Leading while your Heart is Breaking

Bound to fail

Do you recognize the situation? You are working on a task. Then you hit the first obstacle, then the second one, the third one... and your first problem occurs. "No worries, I got this. I can solve it", and you do. Then you face the second problem. Again you think, "No worries, I am a smart person. I can solve this", as you do. But as you do, the first solution fails, causing your second solution to fail, and now you have a bit of a mess on your hands. You keep going, but as problems for simple tasks keep piling up, you feel the emotions take over. Your handling gets a bit rougher, and tensions start running higher. More and more problems pile up. And frustration, even anger, starts running high.

Now picture this. Another person enters the space. The person who enters looks at the messy situation, as you, with a firm hand, try to resolve all the problems and obstacles. You might feel, "Great, and now I have an audience!". What do you think happens next? There are many potential pathways om how this story unfolds. And you can most likely recognize many of them.

Let me stop this story here for a second. For a long time, I have not addressed a topic I have been asked to speak of. Mostly I have ignored it, as I do not enjoy being seen, heard, or known. I like being in the shadows, and I don't want to share my thoughts with strangers. Most importantly, I do not want to be observed, judged, evaluated, or graded. If I remain in the background, I can remain in a place without judgment, being observed, and being evaluated.

The topic I have been requested to talk about is "leading while your heart is breaking". It was first brought to my attention by Diana Kenoly almost two years ago. But I decided not to do anything about it. I decided to be silent and keep my thoughts, learnings, failures, and questions to myself. I stayed in my stubbornness of not wanting to be seen, heard, or known to make sure I would not be judged, evaluated, or observed. I chose this so that I could avoid failure and so I could avoid being hurt. But mostly to avoid sharing important thoughts to avoid the risk of others tearing them apart and needing to deal with the despair, sadness, and powerlessness in sometimes the brutal realities and rhetorics of Social Media. Even after having almost 15 other people use the same words and ask me to speak on the topic openly, I decided to ignore it.

Let's return to the story, and I will share with you what happened to me.

My husband enters the space. He can see I am frustrated, as my calmness is gone. There is frustration and annoyance in every movement I make, and every word I say or leave unsaid. My handling of the net I am trying to get in place is rough, to say the least. I start explaining to him (with rather high intensity) what is wrong with this planning, all the things that keep going wrong, and why what I am doing is not working. Of all the alternative pathways, he jumps on the solutions. As I speak of a problem or issue, he speaks of a solution. I argue for all of the problems with the proposed solution, he already has the next solution to present. The task to perform is not progressing at all, as all energy is consumed in this dead-end debate. My mother's tempered blood runs in my veins. I am getting more frustrated, my arguments are becoming vaguer, as the solutions to the problems I present keep pouring out of my husband. It all seems to be so easy in his eyes, and there seems to be no problem that he doesn't have a solution for. I can sense he is getting annoyed, as I do not appreciate his great solutions, even to problems he is not convinced exist. They don't, but I keep pushing my side of the story. But why?

Then we reach the peak of the debate. He says, "I don't want you to be so frustrated. Maybe you can go inside, and I will take care of it". Can you imagine what happened next?

Before I tell you what happened next, let us pause here. What was happening? It was surely less about getting the net in place, and more about something else. I was in an emotional, unreceiving space where I had only problems. My head was crowded with things happening: I had been happy I could contribute by performing a fairly easy task (installing the net). But then I faced all of these challenges in performing the task, and I struggled to get a sense of flow to the work. I wanted so much to be of value, to help, and to perform. Why was this so important? At the core, I wanted to reduce the amount of work my husband had, and I was making my best effort to overcome the problems and find solutions.

But at the same time, I was annoyed with poor planning, wondering if it could have been done better. Maybe I wasn't the problem. If there would have been better types of equipment or parts to use for the task. I even questioned if it had been planned at all or if it was more of a 'figure it out as you go' solution. It did not help, that I had yesterday been doing a lot of things, and my back was a bit soar. The ergonomics were not the best possible now either. There was a clear conflict of emotions and thoughts in my head throughout the process. I tried to stay positive and realistic but struggled with my frustration of (in my opinion) obvious poor planning. I did not want to give up, as I wanted to be of value, but currently, I wasn't getting anything done. I felt that failing, was not an option, but I could not see a solution.

With all of these things happening, I start sharing all of the thoughts in my head. As I do, they get a response formed to solve all of them, not to recognize them. My response is that I keep coming up with responses as to why the solutions don't work. And there we are, me being reluctant to receive any of the solutions presented to me and the other being reluctant to recognize the state of mind I am in.

The problem is not the process, the materials, or the planning. The problem is a very human-orientated one. As my mind was stuck in only seeing problems, my husband's mind was stuck in only seeing solutions. Funny enough, he wanted to help me, and I wanted to be helped, but we could not find one another. I was also struggling with feeling useless and like I was failing at a simple task. And then, I hear the words, "I don't want you to be so frustrated. Maybe you can go inside, and I will take care of it". My fears became a reality. I wasn't able to add any value.

What happened? The most likely outcome (considering my emotional state) was that I would have slammed all of the tools to the ground and left. But what I did, was that I sat down and went quiet. I know. I surprised myself as well.

As I did, I also recognized the real problem in our dialogue. It was not a dialogue at all. My mind was not ready for a solution to the problem, I just wanted the problem to be recognized, and I wanted to feel like I was heard. I needed some time to get from my problem-orientated mind to the solution-orientation. I shared my observation with my husband. He sat down as well. He also recognized the problem. We sat there for a while: no words, no activities, just silence.

I got up, turned around, and re-started my work, incorporating some of his ideas. He allowed me to work in peace, offering to help if I needed a hand but letting me be. Suddenly, there seemed to be very few problems, and I could find a flow to the work. And my husband could continue doing other things while I contributed by doing my part. I even found the strength to recognize his good ideas. Or was it strength or just 'the right thing to do'?

Now, you might wonder how this is linked to leading while your heart is breaking. Or maybe you can recognize where my heart was breaking? The moment when my husband said, "go inside, and I will take care of it," was the point I was heartbroken.

I could have started to cry. It is a small thing, and really not the end of the world, but at that moment, it felt like everything to me. I felt like I was letting the person I love the most down. I was of no help at all. I felt the depth and pain of my failure. My thoughts were flooded with days of seeing him tired as a result of the long evenings he was working, all of the mornings he didn't want to get up from bed, all the evenings he crashed on the sofa late in the evening, and all of the heavy steps at home. All of these times broke my heart. Now they all came at the same time, added with his despair of trying to help me, and me not receiving it.

I managed to recognize it and consciously address it and lead the situation in a different direction. Allowing myself to feel all I did and allowing my heart to break, I allowed myself to stop and think. And as I did, I managed to recognize how we could find one another.

I work with sustainability challenges in different surroundings and through different approaches. I often see how many of us avoid failing or doing things we believe in for the same reasons I did not write about leading while your heart is breaking. We avoid allowing the painful truths or the state of our planet, our home, and the societies we have created into our hearts. In many cases, we might be stuck in the mindset where we see only problems and find (sometimes) vague arguments to reject solutions. We might even throw down our gloves when we run out of arguments.

But most of all, we avoid having our hearts broken. We have been subject to being emotional, being at the edge, and in some cases, being faced with ruthless comments, stereotypes, and questioning of our worth and knowledge. Even worse, our values are sometimes under heavy attack. Many, like myself, decide to stay quiet. The few strong voices overturn the good we might be able to achieve. The problem focus keeps dominating the narrative and the solutions are bombarded with sometimes vague arguments on why they do not work.

Having your heart broken is natural to avoid. Expecting someone to lead, while their heart is breaking, is close to inhumane and beyond unfair. But we do not have a choice.

As we lead through these crises and uncertainty to reach a sustainable, inspirational future, our hearts will be broken in many different ways and many times over for different reasons. We can not keep hiding from it, and we can not keep ignoring the pain it will cause. We need to learn to see beyond it, work through it, and learn from it. We need to share these situations and learn from them. We also need to share when we fail, as any failure we do not learn from is a missed opportunity.

What is not needed, is to add to the burden of leaders who lead despite broken hearts. What is not needed is to burden solution-minded people with problem-orientated minds. There is a difference between constructive criticism and just criticizing. There is a difference between giving feedback that allows growth and giving feedback just to lighten your own burden or better your own position by demining or denouncing others.

Inspired, by countless youth present at COP27, especially Rahmina Paullete , who puts forward her questions, solutions, and opinions every day and every chance she has. I will share with you different situations where my heart has been broken, but I still needed to lead. I have not always been successful, I have not always managed to lead. For many of them, I am still in the process of learning. Most importantly, despite being successful in one situation, I still seem to struggle to replicate the learnings in a similar situation in the future. But we can learn and observe together.

I am convinced any reader might have insights to share. This is where we can learn together. This is a space where we can connect as a global family. This is how we can re-learn to value all living. This is how I, and many others (e.g. Reboot the Future ), believe we can connect. This is also where we can grow, together.

I welcome any thoughts, ideas, and opinions on the writings. I also welcome contributions from anyone who feels a calling to share.