People ask me all the time what kind of consulting I do, and the honest answer takes a minute. I do strategy. What I won’t do is run a strategic planning process, and there’s a difference, even if the sector has spent years pretending there isn’t. Strategy is the real work: what matters, what is next, what we’re actually going to do about it. A strategic planning process, most of the time, never gets near any of that. It produces a binder. A set of tidy boxes. A laminated list of values nobody can remember by Thursday. And it leaves the people who have to live inside it feeling flat and a little stuck, holding a document where a direction should be. It’s not executive search either, and it’s not a coaching engagement, and it’s not a governance workshop with a deck at the end. There’s good work being done in all of those rooms. Mine is a different room.
So here is the truest answer I have. This is a bravery practice.
I mean that as plainly and as literally as I have ever meant anything, because it’s where I’ve decided, after nearly thirty years, the actual work lives. Thirty years of sitting in rooms watching smart, devoted, good hearted people fail to do the one thing every single person in the room already knew needed doing. Not because they weren’t clever enough. Not because they didn’t care. Because nobody in that room could find the nerve, and nobody had built them a place to find it.
What it is not
I don’t mean fearlessness. The leaders I admire most are frightened a good deal of the time, and they’re right to be. The stakes are real, and the ones who feel no fear walking into a hard season are usually the ones who haven’t understood it yet. Give it a week.
I don’t mean recklessness either. I’m from Newfoundland. Where I come from, you respect the weather precisely because you fully intend to survive it. Bravery that ignores the conditions isn’t bravery at all. It’s just another way to get people hurt.
And I don’t mean a personality trait, some bit of grit a lucky few get issued at birth while the rest of us go without. That idea isn’t just wrong, it’s the thing that keeps people stuck. Because it takes a problem you could actually solve, a problem of conditions, and quietly turns it into a verdict about your character. A leader who can’t bring the hard truth to their board decides, somewhere in the back of their mind, that they must not have what it takes. And almost every time, what they’re missing isn’t courage. It’s something else entirely, and it’s something you can build.
What actually drains it
The decisions that matter most in a hard season take nerve. And nerve is the first thing that scarcity and isolation drain out of a person. So the work isn’t only to find the brave choice. The work is to make it possible to stand in it.
This is what we miss most often.
Scarcity and isolation aren’t the backdrop to this work. They’re the conditions you’re working inside of, every single day. Picture the leader running on a twelve month funding horizon, costs climbing, carrying a decision the board has no real room to hold, without one peer they can be all the way honest with. Their nerve isn’t failing because of who they are. It’s being drained by the shape of the job itself. Put the bravest person you know into those conditions and they will struggle with the same things. That’s not weakness. It’s the predictable result of the conditions they’re working in.
And this is why so much of the help we throw at people misses entirely. The pep talk treats courage like a mood you can talk yourself into. The framework treats it like a gap in your knowledge. The strategic plan treats it like a scheduling problem. But the leader already knows the brave choice. They do. Most of them do. They could name it for you inside twenty minutes if the room were safe enough to say it in. They don’t need to be told what the brave thing is. They need the conditions that let them do it.
What the practice actually does
So that is the work. Not handing people courage. Rebuilding the conditions that let courage exist.
And here is what I want to be clear about, because it’s where most help stops short. Naming the hard thing is the easy part. Most leaders can do it in twenty minutes. They know the merger, the wind down, the truth the board needs to hear. The bravery is in everything that comes after the naming. What actually happens now. How you sequence it so it’s survivable. Which domino you push first so the next one gets easier, and the one after that. The way through the long middle, when the decision is made but the work has only started and almost everyone else has moved on. I don’t just help a leader name the hard thing. I help them figure out what happens once it’s named, and then stay while they do it.
And it’s unglamorous. It’s a confidential room to think, with somebody in it who has sat in that chair and isn’t the least bit frightened by what gets said out loud. It’s naming the decision early, while there is still time to make it well, because by the time a brave choice is made too late, it isn’t really a choice anymore. It’s just the only thing left. It’s preparing the board so the hard truth arrives as a question the table can actually hold, instead of a bomb dropped on it. It’s doing the cold arithmetic on the worst case, because most of the time the numbers are less frightening than the story we have been telling ourselves about them. And it’s staying, being in the room for what tests the nerve most, which is rarely the decision and almost always the doing.
None of that is mystical. Every bit of it is buildable. That’s the whole reason I call it a practice and not a gift. It’s a set of conditions you can construct, and a capacity you can keep up, in a person, in a board, in a whole organization.
The threads
There is one more thing I believe about courage, and it is the thing I find myself saying over and over to leaders who are ashamed of how empty their tank has gotten.
Courage comes and goes. In everyone. There’s no version of this work, there’s no version of any hard, full life, where the nerve just holds steady on its own. What I have watched happen, again and again, is that the people you gather around you pick up the threads when you drop them. Someone holds your conviction for you through the week you can’t hold it yourself, and hands it back when you are steady enough to take it. But here is what we get backwards: that only happens if you’re willing to say, out loud, that you’re struggling. The admission isn’t the opposite of bravery. It’s the thing that summons it. Say “I am not sure I can do this” to the right person, and more often than not the nerve starts coming back, yours, and theirs. That’s not a character flaw on anyone’s part. That’s how courage has always worked. Communally. In shifts. The same way every other thing that ever got a community through a winter worked.
It’s also why people misread the brave ones. I’m told I’m known for doing the hard thing with a smile on my face, but it’s more than a smile. I find the humour in it, even when it’s hard, especially when it’s hard. I look straight at the thing that seems impossible, and I remind myself that being present and doing what is hard is the good work. That’s the whole point, really. The humour isn’t denial, and it’s not me finding any of it easy. It’s what bravery looks like once it’s being practised instead of summoned. When the conditions are right, when you’re not carrying the thing alone, the hard thing just becomes the thing you’re doing today. Heavy, sure. But not impossible.
Obliged to the risk
Not long ago someone asked me what’s left of me if you take away every role I have ever held. Strip out all the titles, all the hats. And the word that came up, the only word, was courage. But not courage as something I own. What I have, I think, is an obligation to the risk of it. Not to being brave, exactly. To being willing to be exposed. To staying in the hard thing when it would be easier to step back, and accepting that it might go wrong. That when a thing needs doing, and it can be done, the chance of it costing me something isn’t a good enough reason not to.
That’s what I bring to this work. And it’s what the work exists to make possible for everyone else, not by asking leaders to be braver than they are, but by refusing to let them stand in the brave choice alone.
You were never short on nerve. You were short on company, and on conditions, and on time. The work is building the season around you that lets the nerve you already have finally do something.