Written by Susan Kuepfer

I hear a version of the same thing regularly in coaching sessions these days:

 “I just need things to calm down a bit. Once this phase is over, I’ll be able to focus properly.”

 Or:

 “I’m not usually like this. I’m normally quite good with change. It’s just been a lot lately.”

I understand the sentiment completely. And I say this with genuine care: I think it is one of the most costly beliefs a leader — or any professional — can hold right now.

Because the calm stretch they are waiting for is not coming. Not in the way they imagine. And every month spent enduring the present while waiting for a more manageable future is a month not spent building the capacity to actually live well in the world as it is.

This article is not about pushing through, staying positive, or being tougher than the circumstances. It is about something more honest and more practical than that: building a genuine ability to thrive in conditions of ongoing volatility, as a leader, and as a human being.

The VUCA world is not a phase

VUCA — Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous — was originally a military term, coined to describe the post-Cold War landscape. Organisations adopted it to describe the business environment of the 2000s. Today, it barely feels adequate. Geopolitical instability, technological disruption, climate pressure, shifting workforce expectations, and the relentless pace of information have compressed change cycles to the point where many leaders feel they are permanently in transition.

The research on this is sobering. Studies consistently show that change fatigue is now one of the primary drivers of disengagement and burnout in organisations. Not the amount of change itself — but the gap between the pace of change and people’s capacity to absorb it.

That gap is where most of the suffering lives. And here is the critical insight: you cannot close that gap by slowing the world down. You can only close it by building your own capacity up.

That is a hard truth for many people to sit with. It can feel unfair — as if it places the burden of a systemic problem onto the individual. I understand that concern. And I also know that waiting for organisations or the world to become less complex is not a strategy. Building your own resilience — deliberately, practically, incrementally — is.

What “thriving” actually looks like

When I work with leaders who navigate these conditions well — not perfectly, but genuinely well — a few things stand out consistently. They are not people who feel no discomfort. They are not immune to stress or doubt. They are not endlessly optimistic.

What they have in common is something more nuanced. They have stopped treating discomfort as a signal that something is wrong, and started treating it as a signal that something is real. They know the difference between a problem to solve and a condition to navigate. And they have built, often consciously, a set of habits and anchors that give them stability not because the environment is stable, but because they are.

Thriving in an ambiguous and unpredictable world is not about being unaffected by change. It is about having enough inner stability that you can be fully present within it.

That inner stability is not a personality trait. It is a practice. And it is available to anyone willing to build it.

For leaders: six shifts that build VUCA capacity

These are not theoretical. They come directly from patterns I observe in coaching — the shifts that consistently make the most difference.

1.  Replace the goal of stability with the goal of rhythm

Leaders who thrive in volatile environments have usually stopped trying to create stability — which is increasingly impossible — and started building rhythm instead. Consistent rituals that anchor the week: a regular team check-in, a personal reflection practice, a Friday review of what mattered. These are not productivity tools. They are neurological anchors. When everything around you is shifting, knowing what Tuesday morning looks like is more valuable than most leaders realise.

 Ask yourself: what rhythms do I currently have that give me and my team a reliable sense of ground?

 
2.  Distinguish between signal and noise — and say so out loud

One of the most exhausting aspects of VUCA leadership is the volume of incoming information, most of which demands a response. Leaders who cope well have developed a conscious practice of filtering: what genuinely requires my attention today, and what is noise that I can set aside without consequences?

More importantly, they name this process openly with their teams. When a leader says, “This development matters and here is why — this other one we are going to watch but not react to yet,” they model the very skill they need their team to develop. Sensemaking out loud is a leadership act.

3.  Get comfortable with “I don’t know yet”

Leaders are often implicitly expected to have answers. In a VUCA world, insisting on that expectation — in yourself or from others — creates enormous pressure and very poor decisions. The leaders who navigate uncertainty best have learned to say “I don’t know yet” with confidence rather than apology. They treat it not as an admission of failure but as an accurate description of reality.

This is a harder shift than it sounds. For many senior leaders, certainty has been both an expectation and an identity. Releasing it requires real courage. But teams consistently report that honest uncertainty from a leader is far less destabilizing than false confidence followed by correction.

4. Invest in your team’s change capacity, not just their change compliance

There is a significant difference between communicating change to your team and building your team’s capacity to navigate change. The first is a one-time act. The second is an ongoing investment.

Leaders who do this well create regular space — in team meetings, in one-to-ones, in retrospectives — to talk about how the team is processing change, not just what they are doing about it. They normalize the conversation about difficulty, uncertainty, and adaptation. Over time, this builds a collective muscle that is worth far more than any single communication campaign.

For individuals: building your personal VUCA resilience

If you are not in a leadership role — or if you are reading this primarily as a person rather than as a title — this section is for you.

The experience of overwhelm in a fast-changing world is not a character flaw. It is not evidence that you are less capable than the people around you who seem to be managing better. In my experience, many of the people who “seem fine” are simply better at concealing that they are not. The feeling of being stretched beyond your capacity for change is one of the most common experiences in modern professional life. It is just rarely named honestly.

5.  Name what is actually hard

There is a subtle but important distinction between enduring difficulty and acknowledging it. Many people have become so practiced at managing their reactions — staying professional, staying positive, staying functional — that they have lost contact with what they are actually experiencing. The discomfort gets pushed down rather than processed, and it accumulates.

One of the simplest and most underrated practices I recommend is this: at the end of each week, spend five minutes writing down what was genuinely hard. Not to dwell on it. Not to solve it. Simply to name it. This week, the hardest thing was the uncertainty about the restructuring. This week, the hardest thing was the feeling that no one is steering the ship. Naming it accurately begins to metabolize it. What goes unnamed tends to fester.

6.  Anchor to what does not change

When the external environment is volatile, one of the most stabilizing things you can do is reconnect deliberately with what is constant in you: your values, your strengths, the relationships that ground you, the work that gives you meaning.

This is not escapism. It is navigation. A sailor in a storm does not stare at the waves — they look for a fixed point. In a VUCA world, your values are that fixed point. Leaders and individuals who know clearly what they stand for, what kind of professional they want to be regardless of circumstances, and what genuinely matters to them are far less thrown by external turbulence than those whose sense of self is contingent on the environment being manageable.

If you are feeling particularly tossed about right now, it may be worth asking: when did I last spend time with the question of who I am when things are hard, rather than what I need to do about it?

A final thought

The people I most want to serve with this article are the ones who are quietly exhausted right now. The ones who are competent, committed, and genuinely trying — and who are still ending the week feeling behind, overwhelmed, or vaguely like they are failing a test they cannot quite see.

You are not failing. You are living and working in conditions that are genuinely demanding. And the discomfort you feel is not a temporary side effect of a difficult patch. It is the texture of the world we are all navigating now.

The question is not when it will get easier. The question is: what kind of person do you want to be and become in the meantime?

Because that is where the real work is. Not in the circumstances. In you.

What is one thing you could put in place this week — however small — that would give you a more genuine sense of ground?