Don’t wait for hindsight.
Learn from a difficult situation while you are still living through it.
Coaching and change partnership for consequential moments in work, organizations, and life.
You’re not running out of options.
But can you still honestly say it is working?
A solution-oriented stance is powerful. It helps us act, adapt, and keep things moving.
But some situations are not held back by a lack of solutions. When people, uncertainty, responsibility, and change interact, every intervention becomes part of the situation. A new framework, a firmer decision, or another conversation may create activity without changing what keeps happening.
You may still have the discipline, endurance, and energy to continue. You may already see several things you could try next.
And yet, something no longer fits.
You can keep this going. But you can no longer honestly say it is working.
Reaching this point is normal. Recognizing what kind of point you have reached is less common. Our capacity to continue can make it harder to notice when another attempt would reproduce the same situation in a different form.
At that moment, the question is not only what else you could do.
Start from first principles
Bring the whole situation into view.
Before looking for another solution, return to what is actually there.
What is genuinely true about the situation?
The economic pressure, the missed delivery, the recurring argument, the evening spent differently than you intended. These are the conditions you are responding to.
What is alive within you?
Your feelings, doubts, desires, resistance, responsibilities, and competing values are also part of the situation. They are not noise to eliminate or instructions you must obey. But leaving them out produces an incomplete picture.
What is your current response adding?
Every response becomes part of the situation. It asks something of you and of other people. It reinforces certain meanings and roles. It may carry a tension forward, redistribute it, or create new tensions of its own.
When these different strands become knotted together, the problem can appear self-evident and your response inevitable.
We separate them.
This allows us to distinguish what the situation genuinely requires from what your current solution requires. We can see which tensions cannot be removed, what matters to you within them, and what conditions your way of moving forward would create.
Once the whole situation becomes visible, it can be held differently.
The tension may remain, but it no longer has to organize your response. You can decide how to carry it forward.
From there, a movement becomes possible that acknowledges what is real, feels like your own, and does not depend on overriding yourself, somebody else, or the situation.
Not a perfect or final solution. A movement you can stand behind, learn from in reality, and build upon.
Don’t ask if the story is real. Ask what’s real in your story.
The last phase …
The way a difficult phase looks while we are living through it is often strikingly different from what later turns out to have mattered.
The last phase of a project at work. The argument with a partner around home duties. The dissatisfaction with how you spend your off-work time.
Those can be genuinely uncomfortable und difficult periods in our lifes. Ironically, if we look back at them later what eventually changed is often quite different from what we thought would make things better.
It is kind of funny, when we settle serious doubts about our how we spend our evenings by eventually re-reading an old favorite book.
But it has real consequences, when we have put a lot of pressure on ourselves and others to make something work we feel is necessary.
Relationships suffer. Resources are wasted. People burn out.
My work is around that gap in perception between “in a difficult phase” and “after a difficult phase”. Entering this gap has the potential to:
Change and make a difference every day by becoming clearer on what is now and find ways to move forward that create lasting progress
Avoid damages and risks to what is valuable by becoming less identified with the necessity of stories that keep us bound
Confidence without the need for perfection by accepting the your full experience and not getting attached to future outcomes you can’t control
Emotional - cognitive - presence coherence by reflecting and modulating your responses progressively