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You're Blaming Yourself for the Wrong Things
Unstuck Monthly | November 2025
What 700 conversations taught me about year-end clarity, self-blame, and the systems that shape us.
A year ago, I published the first Unstuck Monthly newsletter dedicated to the friends and colleagues whose conversations inspired the title.
Twelve months and nearly 700 conversations and coaching sessions later, I’ve learned that many of us get stuck in two places: first, we don’t know what we should be doing, and second, we hesitate to act on it. Without understanding and nerve, the patterns of stuck persist.
And that's why this season matters. The most important leadership work happens in the moments when things become illuminated.
What Becomes Visible
The festivals of light we celebrate this time of year — Hanukkah, Diwali, Christmas, Kwanzaa, the winter solstice — all center on the same truth that when you bring light into dark places, you can see what was always there but hidden.
Year-end does this for leaders.
Everything that’s been building all year suddenly comes into focus.
The wins and the losses.
The opportunities you took and the ones you missed.
The conversations you had and the ones you avoided.
The projects that succeeded and the ones that quietly failed.
The moments you showed up with courage and the moments you didn’t.
It all becomes visible.
The Weight of Visibility
When everything comes into focus like this, most of us turn inward and start accounting.
What did I do wrong?
Where did I fall short?
Why didn’t I see this coming?
What could I have done differently?
We replay the mistakes. We catalog the failures. We search for the flaw in ourselves that explains why things didn’t go the way we planned.
This kind of reflection can feel responsible, even necessary. But it’s also incomplete.
When we only look inward, we miss half the picture. We blame ourselves for outcomes that were shaped by forces far beyond our control. We take on the weight of things that were never ours to carry. And in doing that, we lose sight of what we can actually change.
Seeing Yourself in Context
Coaching leaders through year-end reflections has shown me that we can’t see ourselves clearly without also seeing the environment around us: the unclear expectations, shifting priorities, under-resourced teams, leaders who couldn’t make decisions, systems that were never designed to work in the first place.
Leadership doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It often happens surrounded by a lot of dysfunction.
Did your organization have clear priorities, or did everything feel urgent all the time?
Did your manager set explicit expectations, or were you left guessing what success looked like?
Did the team have the resources it needed, or were you constantly making trade-offs no one acknowledged?
Were decisions made transparently, or did things shift without explanation?
Remember: this is context, not excuses.
And context matters because it tells us whether the problem was us, or the system, or some mix of both. It tells us what we can own and what we need to push back on. More importantly, it tells us where to invest your energy in the year ahead.
Understanding + Nerve
I’ve come to believe that effective leadership requires two things working together: understanding and nerve.
Understanding is what lets you see what’s actually broken. It’s the frameworks, the systems thinking, the ability to diagnose whether this is a people problem or a structural problem. It’s knowing the difference between “I need to improve” and “this environment needs to change.”
Nerve is what allows you to act on that understanding. To stop waiting for perfect clarity. To name what’s broken even when everyone else seems fine with it. To make the hard call, have the difficult conversation, or redesign the process that’s been failing people for years.
Most leaders I work with have plenty of understanding. They see what’s not working. They know what needs to change.
What they're building is nerve.
The courage to trust their diagnosis even when they’re new to the role. The willingness to speak up when the room is silent. The resolve to fix the system instead of just working harder within it.
That’s the gap this newsletter has been about all year. And as we head into a new year, it's the gap I’m still focused on closing—for my clients and for myself.
And once you see it clearly—what will you have the nerve to do about it?
Thank you for this first year.
For reading, for reflecting, for doing the hard work of becoming the kind of leader who doesn’t just understand what needs to change, but has the courage to change it.
Here's to another year of closing the gap between knowing and doing, and getting unstuck.
Until next time,
Alex
P.S. How is your year-end reflection going so far? I’d love to hear what you’re seeing more clearly now or what you're still wrestling with. Reply and tell me.
Self-reflection questions:
What’s one thing you see clearly now about your environment that you couldn’t see earlier this year?
What pattern repeated this year that you've been blaming yourself for? What if it was actually revealing a system problem?
Where did you run out of capacity? What does that tell you about what needs to change in how you’re working?
What conversation did you avoid this year? What would shift if you had it in January?
Ready to create your professional future on your own terms?
I work with ambitious leaders who want to transform their experiences into exceptional leadership capabilities. If you're done waiting and ready to act, book a call to explore working together.
Great conversations start with shared insights. My coaching practice, like this newsletter, thrives on connections. If you know someone who's navigating their own leadership and professional sticking points, I'd love for you to share this with them.
