There are times in life when we genuinely cannot change what is happening around us. Those things are real.

Yesterday, across our two Lead Always Forum sessions, we spoke about agency: our capacity to recognise what remains ours to choose, influence or do, even when much of what is happening around us is not ours to control.

We had fewer people in the rooms than usual, but the conversations were rich. Underneath almost everything sat one very familiar experience: feeling stuck.

Not knowing which way to go. Knowing something needs to change, but not knowing what. Waiting for someone else to make a decision. Waiting to feel more confident. Waiting for circumstances to improve.

Or, as one person put it, waiting for a “clear, verifiable or divine sign”.

There was humour in that, but also a lot of truth.

When effort is not movement

One of the strongest ideas to emerge was that effort and agency are not always the same thing.

We can work incredibly hard and still be repeating the same strategy. More thinking. More fixing. More pushing. More trying.

It feels like movement because it takes so much energy.

Have I actually tried something different, or have I simply tried harder?

That question landed because sometimes our stuckness is not caused by a lack of effort. It is caused by a repeated pattern we can no longer see.

And sometimes we are waiting for something outside of us to change before we give ourselves permission to move: a job offer, recognition, another person’s behaviour, more time, certainty, confidence, the right sign.

What we noticed about feeling stuck

The conversation moved away from simply asking, “What should I do?”

Instead, we began looking at what helps us see what we cannot see while we are caught in the middle of it.

One person spoke about realising that she had slowly lost her voice at work. Another recognised how much of her worth she had placed in whether someone else chose her. Others spoke about the value of having someone to talk things through with, because sometimes hearing ourselves say something aloud helps us recognise what we could not see while it remained inside our own heads.

And then we came back to something deceptively simple: stillness.

Why stillness can feel so uncomfortable

I come back to this repeatedly in my work: many of the answers we spend so much time searching for are already somewhere within us. Sometimes even the better question is there.

But we rarely hear either while we are surrounded by noise.

Much of modern wellbeing advice points us in essentially the same direction. Breathe. Rest. Get outside. Spend time in nature. Journal. Step away from the screen. Practise compassion.

Beneath much of it is one invitation: pause long enough to come back to yourself.

And yet, tell a busy person to get into nature and it can sound wonderful. Tell them to sit still for ten minutes and you can almost see the resistance.

I understand it. Stillness can feel like doing nothing. For people accustomed to achieving, responding, fixing and being useful, doing nothing can be deeply uncomfortable. Sometimes it even brushes up against our sense of worth.

But perhaps that discomfort is precisely the practice.

We willingly repeat the patterns that are familiar to us, even when they are not helping us. The invitation is to become equally willing to repeat a different pattern.

Ten quiet minutes in the morning. A short meditation. A journal beside you. A walk without your phone. Or simply one or two minutes during the working day in which you stop, breathe and notice what is actually happening inside you.

Slowing down and settling our attention can reduce physiological arousal and create better conditions for attention, perspective and self-regulation. It gives us a little more room between what happens and what we do next.

And that is where stillness connects directly to agency.

Why does this matter?

Because being stuck is exhausting.

The danger is that eventually we mistake exhaustion for evidence that there is nothing more we can do. We become desperate for certainty, for the answer, for someone else to tell us what the next move should be.

Perhaps sometimes we need enough stillness to see the question differently.

To notice where we are waiting. To notice where we are repeating ourselves. To notice where we have quietly handed our own voice, worth or choices to someone else.

What can I do from here?

Not everything. Just the next thing.

And this is also why stillness belongs firmly in a conversation about leadership.

It may not look like the typical leadership tool. There is no clever model to complete and no technique to perform. Yet our capacity to pause, regulate ourselves, hear beneath the noise and trust our own judgement enables so many of the qualities we ask of good leaders: perspective, courage, discernment, self-awareness, emotional regulation and the ability to respond rather than simply react.

The world is extraordinarily good at pulling our attention outward. Learning to turn inward again is a practice.

And practice matters.

Change does not always begin with knowing what to do. Sometimes it begins with finally seeing.