developed, our individuality.

Both together are the values we need (the first moreso guaranteed by political systems and the second moreso features of individual life) to live well.

The way that contemporary leadership accounts of values fall down is not in defining a broad assortment of individual values, but in making them sound like selections from a vending machine. Our values cannot be lightly chosen and still be values. Nor are they merely discovered or revealed like a prize inside a cereal box. Our individual values are an achievement, based on our deliberate choices over time. We must strive to be good people of a certain kind.

In this effort we become different from one another far beyond the individual differences we were born with; these are the differences that matter deeply for the world. Whether you care about nature as transcendent or about learning as a matter of principle or justice matters far more than preferences for these fabrics or those activities or these foods. Lots of things that make us different just don’t matter very much. Values do. We would do well to pay far more attention to values commitments and far less to other individual differences. Values commitments are moral elements of who we are. We can be judged for whether we are fair or honest or generous, and we ought to be. Preferences, they just don’t matter that much.

Ultimately, our values must be chosen, fought for, and lived in a way that demonstrates their priority in our lives if they are to be values at all. They have power only when we ensure they do. We must put our values above desires and short-term gains, or they are not distinguishable from desires. Stating values without living them is worse than worthless; it is hypocrisy. This is true for individuals as well as companies. A list of values that is not tied to non-negotiable behaviors, goals, and outcomes is not of any value. This is where any serious discussion of values should begin. What are you willing to struggle for? What are you unwilling to throw over board, even if it costs you? What would you die for?

Cindy

This era of constant noise does demand self-management. Excellent self-management easily becomes optimization, right? If I just add a little meditation, then my mind will focus more easily. More exercise and I will have more stamina. If I face my fears more effectively, I can move more quickly to action, eliminate that wasted space of transition.

Much of the pace of change in this world recommends such an approach. We see resonances with the ancient greeks, the stoics, Aristotle, all cultivating habits to live better. We map this onto our lives and see opportunities to optimize. This is an attempt to control and it is needed, but we can take it too far, and we do.

We are missing the point, and losing our way, big time.

Yes, we do need to manage ourselves to survive and thrive in this world. Yes, we need to bring our attention to heel to our goals and interests; without this we cannot be free. Yes, we must gain control of our fear and anxiety, or it will drive us without our intention. This is all true. But what is the purpose of our self-mastery? Is it to turn ourselves into optimized beings, better able to achieve goals? Or is to make space for us to become more human? Becoming more human is a higher purpose, it implies there is a better way of being. We speed up and strive and make ourselves more efficient, busily doing. Our doing can create space for peace, safety, and becoming more fully human, but if we never rest there, what is the point?

There is no purpose if we don’t attend to who we are becoming.

Growing numbers of young people are opting out. They are opting out of the world of technology and opportunity to try to reclaim their humanity. They want simple. They want analog. They want organic, in the sense of growing in the way living things grow. We have not shown them how to have both.

If I asked you to close your eyes and imagine a time when you were most contented, most alive, when you felt fully you, what would come to mind? Try it for a moment now. Close your eyes, rest your feet on the floor, let your back sink into your chair. Breathe. Remember a time when you felt whole, well, energized. Where were you? What was happening there? Who were you with? What was around you? What were the feelings there?

If you imagined being with a computer or phone, I want to hear about it, because that would be a first. For most of us, we find ourselves in a natural setting — a specific place. There’s a reason. We are natural beings. Who we are, at our most alive, has the quality of connectedness to place, and one another.

Going back to this place, the smells and sounds, animals and others there every day in a brief visualization might lead you more deeply within. That is the journey that most of us need, and the one that eludes us. What would happen if you prioritized experiences that help you to become the you who is most alive and engaged in and with the world? The you who knows why you work, and makes space for just being. Notice this is very unlikely to be the fully optimized you of doing that we were initially describing.

There are two worlds, the world of doing and the world of being, and we ourselves are at the fulcrum. Who we are becoming has never mattered more. Standing up for that person you could be who is as vulnerable as a tender small shoot growing out of the soil may be the most important thing you do today and every day. That person is connected to every other person and the world. What will it take for that part of you to become bigger and stronger and more alive in this world.

Can the environment be made more hospitable to the you who is becoming?

Cindy