In the last post, we explored the one thing that shapes everything else: self-knowledge. Understanding what you carry into a room, what triggers you, and what patterns run quietly beneath the surface. This post takes that foundation into one of leadership’s most challenging moments to navigate: when something hard is happening in the world around you, and work itself starts to feel beside the point. These are the moments that call for grounding and acknowledgment before anything else.
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The Moments Without a Script

Some of the most important leadership moments aren’t the ones with clear answers.

They’re the ones that arrive without warning. A community you serve is in crisis. An external event, political, social, or environmental, lands heavily, and the idea of moving through a normal agenda suddenly feels hollow. Work becomes absurd in those moments. Something more immediate takes over, and everyone in the room can feel the dissonance between what’s happening and what’s on the calendar.

In those moments, the leadership move is to acknowledge what’s true before asking people to focus. Naming reality and grounding the room in it is what makes genuine presence possible.

Most leadership training doesn’t prepare you for this shift: from managing the work to first acknowledging the moment.

And right now, for many mission-driven leaders, those moments are arriving with unusual frequency. The current political climate is making this work harder. Funding is more uncertain. Support feels thinner. Policies that affect the communities you serve are shifting in ways that are difficult to absorb, let alone explain to a team. Many leaders we work with are carrying a quiet grief alongside their daily responsibilities, grieving what feels like lost ground even as they push forward.

And yet the mission hasn’t become less urgent. If anything, the moment is calling for it more. That tension, between the weight of the climate and the pull of the work, is something leaders are holding every day. It deserves to be named.
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Creating Space, For Yourself and Your Team

Before you can hold space for anyone else, you need some of your own. Self-regulation is about creating intentional space between what you feel and how you respond. That looks different for everyone: a walk before a hard conversation, fifteen minutes of quiet after receiving difficult news, or a standing check-in with a coach, a peer, or a close colleague who can help you process before you step back into the work. The key is building that practice when things are calm, so it’s actually available to you when they aren’t.

And once you’ve found some steadiness, the work isn’t finished. Your team is carrying the moment too. How you hold space for them in the aftermath of something hard shapes whether they feel safe bringing their full selves to the work.

That might look like opening a meeting with genuine acknowledgment before moving to the agenda. It might mean checking in with someone one-on-one rather than assuming they’re fine. It might simply be giving people a bit more time, or a bit more patience, in the days following something difficult.

What you’re really offering, in those moments, is permission. Permission to be human at work. Permission to process before performing. And when that permission comes from the person leading the room, it changes what people believe is possible inside the organization.

Leaders often underestimate how much this matters. People don’t need you to have answers. They need to know there is room for them, and that the work will still be there once they’ve found their footing.

Discernment: What to Share, and What to Hold

Once you’ve created some space for yourself and your team, a subtler question surfaces: how much of what you’re carrying actually belongs in the room?

This is genuinely hard. The instinct toward transparency is good. People want to lead authentically, and vulnerability has become something we rightly value in leaders. But there’s a version of sharing that serves the people you lead, and a version that asks them to hold something that isn’t theirs to carry. Both can feel like honesty. The difference is usually in whose needs are being centered.

Discernment is the practice of pausing before you speak and asking: what does sharing this actually serve? Is it going to help the people in this room, or does it need a different container? A conversation with a coach, a peer, or a trusted colleague is a different space than a team meeting. What belongs in one doesn’t always belong in the other.

This isn’t about performing composure or pretending things are fine when they aren’t. It’s about being intentional with what you put down in front of people, and trusting that processing your own experience elsewhere is a form of care for them, not a withholding.

Presence is the act of leadership in those moments. You don’t need the right words. You need to have done enough of your own work to be genuinely there.
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A Small Practice

Think about how you currently show up when something hard is happening, inside the organization or in the world around it. Ask yourself:

• What does my self-regulation practice look like right now, and is it actually available to me when I need it most?
• When I'm carrying something, how do I know whether to share it or hold it? What guides that decision?
• Is there a recent moment where something leaked, in tone, in reaction, in distance, that I can trace back to something I hadn't yet processed?

In the next post, we explore what it means to get genuinely curious about the people who challenge us most, and how that curiosity can transform even the most difficult relationships.

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