There is a version of leadership that runs on fumes and is proud of it.
You know the one. The work gets done. Nothing is on fire in a way anyone else can see. And underneath, some part of you is waiting, always, for the next fire that will need putting out. That is survival. It can carry you a long way. It carried me through more than I’d like to admit.
I want to describe the crossing out of that survival state into a wider thriving one, because I’ve watched it happen enough times to believe it isn’t luck or temperament. It’s a process. It draws on three things: how developmental change actually happens in adults, the difference between authority and power, and our understanding of internal and external barriers.
the fallow field you cannot skip
My model of adult development is a cycle. You start in a structure that works for you. Then slowly you outgrow something, something ends or wears out, and things stop working so smoothly. Typically the tendency in these moments is to sprint back toward the place we lost, or try leap to a shiny new mode of being before we’re ready.
I feel something we’ve lost in our hyper-productive culture is the ability to cocoon, to retreat inside ourselves in order to develop something new. There’s a fallow stretch in the middle of the cycle where nothing is producing. Sometimes we see that as failure. It isn’t. It’s the part where the old structure composts down into material for the next one. If we skip that phase we end up building the new life out of the same tired assumptions that weren’t working in the old one. Survival hates the fallow stretch, because survival wants resolution now. Thriving asks you to stay in the messy middle.
This is where the somatic piece matters, because the body can register the fallow stretch as a threat and flood you with the urge to do something, anything, to make the uncertainty stop. A regulated nervous system can sit in an open question longer than a dysregulated one. The length of time you can tolerate not-knowing is roughly the size of the future you’re able to build.
So the crossing begins with a willingness to be undone for a while. Not forever. Long enough to let the next self form from something other than panic.
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authority is borrowed, power is grown.
Culturally, we tend to treat authority and power as the same thing. But they are not. Authority is the permission a structure grants you, the title on the door, the seat at the table. Power is your capacity to act, to influence, to move something. They feel identical when you hold both. You feel the gap the moment you lose one.
If you wait to lead until you’re handed authority, you’ll be waiting for a long time. The habits of influence, the ability to shift a room, to earn trust, to make a persuasive case, get built in the years before anyone gives you a title. Leadership without authority is not a consolation prize for the powerless. It’s where real power gets forged.
Survival keeps you deferential, routing every decision that matters through someone above you, waiting for the co-sign, because acting without permission feels dangerous. Thriving starts when you notice how much you already own without anyone’s say-so. You set the tone of the rooms you enter. You decide where your attention goes. That is power, and it never depended on a title. The title, when it comes, formalizes what you were already doing. It does not create it.
internal and external barriers
Some of what holds you in survival mode is internal. The story that you’re not ready. The belief that wanting something isn’t reason enough to pursue it. The reflex to shrink so you don’t take up space someone might resent. These are real, and they’re workable. Liberation from an internal barrier is slow and repeatable, one choice stacked on the last.
But some of what keeps you in survival mode is not in your head. For those of us who exist in the world in a body it wasn’t built around, or inside a structure that extracts more from people like us than it returns, the survival mode may not be a mindset problem. Telling someone to meditate their way past a real structural constraint is a way of blaming a victim for a systemic failure.
So, it is critical to be able to tell internal and external barriers apart. Of any resistance, keep asking: is this a story I’m carrying, or a wall someone built? They need opposite responses. The internal barrier dissolves when you stop believing it. The external one doesn’t care what you believe. It requires strategy, allies, boundaries, and sometimes the decision to leave.
When the barrier is external, the survival mode response is to pour everything into the fight. The system takes it all either way, through your compliance or through your exhaustion. Thriving inside a hostile structure means keeping a defended portion of yourself for the life you want, built inside the constraints, without waiting for them to lift. You take the joy anyway. You build the thing anyway. The refusal is the ongoing decision to hold some of yourself back from a system engineered to consume all of you.
Recognizing what is already yours
None of it requires more than you currently have. That’s the part I most want to land. Thriving is not a reward for accumulating enough time, money, status, or permission. It’s a change in how you hold what is already yours.
Survival got you here. It’s a real achievement. But it was always meant to be a bridge, not an address. The crossing to thriving is available now, at your current resource level, in the next moment you decide to hold differently.
FYI: On the side I write a weekly newsletter called For People and Planet. It’s all about progress, hope, and the ways people are building a better future with Earth. You can take a look here: forpeopleandpla.net
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With love, Bri Chapman
