Some moments in leadership are not about what we do. They are about who we become.

I’ve experienced this in room after room this year – capable people standing at the edge of a recognition, and finding that what is being asked is not a different decision, it is a different self.

The recognition of that arrives, and with it something new settles – about ourselves, a relationship, the work we are doing – in a way that cannot be unsettled again.

A version of who we are has run its course and a different shape is becoming visible. The first cannot be sustained any longer; the second has not been stepped into, yet.

Like many of us, I have lived in that space for longer than was comfortable – recognising what was true, watching the visible parts of life continue as though nothing had shifted, while something inside me had already moved beyond return.

It is, I think, where many leaders are standing right now as we face complexity.

From the outside, this kind of moment is hard to recognise. What emerges is a particular kind of decline – a malaise of sorts. Work that once felt natural now requires more energy. The same effort returns less. Things feel harder, and it isn’t obvious why.

We’re trained to read this as a problem to solve. To push harder, to work longer, to find an angle that restores the performance trajectory.

But sometimes decline is not failure. It is the felt shape of an approaching threshold, and that shape is often a U-curve. A time in which our external impact appears to wane, sometimes for the first time in a successful career, while internally, our knowing deepens. The threshold is forming on the inside; the work has not yet caught up, and a fuller kind of impact only becomes possible on the other side.

What the threshold is asking is rarely about doing. It is about being. Permission to be someone other than who we are in this moment. Permission to release a self that has served us. Permission to be unrecognised – by others, and for a while, by ourselves. And perhaps even to disappoint. The colleagues who counted on a particular kind of leadership. The team built around our way of working. The people whose expectations were not unreasonable, simply formed around who we have been, until now.

Beneath this sits something harder. The fear of losing what we are leaving behind: a version of ourselves that has worked, a way of being known, a mastery hard-won over years. An identity we have inhabited so long it has begun to feel like the truth of who we are.

And underneath even that, the faith that what we are stepping toward will hold us – when nothing yet has shown us that it will.

This is where we often stall.

Not at the level of strategy. At the level of self.

You’ve probably been here. You may be here now.

There is no going over it. There is no going around it. There is only through – even when it doesn’t feel safe to do so.

Because this moment is a passage, and on the other side is a kind of safety that does not arrive any other way.

What is the unsafe thing you need to do now, in order to feel more safe next?