The Moment You Are In
Consequential change rarely announces its arrival, and a personal transition can come alongside a professional one. One day you look up and find yourself in a situation inviting you to make your next move, to tap into a new aspect of yourself, or to change direction. I have lived these moments and watched others move through them. They can take many forms, and whatever the specifics, each asks the same three things of you: seeing yourself as you are, reading the system you are in, and knowing what the moment calls for. Here are three I see often. One of them may be the moment you are in.
The quiet before
Before any announcement is made, whether it is an exit or a change in title, there is a quiet stretch. It lives in small private moments, between meetings or wide awake at 3:00 AM, and with it comes a whole range of emotions. You may be making sense of it alone, or with a friend over dinner or a former colleague over a cocktail. You know something needs to shift. Perhaps you have grown too comfortable, or perhaps change is all around you and you do not yet know how you will navigate it.
I know those spaces well, as an individual contributor, as a leader and now as an entrepreneur. When I last stood in one, I knew the next chapter was mine to choose.
So what does that moment ask of you? Standing still is also a decision. The world keeps moving, and if you do not act on your situation, someone else will. I have learned that you rarely need more information. You need discernment: the practice of seeing what is already there, and the fortitude to sit with the uncomfortable realities around you. Sometimes that means having someone name what no one has said to you candidly, or facing what has been there the whole time but felt too hard to deal with.
It also means seeing what to do next among a universe of possibilities, and understanding that your options may be more expansive than what is immediately in front of you. And it means knowing your value, because that is the foundation for unlocking your next move.
Coming into your own
You are often more ready than you perceive. Someone may say to you, "You know, if you want that role, you could have it," and you wave the comment away. The way you see yourself is not always what others see in you, and so often the gap between where you are and where you could be lies in your self-estimation.
The gap might be in how comfortable you are with stepping into something more uncertain, or with not having all the answers, or with what it takes to perform at a different level of the organization, moving from being the expert to being the one who leads. Underneath is a hesitancy to see yourself in a role you could already hold.
If you so often over-deliver and still ask whether you are ready, this moment does call for more confidence. Discernment, here, is learning to assess yourself as accurately as the people around you already do, so that when someone tells you the role is yours, you know it!
When everyone is looking to you
When your organization moves through a transition like an integration, a restructuring or a change in mandate, someone has to lead the people through it. That someone may be you, living it yourself while making the hardest calls with everyone looking to you.
Across my career, I have led teams through those transitions and steadied leaders while the ground was moving.
Discernment, here, is knowing which calls are yours alone to make, and keeping your own footing so the people looking to you can find theirs.
If you are carrying that weight right now, you do not have to carry it alone.
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This is the work I do, privately and in confidence, with a small number of clients: helping you see clearly enough to build what you have earned.
If you are navigating one of these situations, or another consequential transition, consider putting it on the table. Naming it is where clarity begins, and I would welcome that conversation: schiffon@schiffonwong.com.
