The thing that determines how you'll handle the next disruption

I spent the last two weeks with COVID.

Not the push-through lite version. The kind that makes you feel like you were hit by a truck, takes your concentration, your sense of forward motion, and replaces all of it with a ceiling you stare at wondering when you'll feel like yourself again.

Around day four, something shifted that had nothing to do with the illness. The work and clarity I'd been building, the rhythm I'd finally found, the momentum that had started to feel good, all of it went completely quiet in my head and I didn't know how to come back to it.

What I noticed, sitting in that quiet space on my couch, is that I've been in this specific feeling before - this disorientation. It hasn't always come from being sick but that feeling that someone pulled the floor-out from under you. The "I don't recognize myself in this moment" feeling. And because I've been there before, something in me, not my conscious mind but something else, already knew this wasn't an ending to the clarity I had, it was only a temporary disorientation. There's a difference and I could feel it before I could think it and that gave me something important. Trust in myself. 

That feeling carried me back from my disorientation before any plan did.

I want to talk about why. Because I don't think it's unique to me. And I think understanding it might be the most useful thing I can offer you right now.

There are two kinds of people navigating disruption right now, and the difference between them has nothing to do with capability or intelligence or how prepared they are.

The first kind has an internal anchor. They've been through something big before, not necessarily something dramatic, but something that took the ground out and required them to find their footing again from the inside. They came through it. And that experience left a specific kind of residue: the somatic knowledge that they have survived going through a tunnel when they didn’t see the light. That the disorientation is temporary. That they can trust something in themselves even when the external conditions are unreliable.

When the next disruption arrives, that residue is what they reach for. Not a framework. Not a plan. Something older and more fundamental. It's why they can hold steady in a room that's panicking. Not because they're not scared. Because they have evidence that they can get through this too.

The second kind hasn't been through the tunnel yet. Or they have, but they came through it by changing the external conditions rather than finding something internal to hold onto. Their anchor, without them realizing it, is outside them. In the stability of their role. The recognition of their expertise. The predictability of how their work is valued.

When AI disruption, or a sudden illness, or a restructure pulls that external anchor away, there's nothing to reach for except your own swirling thoughts. And thought, in the middle of acute disruption, is often the least reliable tool available. It spins. It catastrophizes. It tries to plan its way out of something that can't be planned out of yet.

This is not a character flaw. It's a gap in experience but the good news is that gap is closeable.

The work isn't to wait until the next disruption teaches you the hard lessons. It's to start building internal evidence now, deliberately, by doing the specific work of understanding what has already carried you through hard things, and naming it clearly enough that you can reach for it again.

You have survived things. The question is whether you've extracted the anchor from them, or just moved on.

Think of one hard thing you've already been through. Not the story of it. The specific moment you knew you were going to be okay.

What was available to you in that moment that had nothing to do with the external situation changing?

If you can identify that, that's your anchor. It already exists. The work is learning to reach for it before the floor gets pulled out from under you.

🩵 One Thing I'm Loving

I've been reading Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score this week, slowly, in the way you read when your COVID brain won't hold a full chapter. It's not new, but it's landing differently when you're physically disrupted and trying to understand why the body finds its footing before the mind does.

His central argument, that what we've been through lives in the nervous system, not just in the stories we tell about it, reframes something important about how we support people through disruption and change. We keep handing people frameworks and expecting their nervous systems to catch up. They don't work that way.

If you work in change, lead teams through uncertainty, or are navigating your own inflection point right now, this book will change how you understand what people actually need. Worth picking up, or returning to, with fresh eyes.

If you read this week's newsletter and recognized yourself in it, I'm opening a small number of spots for one-on-one work this quarter. No program. Just focused, intensive work with me to find and build your internal anchor before the next disruption arrives. If that's where you are, reply to this email. I'll reach back out personally. 

Warmly,

Heather

Heather Stoffle | Change and AI Transformation Leader | Anchored in Possibility™ "You are the author of what comes next."