If you’re a leader feeling increasingly adrift and disoriented about why your usual success strategies and decision-making abilities aren’t getting the results you’re used to, you’re not alone.

Clinical psychologist and professor Merete Wedell-Wedellsborg wrote an illuminating article in the Harvard Business Review in which she names an important dynamic affecting leaders operating in uncertain and volatile environments. She argues this shift goes beyond burnout to something more subtle. She observes that “[Leaders] are withdrawing, or fighting an urge to withdraw, from decision-making and the emotional labour of leadership – or even from the belief that their effort still matters.”

It’s not easy. After all, you have built your career and your reputation on being someone who gets results. You’re good at navigating complexity. But the sustained uncertainty and turbulence of the current environment start producing a gap between the effort you are putting in and the outcomes you are getting. What used to work is not working in the same way. When that goes on long enough, a quiet and niggling question starts to surface: Is it me?

When this internal spiral of self-doubt starts to happen, it can look like putting off tough decisions or avoiding tricky conversations. It can look like an inability to even envision a longer time horizon because the pressures make it hard to look past the immediate. It’s a challenge because the leader sets the tone from the top, so patterns of avoidance or reactivity can ripple out and impact their team and colleagues.

What I found most striking in Wedell-Wedellsborg’s research was how important a role agency and identity play in supporting one’s mental health. She used to train NATO leaders on the impacts of captivity on people. While physical deprivation and interrogation might seem like the obvious key stressors, she found “the most destabilizing stressor…was the feeling of being forgotten, with no signal that you still mattered and no evidence that your actions were seen.” This speaks to the importance of acknowledging and valuing the humanity of those around you, as well as yourself, as we collectively try to navigate and work through complex and compounding change that we’ve never experienced.

If you’re trying to get your own footing and mojo back in the game, here are 3 strategies you can try:

1. Get clear on what you can and cannot control

One of the most disorienting features of sustained uncertainty is it blurs the boundary between what is within your influence and what is not. Leaders who have always been effective at shaping outcomes can find themselves expending enormous energy on things that are simply not theirs to control and depleting themselves in the process.

Start with what you know for certain. You have agency over your thoughts, your words, and your actions. That is always true, even when external conditions are not cooperating. What is not within your control is how other people respond to change, what is happening in the economy or the marketplace, or the pace at which uncertainty resolves.

Wedell-Wedellsborg describes this as the need to redraw the map. Get honest about what has genuinely changed in your environment and what has stayed the same. The map you were using was drawn for different terrain. Drawing a new one is not giving up. It’s how you start navigating again with your eyes open rather than searching for landmarks that are no longer there.

2. Tend to your own inner leadership first

This is the step that leaders most often skip, because it feels counterintuitive when the pressure to act is highest. But the quality of your leadership — the clarity you bring, the steadiness others feel in your presence — depends on the quality of what is happening inside you first.

Wedell-Wedellsborg introduces the concept of negative capability to describe what this internal steadiness actually requires: holding contradictory data, unresolved tensions, and contending stakeholders simultaneously without being frustrated by the lack of coherence. She states, “Leaders with high negative capability are not steadier because they know more. They are steadier because they can tolerate not knowing without collapsing into avoidance or coercion.

Tending to your own leadership starts with simple first steps. Block 5 minutes of reflective time at the end of the day to write down a win of the day and a lesson learned. When you’re feeling amped up internally, pause and take a minute for some slow, deep, intentional breaths to get centred. Find someone you trust who can be a safe sounding board for you to name and process the issues keeping you up at night.

3. Lean in to your team

When leaders are struggling with their own sense of agency, there’s a strong pull to protect their teams from that uncertainty. The instinct makes sense, but the effect is often the opposite of what’s intended.

Downloading unresolved ambiguity onto people and expecting them to cope with it and calling it “empowerment” is not protection. Projecting a confidence you do not feel, only to have people sense the gap, is not steadiness. Stepping back from the people and conversations that feel most difficult is actually withdrawal showing up in a new form.

In uncertain times, your team needs you to lean in, not pull away. The message of “We are all navigating this, me included, and I believe we can find our way through it together” signals vulnerability and builds trust. Acknowledging that this is hard while holding a steady belief in the collective capacity to meet it sets the tone from the top in a way that people can actually feel and hold onto.

The leader who shows up honestly is far more grounding than the leader who shows up perfectly. Your people are watching not for evidence that you have all the answers, but for evidence that you can be counted on when you don’t.

If you are looking for a more structured way to strengthen your leadership from the inside out, my Executive Coaching program is designed for exactly that.