There are moments in our lives when progress cannot be forced. No strategy will suffice, no clarity will emerge on demand. We feel clueless about how to influence the behaviors of a group of people with whom we interact; our colleagues, the market, our family, our friends.

We have no idea what happened within our organization, or within the ecosystem of our community. But everything around us seems to be in flux. Confusing. Unsteady. Separated from any sense of equilibrium.

We’ve tried everything we know to make changes. We’ve developed positive habits: eating less, exercising more, giving ourselves more downtime, being patient with our parents, more understanding with our partners. But nothing we do seems to affect the situation. We cannot find our way forward. If anything, we are regressing backward. And we’re not sure why.

These moments are not the interruptions to the journey. They are the journey.

[Priest and writer] Richard Rohr names this clearly: “Some kind of falling, what I call ‘necessary suffering,’ is programmed into the journey. It is needed to teach us that we are not in control, and it is never what we expected.”

I was half way through writing this article when I got the call to say that my father had just died. The following weeks became quite an experience of ‘necessary suffering’. Dealing with the details. Navigating the challenges. Occasionally getting a few moments to start to process the last 43 years of relationship with my father.

Grief has crept up on me quite a few times already. No amount of preparation can substitute the shock of the moment, the body’s visceral response to loss. To a very common, yet very challenging, experience of necessary suffering and loss.

This suffering, if we let it, can become alchemical. It burns away our illusions of control. It softens our certainty. It brings us to our knees.

Initially, this often feels like defeat. But over time, as the strong emotions subside, and the urges to run away or fix or break things settle down, our sense of pain and defeat metamorphoses into openness. Acceptance. A realization of the futility of fighting.

We become curious as to ‘what else’ is life asking of me? How else can I experience this grief, this sense of having some of my power and control removed from me.

This liminal space is where wisdom takes root.

The liminal space we’d rather skip

Much of modern leadership is designed to escape this space. We manage; we move on; we become efficient. But in the deeper current of leadership, we learn to stay with what is unresolved.

In this liminal space, we’ve left behind certain ways of living and leading, but we’re not yet sure what new ways are emerging. What other path to take. We are on the threshold of something new, yet still in this ‘in between space’.

Staying here takes courage. Here, we don’t get the answers. We get silence. We get unravelling. But if we stay long enough, we start to feel the stirrings of something else: not certainty, but trust. Not clarity, but rootedness.

And then the slow reassembly begins — not of our former self, but of someone deeper, truer, less defended. At the end of his wonderful book, Anam Chara, John O’Donohue reminds us of how necessary suffering is built in to every part of the human experience, right from the very beginning:

“Though we all came through it, the journey of birth is so forgotten, so taken for granted. Yet for the child, birth is a dark, forlorn and terrifying journey. The child leaves the only world it has known and crosses out into the unknown, alone and in terror. It is a journey that involves loss, separation and a frightening sense of falling. The child has no idea that its painful journey is about to lead into a new world, a world full of light, color and the faces of others. From the child’s perspective, the journey through the birth canal must seem like death. Yet, it is the necessary journey into life.”

The wound that opens the door

Every leader who has truly grown in depth can point to a wound. A loss. A collapse. And every true elder I know speaks of that season not as the end of their leadership, but as its beginning.

We cannot schedule transformation. But we can make ourselves available to it. Here are a few invitations that help hold space for this sacred undoing:

1. Name what is dying. Ask: What roles, stories, or identities are falling away? Let them go with dignity.
2. Welcome the cocoon. Engage in daily moments of stepping back — breath, silence, stillness — these can help us to stop resisting the descent. Let the discomfort of the in-between be your teacher, not your enemy.
3. Seek to be seen, not solved. Find situations where your pain doesn’t have to be explained — only seen by others. These can be in relationship with family, friends, colleagues, coaches, therapists or other helping professionals. In community, we remember: you are not alone here.
4. Mark what is emerging. Create small rituals to acknowledge change — a walk in silence, carrying a stone that represents a ‘necessary suffering’ until you feel ready to let it go, write a simple journal entry that begins: “Today, I noticed…”

A leader formed through fire

Embracing necessary suffering isn’t about romanticising suffering. Pain is real. Loss is hard. But if we are willing to meet it with open eyes, it becomes more than an affliction. ‘Sit with the pain until it heals you’ is an old adage that a friend of mine shared with me years ago. It’s the only healing path that I’ve experienced myself.

A leader who has faced their own breaking is a leader who can hold space for others to break and not rush them toward a fix. They are less reactive, more patient. Less certain, more present.

And in a world of fast answers and polished masks, this kind of leadership is radical.