A few months ago I set out to listen.
Not to gather data in the research sense, not to build a case for anything in particular, but to listen to what the leaders I respect most are carrying right now. I reached out to twenty-two of them. Founders, CEOs, executive coaches, healthcare leaders, educators, filmmakers, fractional CFOs. People whose work I’ve watched with admiration and whose judgment I trust.
I asked them about what it feels like to lead in 2026. What I heard enlivened me.
Not because it was surprising, exactly. But because it was honest in a way that leadership conversations rarely are. These were not conference versions of their stories, but real ones. About fear and fatigue, about longing for connection amidst the brittle uncertainty for our future. And underneath all of it, something I hadn’t quite anticipated: a quiet, tenacious hope.
The report I wrote from those conversations is called Still In It (you can download it here). Six themes emerged. As I’ve been sitting with what I heard, I keep returning to something I’ve been exploring for the past several months: the stories we tell ourselves when the ground is unsteady, and what it costs us to keep telling the ones that no longer serve.
What We’re Carrying
The first and most consistent thing I heard from these twenty-two leaders was that fear is closer to the surface than any of them have experienced before. Not distant, out there, theoretical fear. But present, palpable, in-your-bones fear that’s influencing decisions about what to say publicly and what to keep private, about who to trust and how much, and whether to act on values that might make someone, anyone, uncomfortable.
One managing director who has spent decades at the highest levels of organizational life told me he has never seen fear this concentrated. A healthcare CEO told me, with the clarity that only genuine integrity can produce, that there isn’t a lot of hope right now. And that for her, naming that weight isn’t giving up, but what honest leadership requires.
Alongside fear, decision fatigue is quietly hollowing people out. Not exhaustion from a sprint but fatigue from running at altitude with no recovery. One leader put it precisely, “fatigue requires a completely different treatment than exhaustion does.” We’re operating in the reactive present because the longer horizon feels too uncertain to plan toward. Tanks aren’t simply empty; they’re not being refilled.
And then there’s a hunger that lay beneath the fear and the fatigue, an ache longing for real human connection, being seen by another person in conversations where masks are off.
I want to pause here, because I think these three things—fear, fatigue, and hunger for connection—aren’t separate problems to be solved. Instead, they’re symptoms of something deeper. That something deeper is the story.
The Stories We Tell
For the past several months I’ve been reflecting a lot about the role of stories in our lives and leadership. Specifically those stories we make up to make sense of things, and what happens when we grip those stories so tightly we can’t see around or through them. We become them instead.
This landed close to home for me this past winter, when I lost a dear, dear friend. It cracked me open, and for that I am grateful, despite having to feel the full weight of grief.
What I realized is that I’d been caught up in my story about how to do life. Hyper-focused, over-analyzing, grasping for a certainty that isn’t possible. All of it, in some way, was an attempt to avoid the pain and reality in my life. I didn’t think I was avoiding. But I was.
That awareness is the key.
We all do this, of course; it’s one of the most human things we do. Faced with potential threats or uncertainty, we reach for a story to explain it, one that tells us what to do next.
Those stories often come from the accumulated experiences of every hard thing we’ve ever navigated before. Sometimes those old stories serve us beautifully, growing our resilience.
Yet sometimes stories don’t serve us at all. Like one of the leaders on the listening tour who described it so precisely: “it’s a way of explaining why nothing we do will matter, dressed up in the language of pragmatism.”
Sometimes it’s a story about what any human – adult, parent or leader – is supposed to look like (you know that one). It costs us the very thing we need most today which is the capacity to respond freshly to what is happening, right now.
Here’s the paradox: stories are essential. Our stories biologically filter all incoming experiences. In telling stories, we texture our lives with meaning, learn about each other and ourselves, and build trust in our communities. Words and stories have power.
We can spin stories around ourselves, layer upon layer, thread by thread, like a protective cocoon. What starts as protection over time becomes thicker, insulating, and separating. Those stories that once helped us navigate the world begin to separate us from what’s happening right now.
Yet here’s the thing about cocoons: they’re necessary because they hold the goo of transformation.
We just have to know when to stop spinning them.
The leaders I spoke with who’re navigating this moment most effectively share something in common: they’re not without stories but are holding their stories lightly.
They’re curious about what is present rather than what they expected. One of them, a filmmaker, put it this way: “what we need to be investing in right now are the networks, the relationships, the systems that can create what’s new once this moment passes.”
He’s advocating for discernment around setting down the story that says it’s already too late, or that the only wise move is self-preservation, and calling us to be willing to create the conditions for a new, collective story to emerge.
This is where practice comes in.
The Pause as Practice
I wrote The Leadership Pause because I believed, and still believe, that the single most powerful thing we can do is learn to create space between what happens, our reactions, and how we want to respond. Not as a technique to get a grip, but a genuine practice of directing attention that changes what becomes possible.
The Still In It report confirmed this in every single conversation.
Those leaders holding steadiest aren’t the ones with more information, certainty, or resources. They’re the ones who’ve developed the awareness to pause first, then notice what is present—including the fear, fatigue, and their story running in the background—and respond from there.
The space that comes with a pause, is the bit of awareness between stimulus and response where choice lives. It is, as I wrote in the report, where discernment happens: the practiced ability to distinguish between what is ending because it should, and what is trying to grow.
Practicing the pause also makes it possible to be present to other people in the way these twenty-two leaders are hungry for. You can’t see someone while half-attending to your phone. Nor can you hear someone while composing your response. Presence is the prerequisite for connection, and the pause builds our capacity for presence. Not once, but over time, in small, repeated choices, day after day.
You become what you practice.
What You Can Do Right Now
Hope without action is just a feeling. We need concrete places to start; below you’ll find three.
Notice your story before you act. Before your next significant decision or difficult conversation, take sixty seconds to pause and ask yourself what story is already running. Not necessarily changing it, but simply seeing it for what it is. Named stories have less power than unnamed ones.
Protect one daily practice of restoration. Not as a luxury, but as a requirement of living and leading well. Our cognitive and emotional capacities are a finite resource, and this current environment is drawing down on them heavily. Thirty minutes without a device or an agenda, a ten-minute walk, there aren’t indulgences, but maintenance.
Have one real conversation this month. Not a check-in, but a conversation where you ask something genuine and then listen. The leaders I spoke with are longing for this. So, most likely, are you and the people around you.
A Note of Genuine Hope
Here is what I want to leave you with, because it’s true and it matters.
The twenty-two leaders I spoke with are not naïve, but instead they are eyes-open about how hard this moment is. And they are still in it. Still thinking, still caring, still asking the harder questions about what it means to lead with integrity when integrity is inconvenient and sometimes quietly costly.
This is not a small thing. This is, in fact, the whole thing.
One leader offered a frame that has stayed with me since our conversation. “Uncertainty itself is curriculum.” Every fast decision made under pressure, every pivot, every crisis navigated, is building muscles of resilience. Going through hard things together is what builds a team.
The practices in The Leadership Pause Book of Practices, which launches just around the corner at the end of April, were created this kind of moment, to support to meet the moment with the full range of what you know and who you are.
The Still In It report is available now. I hope you’ll read it and share it with someone who will recognize themselves in its pages.
The listening isn’t over. It is the beginning of how we can lead differently to create the future we want.
I’m here and ready to listen, reach me at drchris@q4-consulting.com.