There are moments when we begin to see clearly what isn’t working anymore…The patterns. The reactions. The ways we relate to challenge, conflict, and even ourselves.
And yet seeing it doesn’t immediately mean we know how to live differently.
That middle space can feel surprisingly tender. We become aware of habits we can no longer fully believe in, while the new ways of being we long for still feel unsteady, incomplete, not yet embodied.
In my recent conversation with executive coach Catherine Morisset, we touched this terrain briefly while exploring resilience, grace, and inner leadership. And I leaned on a few frameworks that had quietly helped me orient within this crossing myself. Not as answers. Not as formulas for self-improvement. More like temporary scaffolding around a profoundly human developmental experience: how we stay kindly present with ourselves while becoming.
So I created this short companion video to walk more slowly through a few of those orienting shapes. We explore:
The Drama Triangle and how easily we fall into patterns of victim, rescuer, and persecutor under stress;
The Empowerment Dynamic and the shift toward creator, coach, and challenger; and
The Four Stages of Competence, which help name the tender stretch between awareness and embodiment.
But beneath all of those frameworks lives a deeper question:
How do we stay with ourselves ~ compassionately ~ when we can finally see what isn’t working, but haven’t yet fully grown the capacity to live another way?
That, to me, is where grace becomes more than a feeling. It becomes a form of inner leadership.
And perhaps this is part of what this moment in history is asking of many of us: not perfection, not instant transformation, but practice. The willingness to stay in relationship with ourselves, each other, and reality itself while something new slowly learns to live through us.
🎥 Watch the companion video above.
🎧 Listen to the full podcast conversation with Catherine
If these frameworks are already familiar to you, perhaps you’ll enjoy the synthesis. And if they’re new, you don’t need to master them all at once. Sometimes it’s enough just to notice what becomes a little more visible than it was before.
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If you’d like a quiet way to stay in contact with what’s unfolding ~ I share occasional notes from the edge of the work. Small signals, patterns, and questions as they emerge. Notes from Laureen is a place to stand at the shoreline…and sense what’s moving across the waters.
Thanks for the clarity you shared about this process of competence and consciousness. I am pondering another graphic of spirals between each stage and then returning through each stage in a new circumstance or different space, not sequentially ascending a ladder but iteratively moving between the less conscious and the more conscious competence. I am also savoring your call to compassion. Striving for self-compassion seems to open to compassion for "the other." I am gleaning this vision from the book, "The Wall Between" by Khouri & Wilkinson.