Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Space Where Leaders Grow: Viktor Frankl on Response and Freedom
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, it's not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled, The Space Where Leaders Grow, Victor Frankel on Response and Freedom. Here we go. There's a moment that every leader knows. Someone says something you didn't expect. A number comes in wrong, a decision gets made above you that affects everything below. And in that moment, everything in you wants to react. Fast. Decisively. With authority. And sometimes that instinct is right. But often, in fact very often, it is not. Today I want to talk to you about the space between what happens to you and what you do about it. Because that space is where your actual leadership lives. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps. He watched people lose their families, their health, their dignity. And what he discovered inside one of the worst environments a human being has ever endured is something that has shaped how I think about leadership for years. He wrote, between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. Between stimulus and response, there's a space. I've worked with executives who were brilliant strategists, technically excellent, deeply competent, but when pressure hit, that space disappeared. They would get a difficult email and fire back in minutes. They would hear a challenge in a meeting and interrupt before the other person finished. They would take feedback and move immediately to defend. None of those responses were evil. Most of them were understandable, but none of them were effective. What I've noticed is that the leaders who built the most durable teams, who made the best decisions in crisis, who earned the deepest trust from the people around them, those leaders had a different relationship with that space. They had learned to find it, even when everything around them was moving fast. It's not a personality trait. It's a practiced discipline. Here's what most people get wrong about this idea. They hear pause before you respond, and they think it means be passive, be slow, absorb. Take the hit. Let things slide. That is not what Viktor Frankl meant. And that's not what I'm talking about either. A pause is not inaction. A pause is deliberate engagement with your own thinking before it exits your mouth or your keyboard. The leaders I have coached who struggle most are not the ones who move too slowly. They're the ones who confuse speed with strength. Who believe that responding immediately signals confidence. Who fear that taking a breath will be read as weakness. Speed has its place. Judgment has to come first. Think of it this way. The stimulus is always going to come. Always. You don't control that. What you do control is what happens next. The space Frankel describes is not a passive gap. It's the arena where your values, your experience, and your clarity get to show up before your impulse does. It's where the executive you aspire to be has a chance to outrun the version of you that just got triggered. Most leaders don't lack intelligence in those moments. They lack access to their intelligence because the space is gone. And when the space is gone, what comes out is reflex, not leadership. Building that space back into your daily practice is one of the highest leveraged things that you can do as a leader. So here's what I want you to consider. Think about the last 30 days. Think about moments where you reacted and you knew even as it was happening that it was not your best. Where did the space close? What was the stimulus that got past your judgment? Now flip it. Think about a moment where you held the space, where you chose your response. What made that possible? What was different? The pattern in those two questions will tell you more about your leadership edge than any assessment ever can. Victor Frankl did not write about freedom as an abstract ideal. He wrote about it as something you can claim in the gap between what the world does to you and how you decide to show up in response. That's leadership. Not the title, not the strategy deck, not the headcount that you manage. The willingness to find the space when everything in you wants to collapse it. That's where growth lives. That's where freedom lives. And that's where the best version of your leadership lives, too.