It's Not Working, and It's Not Over

Eight or nine years ago I was running over a hundred miles a month. Trail races, the whole thing. I was getting life insurance for an organization I led, and the nurse doing my biometrics looked up from the cuff and said, "Are you a runner?"

Yes. I am a runner. That felt good.

Here's why it mattered. When a day got away from me and I missed a run, my mind didn't say "I missed a run." It said, "I'm not a runner."

A hundred miles a month, and one missed run turned into an indictment of who I am.

If you can make that conclusion with running, you can do it with your marriage, your company, your faith.

There's a place I've come to call limbo. It's the place where nothing has ended yet and nothing has started either. Where it's not working, but it's not over.

Sometimes it's small. A shipment not arriving as scheduled and no one knows where it is.

Sometimes it's big. A weekend weighed down by the anticipation of the results from the blood work. The career you've been building but get laid off from. The marriage that's become two quiet lives with a widening gap between them, still together, not yet healed.

For me, it was 2008. Everything I'd put my energy into professionally was dying. I was holding an eviction notice. And every leadership book I'd read, everything I'd studied, none of it had an answer for that in-between moment.

So here's what I've learned since, through more than two decades of learning from my limbo moments and coaching leaders through theirs.

You can't control the circumstance. Anybody selling you that is selling a lie. What you can master is the story you tell yourself out of the circumstance.

It happens fast. A circumstance you can't control turns into a story:

"I don't have what it takes." "I can't figure this out." "I suck at this."

And before you've even noticed the story, you're already acting on it. Let me prove it to everybody. Let me post something. Let me try harder, power up, get the team back on my side.

Or the other direction, which most people don't recognize as the same move: let me go quiet. Get sad. Withdraw.

We think manipulation only looks like the loud version. The sullen, mopey version is manipulation too.

That whole sequence, circumstance to story to leadership mistake, runs in about a second. The challenge is to pause it. Wedge some space in there. Not toxic positivity; you still have to square up with what's actually fragile, what might die, what is dying. But you can suspend the verdict and just look at what's happening.

The first time I caught it, my wife had asked me a harmless question, and I felt threatened. She wasn't doing anything. I was making a conversation a verdict on me. And the moment I could see that, name it, call it what it was, my brain started organizing new behavior on its own. You can't unsee it once it's that clear.

So here's the challenge this week. The next time something lands that you didn't choose, before you do anything about it, write two sentences. The first is the circumstance, no adjectives. The second starts with "this means I am." Then read the second one out loud and decide whether it's true.

Most of the time, that's the whole shift.

Chris

If you want to see the story you're tempted to tell yourself under pressure, in your own numbers, take the IFQ®. It's 15 minutes, and it names the thing you can't unsee. sightshift.com/ifq