Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / When You Can't Change the Situation — Change Yourself
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, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. Today's episode is entitled, When You Can't Change the Situation, Change Yourself. Here we go. There's a particular kind of frustration that shows up in leadership and it doesn't get talked about enough. It's not the frustration of losing a deal or missing a quarter or navigating a difficult board conversation. It's deeper than that. It's the frustration of realizing that the situation in front of you simply will not change no matter how hard you push, no matter how well you execute, no matter how good your strategy is. The thing is immovable and you're standing there running out of moves. Most leaders have not been trained for that moment. They've been trained to solve, to fix, to optimize. And when the problem won't yield, the instinct is to push harder. But pushing harder on something that won't move isn't leadership. It's just effort without direction. Viktor Frankl wrote, when we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves. Frankl was not writing from a corner office or a leadership retreat. He was writing from inside a Nazi concentration camp, having lost almost everything. His wife, his family, his manuscripts, his freedom, and what he discovered in that extreme, in conditions most of us will never experience, was that human beings carry a freedom that can't not be stripped away. The freedom to choose their response. That's not a soft idea. That's not motivational language. That's a philosophical foundation that has direct application to how you lead. I've worked with executives who faced moments that looked something like this, even if the scale was different. A merger that eliminated their division. A market that shifted faster than their product roadmap. A leadership team that fundamentally could not be aligned on strategy. In each case, The external situation was fixed. It was not yielding. And the question they all eventually had to confront was, what do I change about myself to lead through this? That question is harder than it sounds. Because changing yourself isn't the same as adapting tactics. It means examining the assumptions you've built your leadership identity on. It means being honest about defaults that no longer serve you. It means developing something new, often uncomfortable, in a time when you're already under pressure. Here's where leaders sometimes get this wrong. They hear, change yourself, and interpret it as self-blame. As if the situation being immovable is somehow their fault, and now they need to fix what's broken in them to compensate. That's not what this means. And it's not a useful frame. The misread leads to self-criticism that drains energy and erodes confidence at exactly the moment you need both. It's not about what's wrong with you, it's about what growth is being asked of you. So the reframe is this. Adaptive leadership is not a concession. It's a competency. When a situation won't change, the leader who asks, who do I need to become to navigate this well, is not admitting defeat. They're exercising the most sophisticated leadership move available. They're choosing to grow in response to pressure rather than being shaped by it unconsciously. That's the distinction Frankl is pointing at. You're going to be changed by circumstances regardless. The question is whether that change happens to you or it's directed by you. Leaders who do this well audit their defaults under pressure. They identify what they're avoiding. They name what new capacity they need to build, and they build it intentionally, even while the situation is still unresolved. Before you move on today, I want you to sit with one question. What situation in your leadership right now is not going to change? Not because you've given up on it, but because you've honestly assessed it. and named it for what it is. And within that situation, what are you being challenged to develop? What's the gap between who you are right now and who you'd need to be to lead through this with clarity and steadiness? That's not a passive question. That's the most active leadership work that you can do. Victor Frankl's insight has outlasted virtually every leadership framework published in the last century, not because it's idealistic, but because it's true. The situation will not always move. But you can. You can develop the discernment to distinguish what's fixed from what's flexible. You can examine the defaults that you fall into under pressure. You can identify what growth this time is asking of you. Adaptive leadership isn't what you do when everything else fails. It's what separates the leaders who endure from the ones who stall. The capacity to change yourself when you cannot change the situation is not a fallback. It's the most sustainable competitive advantage that a leader can possess.