3,375 words, approx. 14 minutes’ reading time..
Why Did No One Tell Me?
On the Humanity of Those Who Lead, and What 25 Years of Working with People Have Taught Me
“Some people arrive angry and leave angry.”
One of my teachers said this to me many years ago during a supervision session. Quite matter-of-factly. Some people would go on to speak badly of me, he said. I couldn’t prevent that. And in most cases, it had very little to do with me.
I remember exactly how I sat there.
Relieved and unsettled at the same time.
Relieved because someone I respected deeply was speaking so matter-of-factly about something I had long regarded as a personal failure.
Unsettled because he said it so casually. As though everyone knew.
You know this? This happens to everyone? Then why does no one talk about it?
That question has stayed with me ever since.
The answer I found is more uncomfortable than I expected. It begins with the people who love this work the most.
When Working with People Is a Matter of the Heart
For some people, working with others is far more than a profession.
They feel a profound calling to make development possible. They believe we can become more conscious in the way we relate to one another and help create a world in which people and all other living beings have a place where they can thrive.
I am one of those people. And I know and work with many others who approach their work in this way.
Many of them are highly empathetic. They notice the smallest shifts, recognise potential and see possibilities long after others have given up.
These abilities are precious. But they can also make us particularly vulnerable.
Because someone who believes deeply in the possibility of growth will sometimes hold on to that possibility longer than the person whose growth is at stake.
When we see suffering, we want to ease it. When we understand someone, we find reasons for their behaviour. And when we see our work as a contribution to a more humane world, we are especially inclined to look for responsibility in ourselves first.
The very people who care most deeply about their work are at risk of losing themselves in it.
That is the uncomfortable part of the answer. And one of the things I wish I had understood much earlier.
I Expected Too Much of People
When I founded my institute for intuition training, the work grew almost entirely through word of mouth. Our training programmes were full. I loved my work and was excited by what became possible in these spaces for personal development.
In one very particular respect, I was remarkably naive.
I assumed that people who voluntarily chose personal development were also willing to develop.
Of course I knew that change provokes resistance. I was familiar with projection, transference and group dynamics through my work. But it took years for me to grasp the full implications of what happens when those forces operate over long periods within a shared space for development.
Above all, I had underestimated one thing:
Some people organise their resistance in such a way that everyone else ends up working on it.
I often recognised someone’s potential very quickly. And for a long time, I believed it was my job to help that potential become reality.
My own rescuer tendencies were part of that.
I took on too much responsibility. I kept having conversations that had long since stopped producing new insights. I set boundaries too late. And I kept people in processes even though I had already sensed that something was no longer right.
In doing so, I learned how quickly a willingness to question yourself can lead you to stop taking your own perception seriously.
When a Small Part of the Group Took Up All the Space
I remember two situations in my training programmes when I gave groups a great deal of room to express their dissatisfaction.
I wanted to understand what had happened. I wanted to take criticism seriously. I wanted whatever was usually swept under the carpet to be brought into the open. I was willing to set aside planned training content to make that possible.
Today, I see those situations differently.
Looking back, around ten to fifteen per cent of the participants were driving those confrontations. The others sat there. Some may have agreed with individual criticisms. Others may have experienced things very differently.
Yet I allowed those few people to occupy more and more of the space.
Increasingly, people talked about others rather than to them. My team members came under attack too. And I kept the space open, partly because I still believed we were discussing substantive issues, and partly because my freeze response had already begun.
At some point, someone said, in effect, that “this space, like every other, was ultimately all about power”.
I sat there, unable to respond.
I froze.
I had opened the space to make a confrontation possible. And at some point, I was no longer capable of leading it.
That is an experience for which I take responsibility today.
I should have listened to and examined the criticism. I should have ensured that my team members were protected. And I should have recognised sooner when a necessary confrontation was turning into a dynamic that kept feeding itself.
The volume of a conflict tells you nothing about how representative it is of a group.
The people sitting there in silence were part of that group too. They, too, were entitled to my attention, to their time for development and to a professionally led space.
I had believed I was serving the group process.
What I thought was openness had, at some point, become a failure to lead.
When Criticism Becomes a Verdict
I do not know what was going on inside each person at the time. But that situation taught me something about a dynamic I would encounter again and again.
There is nothing inherently objectionable about the statement concerning power.
Of course power is at play in spaces for personal development. Every professional relationship involves an imbalance of power. Anyone leading a group makes decisions about the framework, the content and the boundaries. All of that must be open to reflection and challenge. Even harsh criticism can be justified.
But there is a crucial difference between criticism that seeks clarity and a verdict that believes it has already explained everything.
When every action taken by a leader is interpreted as an exercise of power, even an attempt to resolve a conflict can be taken as further proof of the original accusation.
If you disagree, you are supposedly defending your power. If you set a boundary, you are supposedly suppressing criticism. If you explain yourself, you are making excuses. And if you remain silent? Your silence can be used against you too.
In my Field Guide, I call this dynamic the Moral Sniper.
The real question is this: Is it still possible to investigate together what actually happened? Can different perceptions coexist without immediately becoming a judgement on someone else’s moral integrity?
When that is no longer possible, a conversation becomes a tribunal.
And anyone who finds themselves in the dock can hardly remain in a relationship of equals.
The Illusion of the Fully Formed – aka „healed“ – Leader
There is a societal idea of leadership that I find profoundly troubling.
Leaders are expected to know themselves one hundred per cent. To be able to handle conflict, remain composed even under extreme pressure and make the right decision every time.
As though leadership were a state you eventually attain.
I have met, and worked with, many people who lead. Experienced therapists, coaches, entrepreneurs and people who have been guiding groups for decades.
I know no one who has never made a mistake. No one whose development is complete.
And there is something else that is rarely said aloud. Leaders carry their own wounds, too, some reaching far back into their lives. Ideally, they have worked on them deeply and for a long time, often far longer than the people they accompany. Those wounds have not disappeared. Under pressure, old reactions can be triggered again, and every person has their own ways of responding, including the person at the front of the room.
When we expect leaders always to have moved beyond all of this, we make it unspeakable. To say, “I could not lead in that moment because I was experiencing a trauma response myself,” then sounds like an admission that you are incapable of leading at all. So people stay silent.
Leaders are people who are still developing, taking responsibility for other people who are still developing.
Yet we have a peculiar relationship with people to whom we grant authority.
We elevate them. We long for their certainty, their guidance and sometimes even answers to questions we cannot yet answer ourselves.
When they fail to meet our expectations (which are often irrational themselves), that idealisation can turn into devaluation. Suddenly, someone we once admired becomes a person who supposedly never deserved our admiration in the first place.
I have encountered this movement between idealisation and devaluation for many years, both in spaces for personal development and far beyond them.
As long as we confuse leadership with superiority, we will expect something of leaders that no human being can deliver.
We submit to authority and then punish it for being human.
Those who lead must examine their own power, accept criticism and take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions.
Responsibility is not the same as infallibility.
Why So Many Eventually Walk Away
Over the years, I have watched people give up their work as coaches or guides. Some withdrew from one-to-one work. Others reached a point where they no longer wanted to lead groups.
Not because they had stopped caring about people, but because they were exhausted by dynamics for which they had been given so little guidance. Exhausted by the constant question of whether they themselves had done something wrong.
Some time ago, a psychotherapist who had completed my training and had herself been leading groups for many years asked me, in essence: “I don’t understand how you did it. I work with groups for eight or twelve weeks. But you accompanied people for years, through far more intensive processes. How did you endure what happened? Many of my colleagues who led groups for a long time are utterly exhausted, take long breaks or have stopped altogether.”
That question stayed with me for a long time.
Long-term spaces for development can make extraordinary things possible. But they can also develop an intensity that is almost impossible to imagine from the outside.
We talk a great deal about what people need when they place their trust in us. Remarkably little about what happens to those in whom they place that trust.
At some point I began to wonder how many people we have already lost. People who wanted to accompany others. Who had something to offer. Who wanted their work to contribute to a more humane world. And who eventually decided they could no longer afford to pay that price.
We need to speak more openly about this. About what is demanded of people who hold such spaces. About their vulnerability and how they themselves can remain healthy and capable of acting.
When people abandon their calling because we leave them alone with the darker sides of their work, we lose something our society urgently needs.
A more humane world needs people willing to lead. And it needs a more humane way of treating those people.
The Problem with Understanding
For a long time, I believed that understanding was almost always the key.
It is an essential ability in my work. But it has a shadow side.
Understanding someone does not mean having to tolerate their behaviour without limit.
I can understand why someone crosses a boundary and still insist that they respect it.
I can recognise the wound behind an attack and still put an end to the attack.
I can feel compassion and still choose not to continue a professional relationship.
I had to learn that distinction.
The way I had learned to deal with conflict in my own life, and the way my teachers had taught me to lead, meant that I used my ability to understand other people against my own perception and, above all, at the expense of my own psychological wellbeing.
I noticed that a boundary had been crossed and initially looked for reasons why the other person had needed to cross it. I noticed that conversations kept repeating themselves and wondered what new intervention I could offer. I noticed that I was becoming increasingly exhausted. Even when faced with openly or passively aggressive attacks, I investigated, above all, which of my own issues might be responsible.
My self-reflection was thorough. But it had developed a dangerous imbalance.
What I Do Differently Today
Today, I confront people much sooner with what I perceive. I set boundaries as soon as I recognise that they are necessary. And I leave people responsible for their own behaviour.
In the past, I often saw the wound behind someone’s behaviour and concluded that the person could not act differently at that moment. I understood their history, recognised their inner patterns and, because of that, took responsibility off their shoulders that rightfully belonged to them.
I no longer do that.
I can recognise someone’s wound and still confront them about their behaviour. I can understand why someone developed a particular strategy and at the same time expect them to take responsibility for its impact.
If someone in one of my groups today claimed that everything in that space was ultimately about power, I would make that statement the subject of our shared inquiry. I would ask what understanding of power lay behind it. And I would confront that person with their own relationship to power.
Because accusing others of wielding power does not place you outside power relations.
I take people more seriously today by expecting them to take responsibility for themselves.
Self-Reflection Is Not Self-Blame
Anyone who accompanies others professionally should be willing to recognise their own projections, reflect on their own power and take responsibility for mistakes.
That willingness is indispensable.
But self-reflection can become a method of overriding our own perception. We keep asking about our part in a situation until we have taken on the other person’s part as well.
Not every uncomfortable perception is a projection. Not every instance of exhaustion points to an unresolved issue of our own. Not every conflict can be resolved through still more understanding.
I like to put it this way: Your body is not a court of law, but it is a witness.
An uncomfortable reaction is not proof that the other person has done something wrong. But it is information. It deserves to be taken seriously and examined carefully.
Today, in difficult situations, I ask myself four questions:
- What belongs to me?
- What belongs to the other person?
- What emerges between us?
- What is the field doing to us?
The fourth question is surprisingly often forgotten in groups. While we are trying to understand one individual, others are sitting there too. They are watching what we allow.
Our responsibility extends to the entire space.
Why It Took Me So Long to Find Anything About This
After that supervision session, I began searching. I wanted to know why these experiences were discussed so rarely.
I discovered that people had long been writing about these experiences. But not really in the way I would have needed at the beginning of my journey as a leader.
Jeremy Safran and Christopher Muran have written extensively about how ruptures arise in therapeutic relationships and how they can be repaired. Carolin Graßmann, Sandra Julia Diller and Eva Jonas examined the strategies coaches use when working with particularly challenging clients. In their open-ended responses, some of those surveyed also reported terminating such processes.
I found that striking. Because in many training programmes, we learn primarily how to build relationships, establish trust and guide people through difficulties. Far less often do we talk about when a professional relationship should be brought to an end.
The knowledge existed. But it was scattered across disciplines, described in different terms and often hidden behind specialist language that offered little help in the moment itself.
What I lacked was a map.
Something that would help me recognise early on which dynamic was developing. And above all, what I myself was doing to keep it going.
That is how my Field Guide came into being. In it, I describe ten dynamics I have encountered over many years of practice, give them names, identify their early warning signs and formulate questions that can help people regain their ability to act.
These ten dynamics are my own distillations from practice. They describe recurring relationship patterns and help identify their emergence and dynamics at an early stage.
In the Field Guide, I also describe what can happen after a rupture, particularly when there was once great closeness or admiration. Sometimes separation seems possible only once the shared history has been rewritten: years that were once valuable are retrospectively reduced to dependency, and the decisions someone made for themselves at the time disappear from the story. I call this the Exorcist. She is less a distinct type than an escalation of other dynamics.
These distinctions require careful perception. A map is meant to help us recognise dynamics.
It must not serve to shield our own perspective from every other point of view.
The People I Am Talking About Are a Small Minority
The overwhelming majority of people I have worked with over 25 years do not feature in my Field Guide at all.
They have struggled, disagreed, cried, made mistakes and taken responsibility. They were not always easy. Neither was I. And many of those encounters led to developments that still move me today.
The Field Guide is about the other situations. About dynamics in which development eventually ceases to be what a space is actually organised around. And about the moment when the ability to understand someone deeply can become a danger to your own judgement.
What I Notice About Myself as I Write
As I wrote my Field Guide, as I work on my new book and now as I write this article, I notice how carefully I try to avoid doing anyone an injustice. How precisely I name my own mistakes. How important it is to me to consider every possible perspective.
How deeply the impulse still runs in me to speak about other people’s behaviour only if I simultaneously emphasise my own responsibility.
I recognise in this something of that old habit of taking on too much responsibility, the very thing I am writing about here.
Of course I am responsible for my actions. But I do not have to prove my willingness to reflect on myself every time I make a statement.
My experiences, too, are allowed to stand on their own.
My humanity, too, needs no justification.
Today I know that I take my responsibility as a leader especially seriously when I am prepared to set a boundary.
Even when someone is disappointed.
Especially when someone leaves angry.
Even if someone subsequently speaks badly of me.
I must recognise and own my part. I must examine criticism, correct mistakes and remain willing to learn.
But I am not responsible for what another person makes of their experience with me.
Recognising someone’s potential does not oblige me to devote my life to making sure they fulfil it.
This has given me back something I had almost lost in my willingness to take responsibility:
The freedom to trust my own perception.
Because leadership is not proof that someone has completed their development.
Leadership is the willingness to take responsibility while continuing to become more fully human yourself.
What No One Tells You When You Work with People
My Field Guide is for people who accompany others, lead groups, coach, train or otherwise take responsibility for processes of personal development.
It contains ten dynamics and their early warning signs, concrete questions for self-reflection, a process-readiness check, worksheets for developing your own early warning system and practical wording for situations in which you need clarity.
Silvia, who has read the Field Guide and is already using it, wrote to me:
“This is a valuable tool for people in leadership positions who already have experience with group dynamics. It helps them put their own insights and processes into perspective and preserve or regain their ability to act.”
That was precisely my intention. I wanted to write the map I had needed myself.
So that people who care deeply about their work can take responsibility without carrying responsibility for everything.
[EXPLORE THE FIELD GUIDE]
P.S. Alongside the Field Guide, I am writing my new book. In it, I continue exploring the questions that have occupied me for years: What does it mean to accompany people in their development? How do we change our understanding of leadership? And how can we take responsibility without losing ourselves in the process?
If you would like to know when the book is published and stay informed as it takes shape, you can join the waiting list.
Further Reading | Sources
Wolf, Abraham W.; Goldfried, Marvin R. & Muran, J. Christopher (eds.) (2013): Transforming Negative Reactions to Clients. American Psychological Association.
Möller, Heidi & Zimmermann, Jannik (eds.) (2020): Schwierige Situationen im Business-Coaching. Springer.
https://doi.org/10.1365/s40896-020-00048-8Graßmann, Carolin; Diller, Sandra Julia & Jonas, Eva (2021): Welche Strategien nutzen Coaches bei herausfordernden Klienten? Coaching | Theorie & Praxis, 7, 3–12. https://doi.org/10.1365/s40896-020-00048-8
Safran, Jeremy D. & Muran, J. Christopher (2000): Negotiating the Therapeutic Alliance. Guilford Press.
Schleu, Andrea (2021): Umgang mit Grenzverletzungen. Springer.
