Embracing Paradox: A Leadership Lesson from an Unexpected Season

For months, I didn’t know how long I’d be staying in Korea. That was the hardest part — not the crisis itself, but not knowing when, or if, it would resolve. My sister needed care. My mom needed support. My dad’s treatment had no clear timeline. Every week I stayed, I asked the same question: is this the week I go home, or do I stay longer?

There was no clean answer. The uncertainty didn’t lift — it just kept ticking alongside the clock.

It was early one morning, in prayer, that the question stopped being abstract. When is it time to stay, and when is it time to come back?

I ran through what had changed. My sister discharged. Business operations stabilized. More hands in place to support my mom.

And yet. My dad was still hospitalized. Still receiving treatment I had no ability to control the outcome of, no matter how much longer I stayed.

I could feel both at once, sharp and real: I had been influential enough to help stabilize a family in crisis. And I was powerless over the one outcome I most wanted to control.

We tend to think of leadership decisions as binary — stay or go, hold on or let go, be strong or admit fragility. But that morning taught me something different: the real work wasn’t choosing a side. It was assessing capacity.

Not my capacity to endure. The system’s capacity to sustain itself.

Had enough been built — in the people, the operations, the relationships — that my ongoing presence was a choice now, not a requirement? That question doesn’t erase the paradox. I was still influential enough to have shaped that capacity, and still powerless over the one outcome I most wanted to control. Both stayed with me at once.

But naming the actual question — is there enough capacity here to mature without me holding every piece — is different from asking am I strong enough to keep going or have I failed by leaving. One is diagnostic. The others are binary judgments dressed up as decisions.

In my work, I map this as three resources: Inner, Relational, and Environmental capacity. That early morning, I wasn’t just praying for an answer — I was doing the quiet, unglamorous work of Inner Capacity: listening past the guilt and the ticking clock to what was actually true. And what was true included this: the Environmental and Relational capacity around my family had grown. Workers were in place. Operations were stable. My sister and mom were held by more than just me.

The same question met me at work, too. What comforted me through that season wasn’t confidence that everything would go smoothly — it was the work we’d already done together as a team: apprenticing each other in program design, running book clubs, talking openly about how to improve what we built. None of it was for this moment specifically. But it let me trust, from a distance, that my team could keep growing without me physically there.

I never got a clean answer that morning in prayer. I didn’t walk out knowing exactly when to go home. What I found instead was a better question — not am I strong enough to stay, but has enough capacity grown here that I can trust it without me.

When I finally did decide, it didn’t feel like relief exactly — more like my shoulders dropping half an inch, the first time in months. The paradox hadn’t resolved. I was still someone who had shaped what my family and my team had become. And I was still someone who couldn’t control my dad’s treatment, or guarantee any outcome I most wanted. Both stayed true, the whole time.

The biggest leadership lesson I’m taking from this season is this: become a capacity builder, and be humble enough to let go when that capacity emerges — to make space for the people and systems around you to grow on their own. It’s the same lesson I learned years ago in my master’s program, studying consulting: you haven’t truly succeeded until the people and systems you’ve served can grow without you.

A journaling invitation

Take a moment to sit with where you are right now, before rushing to answer.

What circumstances or situations are calling you to discern whether to stay or let go?

What capacity do you observe in that situation?

What would it mean to trust that capacity, instead of holding on out of habit or fear?

The truest measure of what I’ve built isn’t how long I can keep holding it. It’s whether it can keep growing, long after I’ve let go.

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