Good Morning Reader
I have been thinking about the word we reach for when something goes wrong.
You have been calling it a problem.
That is the first thing worth looking at, not the problem itself or whether you can solve it, but the word you reached for when it landed. The label. The frame you built around it before you had finished processing what it was.
A CEO client of mine sat down recently and ran through her week. C-suite friction. International and domestic teams pulling in different directions. Three things we had been working on, still unresolved and then, almost as a footnote, a resignation from her immediate team. She described it as a loss.
I let her finish. Then I asked her one question.
How are you using the difficulty to make things around you better?
She stopped.
Not because the question was clever but because it named something she had not considered. She had been so deep inside the experience that she had never stepped back far enough to ask what the experience was for.
There is an interview with Michael Caine, and if you have seen it you will know exactly what I am about to say. He is telling a story about early in his career, a scene where he could not get to his mark. A chair was in the way. He told the producer he could not get through. The producer said: use the difficulty.
Caine said that line became a principle for life.
I think about it differently in a leadership context. You are not an actor trying to hit a mark. You are a leader trying to read what the environment is actually asking of you beneath the noise of what it appears to be doing to you. The chair in the way is almost never just a chair. It is information. It is telling you something about a structure, a dynamic, a relationship that has not been looked at squarely enough. The moment you frame it as an obstacle to get past, you stop being able to hear what it is telling you.
The resignation my client described as a loss. I knew from our work together that this person had been a constraint, not a contributor, at the level she was building toward. The departure was not a problem. It was the opening she had been waiting for, without knowing she was waiting for it. She could not see that from inside the story she was telling herself about it.
So I did not tell her that. I asked the question instead.
What is this situation teaching me? What can I use here?
She spent the next twenty minutes taking the week apart. The C-suite friction was not a distraction. It was showing her something about alignment she had been too busy to address. The domestic and international tension was not an obstacle. It was a signal that the structure underneath the work had not kept pace with the ambition sitting on top of it. And the resignation she had called a loss. She sat back and said: actually, that one is a gift.
She did not arrive at that by accident. She arrived at it by changing the question.
If the difficulty you are sitting with right now is real, I am not asking you to minimise it. Some weeks are genuinely brutal. You are allowed to feel that. The feeling is not wrong. It is just not the whole story. And the story you tell yourself about the difficulty, before you have done anything with it, is where everything either opens or closes.
Three questions I use. What is this situation teaching me? What is the useful thing I can take from this and apply somewhere? How do I use what looks like a setback to find what it is actually offering?
You do not have to like the difficulty to use it. You just have to be honest about what the label you gave it is protecting you from.
If you are sitting with something difficult right now and you would like to think through it differently, that is exactly what a coaching conversation is for. Not to make it smaller. To help you see what you cannot see yet from inside it.
One thing for this week.
Write down the difficulty you have been carrying the longest. Not the ones that arrived yesterday. The one that has been sitting in the back of your thinking for weeks, the one you have named, explained, and moved around but not actually moved through.
Write down the label you gave it. The actual word........
Ask yourself this: What is that label protecting me from having to see?
Some difficulties are genuinely hard. Some situations are as bad as they look and deserve the weight you are giving them. This is not about toxic positivity or pretending the chair is not in the way. It is about whether the frame you put around the difficulty is the most useful frame available to you, or just the first one you reached for.
If it is a signal, what is it signalling? Write that down too and then decide what you are going to do with it.
One reflection question to sit with:
- What would change about how you are handling this if you stopped calling it what you have been calling it?