At the Edge of Myself: A Reflective Narrative on Leadership, Disruption, and the Work of Staying Present

This episode explores the discomfort of sudden leadership change, from the antenarrative and psychological contract to the emotional labor of staying composed when everything feels unstable. There are moments where leadership stops feeling like something do and becomes something that we are subject to. These are not the moments we would ever have chosen or designed. yet somehow they are those moments that arrive uninvited, often carrying disappointment, sometimes sharp enough to bruise the ego before I have time to make sense of it. - and they matter I have come to think of this as being at the pointy end of leadership. It is a particular sensation—of no longer standing above a situation, nor even alongside it, but finding myself underneath it, pressed by something larger. Sometimes that force is a system, sometimes a decision, sometimes a quiet but undeniable shift in how I am seen or positioned. And sometimes, if I am honest, it is my own framing of events that begins to close in on me. I work in the field of leadership while also working for myself, which means I occupy a dual stance: I am both observer and experiencer. I watch systems unfold while simultaneously being shaped by them. I see patterns in others that I later recognise, often uncomfortably, in myself. This doubling sharpens my awareness of what it means to lead at the edge—particularly when that edge begins to infringe on my own idea of who I am. What I have learned is that these moments are rarely about the event itself. The specifics change—a missed expectation, a shift in direction, an unanticipated outcome—but the conditions repeat. There is a familiar structure beneath the surface: the loss of control, the destabilisation of identity, the quiet rupture of something that once felt understood So how can we dance at the pointy edge of being an imperfect leaders harnessing edge-walking, reflexive resilience, and the power of clear, human conversation to make sense of uncertainty