- Tue, 27 October 2026
In The Book of Serenity, the Zen monk Fayan is travelling on pilgrimage when the teacher Dizang asks where he is going. Fayan replies that he is wandering, and when Dizang asks about the purpose of the journey, his answer is simply, “I don’t know.”
“Not knowing is most intimate,” Dizang replies.
For anyone who has ever moved through a professional transition, the exchange is striking in its economy: so few words, and yet so much of the experience is already there. We like our journeys to make sense, preferably while we are still in the middle of them. There should be a reason for leaving, a destination somewhere ahead and, if possible, a coherent – perhaps even wise – sentence explaining what the experience is teaching us.
Professional life reinforces this expectation particularly well. We move from one role to another and are expected to arrive almost immediately as the person the new position requires. A promotion brings a larger remit, more responsibility and the reasonable assumption that the person who accepted it is ready to step into all of it. Once the announcement has been made, congratulations exchanged and the new title added to the email signature, the transition can appear remarkably complete from the outside.
The person inside the role may be having a very different experience, though – a less organised one.
Imagine someone who has spent years becoming good at what they do. They know the business, understand the details, anticipate problems before they become visible and have earned a reputation for being reliable when things become difficult. When a deadline starts slipping, they somehow bring it back. When a problem lands without an obvious owner, people call them. Over time, their competence becomes visible and tested, while their reliability becomes part of how others see them and even part of how they have learned to see themselves.
Eventually, they are promoted into senior leadership, and the promotion makes perfect sense. There may be a celebratory drink, a new title and, almost certainly, several additional meetings appearing in the calendar with words such as strategy, alignment and leadership in their titles.
Then the actual role begins.
The work becomes broader, the decisions carry greater consequences and certainty becomes harder to find. Yet the instincts developed over all those successful years do not disappear with the previous job title. The new leader still sees the operational problem before everyone else, still knows exactly how the presentation could be improved and still finds it difficult to watch someone spend forty-five minutes solving something they could probably resolve in twelve. They understand delegation perfectly well, though living it is a different matter.
Somewhere between what they already know how to do and what the new role is beginning to ask of them, an uncomfortable question starts to surface:
What if I am not actually ready for this?
And this is where one of the most interesting paradoxes of leadership development begins. The person has reached the new role largely because of the behaviours that made them successful in the old one, while the next stage of their development may depend on changing their relationship with those very same behaviours.
For years, competence may have meant stepping in, knowing the answer, responding quickly and taking personal responsibility when something was at risk. These habits brought results, recognition and trust, and over time they also became psychologically reassuring. Being the person who knows, fixes and delivers becomes part of how someone recognises their own value.
Senior leadership changes that equation. Increasingly, the work asks for distance from the detail, trust in other people’s judgment, comfort with incomplete information and responsibility for outcomes that are no longer personally controlled.
So, quite understandably, people sometimes try to do both. They perform the new role while continuing to perform the old one, because the old one is something they know, something they have done and somewhere they already understand what competence feels like. The new responsibilities are added while very little is actually released.
Uncertainty can then surface in less obvious ways. When authority does not yet feel entirely natural from the inside, there may be a temptation to make it more visible on the outside. Communication becomes firmer, corrections arrive more quickly, requests begin to sound more like instructions and decisions leave less room for discussion. The leader can appear increasingly certain at precisely the moment when they are experiencing more uncertainty themselves.
This can happen when someone is learning authority in public. The new role may already expect calm judgment, good people instincts, political awareness and the ability to hold several competing views without rushing to a conclusion. Meanwhile, the person who has just stepped into it is still learning what that actually looks like in real life. From the outside, the promotion makes everything seem settled: this is the leader now. Inside, authority can feel much less secure, especially when it is no longer supported by the familiar comfort of being the one who knows the answer.
Anthropology has a useful name for this awkward middle ground: liminality. In The Rites of Passage (1909), Arnold van Gennep described transition as a movement through separation, a threshold phase, and eventual incorporation into a new state; Victor Turner later called this middle territory “betwixt and between.”
In leadership, that threshold can be very real. The promotion may be official, the team may already look to the person for direction, and the role may demand judgment, authority and emotional steadiness from day one. Yet the person stepping into it may still be relying on the habits and sources of confidence that made them successful before. The title has already moved ahead while the identity is still catching up. That gap can feel uncomfortably exposing, and it is often where impostor feelings begin to surface.
A newly promoted leader can quickly find themselves under a very specific kind of pressure. The expectations have changed, the visibility is higher and there is an unspoken sense that they should already know how to inhabit the role. At the same time, the old habits are still close at hand because they are familiar, proven and reassuring.
That is often where the doubts start to creep in.
Am I actually ready for this?
Do they expect more from me than I can give?
What if they notice that I don’t have all the answers?
When those questions stay mostly internal, the response can become more visible on the outside. The leader may become firmer, more controlling, more involved in the detail or more careful to project certainty, especially when the pressure to “look like a leader” starts competing with the reality of still learning how to be one.
The paradox is that, under pressure, we usually reach for the behaviours that once made us feel competent. So, the person keeps checking, stepping in, correcting, deciding and staying close to the work, even while the new role is asking for more trust, more distance, more patience and more space for others to develop.
For the team, this can feel rigid or overly authoritative. For the leader, it may simply feel like the safest way to meet expectations without exposing too much uncertainty.
And because the old role is still being performed alongside the new one, the load also doubles. Strategy sits next to operational detail, people development next to problem-solving, delegation next to the urge to take things back.
When pressure rises, the old reflex returns:
I know how to do this, I’ve done this before. At least here, I know I’m good.
That sense of familiarity can be deeply reassuring, which is precisely why old habits are so difficult to loosen. Alongside efficiency, they are carrying confidence, identity and a temporary answer to the question of whether the person really belongs in the new role.
For coaching, this opens a conversation that goes deeper than delegation techniques, communication style or executive presence. It brings attention to what competence has meant to the person until now, and what happens when the familiar signs of competence no longer fit the role in front of them.
What did being the person with the answer give you?
What feels uncomfortable when someone else knows more?
Which parts of the old role still belong here, and which ones are you carrying because they feel safe?
These questions often bring the leader directly into the liminal space: the old identity is no longer enough, while the new one has not yet become fully their own.
And recognising that does not make the transition neat. Someone can understand the pattern and still send the overly firm message the next morning, take the task back when the pressure rises, or genuinely want to develop others while finding it painfully slow to watch them learn.
That inconsistency is part of the threshold. The previous identity remains close and available, especially when uncertainty appears, while the new one is still being shaped through decisions, relationships, mistakes and experiences that cannot be fully rehearsed in advance.
Perhaps this is why Fayan’s answer still resonates. He is already travelling. He has left “somewhere” behind. And still, when asked where the journey is taking him, the most truthful answer he has is:
I don’t know.
For a culture that prefers confidence, milestones and clearly articulated development goals, that can be a difficult answer to tolerate.
Nonetheless, transitions may contain periods where certainty would be less truthful than confusion.
The role may arrive first, while the identity has to grow into it.
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