FROM THE COACHING ROOM
Something has shifted in the people I sit with this year. Their diaries are full and their plans are detailed, yet very few of them can tell me what they actually want. Underneath it all runs a restlessness they cannot name. Here is what I think is happening, the questions I ask and what happened when one leader finally heard the answer.
He arrived with five plans and a notebook to prove it.
A second factory. A new ERP system. Export into the Gulf. An executive MBA he had been “meaning to start” for two years. Together with – almost as an afterthought, a small hotel on the south coast that he and his wife had been sketching on Sunday evenings.
He was the managing director of a family manufacturing business, second generation, late forties. His father built the company and still sat as chairman. On paper, everything was moving in the right direction. Revenue was up. The bank was friendly. The team was stable.
“I should be happy,” he told me. “Things are going well.”
He wasn’t sleeping. He had snapped at his finance head twice that month and couldn’t say why. Weekends had become something to get through. He described it as a hum in the background, a low unsettled feeling that followed him from meeting to meeting.
I hear some version of that hum more often now than at any point I can remember. Capable people with plenty of options, plenty of plans and almost no idea what they actually want.
A PLAN IS NOT A WANT
A plan tells you what you will do. A goal tells you what you are reaching for. You can have a beautiful plan with nothing at the end of it, the way you can have a perfectly tuned car and nowhere to drive.
For most of a career the two travel so close together that we stop telling them apart. The organisation or in his case the family, hands you the destination. You supply the plan. It works for years, and you become very good at it. Somewhere along the way you lose the habit of asking where you want to go, because someone else always answered that for you.
Then the old destination quietly stops meaning what it meant. Nobody hands you a new one. So you do what you are good at. You make more plans, and they keep you busy enough that you never have to sit with the harder question.
“The plans keep you busy enough that you never have to sit with the harder question.”
THE RESTLESSNESS IS TRYING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING
Most leaders treat restlessness as a fault to be fixed, so they attack it with activity. Another initiative. A fresh set of objectives, written quickly so the uncomfortable feeling will go away.
William Bridges, who spent his career studying how people move through change, drew a distinction I come back to often. A change is the external event. A transition is the inner process and it begins with an ending. Between the old and the new lies what he called the neutral zone, a disorienting stretch where the old identity no longer fits and the new one has not yet formed. It feels like drift. It is actually where the reorganising happens.
The restless people in my room are often standing in that neutral zone without knowing it. Something has ended for them, and because they have not named it, everything feels slightly off.
THE QUESTION THAT CHANGED THE ROOM
For the first hour with this managing director, we walked through the plans. I asked what would be different for him when each one was finished. The answers were thin. “The business will be bigger.” “We’ll be more efficient.” Correct answers, all of them, delivered in the flat voice people use for correct answers.
So I stopped asking about the plans and asked about their origin.
“Whose plan is the second factory?”
He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. He looked out of the window for what felt like a long time. Then, very quietly: “My father’s.”
I let that sit. Then I asked the question I had been holding.
“What have you stopped wanting that you haven’t yet admitted to yourself?”
He laughed, the kind of laugh that comes just before something true. Then he said it.
“I think I stopped wanting to be my father about three years ago. I just never told anyone. Including me.”
The hum had a name.
He had spent three years executing a vision he no longer believed in, because believing in it had once been the price of belonging. Every new plan was another way of staying busy enough not to notice. The restlessness wasn’t a malfunction. It was the honest part of him knocking on the door.
“I stopped wanting to be my father about three years ago. I just never told anyone. Including me.”
THE QUESTIONS BENEATH THE BREAKTHROUGH
That moment didn’t come from a clever technique. It came from staying with him long enough for the real question to surface. These are the questions I reach for when someone is restless and full of plans.
When this plan is finished, what will be different for you? Not for the company. For you. An honest “nothing much” is the first crack of light.
Whose plan is this, really? Many plans are inherited from a parent, a board, a former self, or a picture of success absorbed twenty years ago.
Are you restless about something, or restless for something? Restless about is usually fear. Restless for is usually desire that hasn’t yet found its words. From the inside they feel identical.
What have you stopped wanting that you haven’t yet admitted to yourself? This is the one that tends to change the session.
If nobody were watching or keeping score, what would you do with the next year of your life?
Then I stop talking. Nancy Kline has argued for years that the quality of a person’s thinking depends on the quality of attention they receive. A senior leader rarely gets ten unhurried minutes to think out loud without being interrupted, judged or rescued. Giving that is a large part of my job.
WHAT HE DID NEXT
He didn’t resign, sell the business or buy the hotel. Real breakthroughs are usually quieter than that.
He put the second factory on hold for six months. Then he had the conversation with his father he had avoided for years. It was not easy. It was, he told me later, the first time they had spoken as two adults rather than as founder and heir.
Then he tried something small. Herminia Ibarra’s research on career change found that people rarely think their way into a new direction. They act their way into it, testing possible selves in small experiments. So he began spending Saturday mornings with the young engineers in the business, helping them grow.
Three weeks in, he called me. “I haven’t felt like this since I was thirty,” he said. He had found his energy, and it wasn’t in building another plant. It was in building people.
He is now bringing in a chief operating officer to run the operations he had been carrying alone, so he can lead the part of the business he actually cares about. He is sleeping again. His finance head has noticed.
BEFORE YOU WRITE NEXT YEAR’S PLAN
If you recognise yourself in any of this, the plans are not the problem. They are simply what a capable person does with a feeling they cannot yet name.
So before you set next year’s objectives, put the plans to one side for an hour. Sit somewhere without your phone. Ask yourself whose plans they really are. Ask what has ended for you, even if nobody else has noticed. Then wait longer than feels reasonable for the answer.
It begins, as it always does, with being honest enough to admit you may no longer want what you are working so hard to build, and brave enough to stay in the room until you find out what you do want.
Wishing you a weekend with a little more stillness in it, and the courage to listen to what the restlessness is trying to say.
S. Neroshan Silva, MCC. Written from the coaching room, in Ratmalana.
