Identifying our edge

Every major firm from MBB to the Big 4 touts a framework telling leaders exactly what they should do. So why do we still struggle? Because knowing that something is true doesn’t help us know how to act [1]. We know that we need to have difficult conversations, but drag our feet nonetheless. We know that our teams respond better to empathy, but in a fit of rage we forget. Frameworks can guide us, but trying to lead by framework is like trying to learn to ride a bike from a book. 

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Outgrowing our problems requires us to identify our edge, the boundary that constrains our sense-making. It enables us to make some meanings, see some options, imagine some ways of behaving — but not others. Moreover, there can be no one-size-fits-all solution because each leader’s edge is uniquely their own. Take the founders I meet who believe they have a “time management” problem. Upon deeper inquiry, the real reasons they don’t have time for what they need to do range from a reluctance to say “no,” to anxieties about settling for “good enough," to fears of missing out on opportunities – deeply individual challenges that run-of-the-mill frameworks like “Urgent-Important Matrix” or “The One Thing” fail to address. 

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Understanding our edge can also radically alter the problem we think we have. This was the case for a client who initially sought help to mend a strained relationship with his business partner, but ultimately discovered the strain was a symptom of a venture that was out of integrity with his values. Similarly, a leader anxious for ways to develop her team realized how her own eagerness to help was actually preventing them from taking the initiative for their own learning. Identifying their edge helped clarify that the solution they sought was not the one they needed.  

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Why is identifying our edge difficult to do on our own? Like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous commencement address who don’t know what water is because they’re in it all day, it’s difficult to identify the edge of our sense-making with the same apparatus we use to make sense [2]. If you hate feeling dependent on people, you’re not choosing not to ask for help. This possibility does not cross your mind at all. It’s not necessary to identify your edge in advance of coaching. A trained coach with enough pattern recognition will help transform your sense-making apparatus into something you actively shape, rather than something you’re unconsciously bound to [3]. 

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Exploring our edge

Identifying our edge marks an achievement of self-awareness, yet it is just the beginning. Self-awareness alone rarely suffices to unlock wise action. Realizing we have a desperate need to be liked, for instance, does not immediately equip us to make the tough decisions we were avoiding. After all, what makes our edge feel edgy is that we want nothing to do with it. In fact, one of the clearest signs we’ve found our edge is the experience of wishing to flee, avoid, and not spend even one more second near it. As Pema Chödrön writes, “fear is a natural reaction to moving closer to the truth.” 

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So, what needs to happen next is the least enjoyable part of the growth process — because it involves welcoming the one thing we desperately wish to avoid. If disappointing others terrifies us, our work is to befriend our fear. If we’d rather work ten times as hard to avoid the vulnerability of asking for help, now we embrace that vulnerability. If this sounds daunting, it is. It requires us to sober up and give up our strategies for staying comfortable, to remain receptive to what’s happening even when we want to solve and fix, and to do all this with compassionate awareness rather than “white knuckling” through it.

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This work asks so much of us, but offers so much in return. By giving permission to their unacknowledged rage and frustration, my clients have accessed formidable reserves of energy to reshape their personal and professional lives. By grieving the sacrifice they made of their innermost wishes early in life, they’ve found the courage to transform their lives in alignment with their deepest aspirations. By healing early relational hurts and disappointments, still others have rediscovered wellsprings of empathy and compassion that unlock deeper connection in their relationships. 

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As Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love” [4]. But this work is difficult to undertake alone. The pressures of daily life do not leave us much space for welcoming fear or helplessness, let alone accessing love for what engenders these feelings. No one can hand you a map to your edge, but a coaching relationship with someone who’s extensively navigated their own and others’ offers a container in which what is currently unbearable within you can be welcomed and transformed. 

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Venturing beyond our edge

When faced with challenges, our instinct is often to jump to action. Yet it’s the work of identifying and exploring our edge that makes new behaviors possible. Every small increase in our ability to remain at our edge without retreating or shutting down frees up time and energy we’d otherwise spend protecting ourselves from what we fear, and expands our freedom to act differently by expanding the boundary of what we can accept. 

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Armed with this newfound energy and freedom, my clients become able to experiment with new strategies and behaviors; like saying no instead of people-pleasing, trusting others instead of micromanaging, and speaking their minds instead of playing it safe. Importantly, the awareness and spaciousness they’ve developed can turn every experience they have into a learning laboratory, where each new action generates new data on their edges, which in turn spurs a virtuous cycle of new observations, reflections, and experiments for growth.

My role here is to help my clients learn to learn, because learning only happens if we notice and reflect on what’s happening. With the benefit of the coaching relationship we’ve built together, I help clients connect disparate experiences into illuminating patterns of behavior, draw attention to and celebrate the ways they’ve grown without even noticing, and catch them when they lapse into old habits before the new ones they’re developing have had a chance to settle. 

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At some point in our work together, my clients catch themselves wanting to say what others want to hear, and make the courageous choice to speak the truth. They notice how fear makes up stories about why they can’t have what they want, and choose not to let that stop them. They begin to relish challenging themselves to try new behaviors and welcome the feedback that they’ll receive from others as valuable data for their growth. As a coach, one of the most gratifying experiences is realizing that my clients no longer need me. There will be other edges for us to work on down the road, but for now, they’ve outgrown the problem they began with. 

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Many thanks to Natalie Rothfels for feedback on an earlier draft.

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[1] Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) argues that the ability to perform intelligent actions regarding X (“knowing how”) is not reducible to possessing accurate facts about X (“knowing that”)

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[2] David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, later published as This Is Water (2009)

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[3] Robert Kegan calls this the "subject-object move" in The Evolving Self (1982), where aspects of our understanding are shifted from being unconsciously embedded ("subject") to being observable and examinable ("object").

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[4] Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)