On The Floor Again

I’m in a “season”—a period of time marked by specific circumstances that are most likely temporary. I was listening to the Nation of Language song “I’m Not Ready for the Change” when the refrain caught my attention:

Look, all I know 
Is I’m on the floor again 
Pressed beneath my skin 
And I’m not ready for the change

Honestly, I am not always ready for the change. Seasons are about change. Brought on by change. Leading to change. Always shiftingbecause of change. Sometimes, I feel like I’m on the floor, and the weight of the change is pressing me down. If you have never felt this way, you can stop reading now. The rest of you, come with me.

Change comes at us in different forms, and, if we’re going to lead through it well, we need to understand what kind of change we’re facing. Not all change requires the same response from us or from our teams.

Some change gets pushed on us by circumstance. Conditions don’t ask us if we were ready. Market shifts don’t wait for us to get comfortable. Regulations change, technologies become obsolete, and competitors make moves that force our hand. This type of change can certainly feel like being on the floor with weight pressing down.

The temptation here is to become a pressure amplifier. We feel the weight, so we push that weight down onto our teams. We get frantic. We demand more with less patience. We operate out of fear instead of clarity. But great leaders become shock absorbers—not amplifiers. We feel the pressure, acknowledge it honestly, and then create space for our teams to do their best work in spite of it.

This doesn’t mean pretending everything is fine. It means being honest about what we’re facing while also being disciplined about what we can control. We can’t control the market; we can control how we show up every day. We can’t control the timeline someone else sets; we can control whether our people feel safe enough to tell us when something isn’t working.

Then, there’s the change we initiate and desire, but that is still stressful. Recovery taught me this one deeply. I wanted to be in recovery, I chose that path, and it was still incredibly hard. Just because you want something doesn’t mean it won’t hurt to get there.

Organizations often miss this. We launch new initiatives, restructure teams, and invest in new capabilities. These are good decisions, necessary decisions. But let’s not pretend they’re easy just because we chose them. The gap between wanting something and actually doing the work to get there can feel like a canyon.

The key is positive prospection. We need to imagine success while acknowledging difficulty, then work accordingly. Not “this will be easy,” but “this will be worth it.” We owe our teams the truth about both parts—yes, this is the right direction, and yes, it’s going to require real effort and sacrifice. Leaders who only talk about the vision without acknowledging the cost lose credibility. Leaders who only talk about how hard it will be without pointing toward something worth pursuing lose their teams. We need both.

Finally, there’s change caused by tragedy and loss that still offers a chance to grow. This is the hardest one. People leave. Projects fail. Relationships end. Sometimes people die. The temptation is to rush past the grief, to solve the problem, and to fill the gap as quickly as possible.

But as I learned in recovery, pain is just a middleman. It’s not the beginning or the end. It’s the process between broken and repaired. And repaired is never the same as being unbroken. There will always be marks that remind us we suffered. Those marks aren’t failures; they’re part of who we become.

When our teams experience loss, they need space to be on the floor for a while. They need to know it’s safe to struggle, to not be okay, to take time to heal. Our job isn’t to fix it for them or rush them through it. Our job is to walk beside them, to keep the organization functioning while they process, and to believe that they will come through it changed but not destroyed.

This applies to organizational losses too. When a major initiative fails, we can’t just pivot immediately to the next thing without acknowledging what we learned and what we lost in the attempt. Communities that don’t grieve together can’t grow together.

The song says, “I’m not ready for the change.” Most of the time, I’m not either. I don’t think we’re supposed to feel ready. The question isn’t whether we’re ready; the question is whether we’re moving.

Progress, not perfection—that’s what we learned in recovery, and it applies to every kind of change we face. Whether the change is pushed on us, chosen by us, or caused by loss, our teams don’t need us to handle it perfectly. They need us to handle it honestly, to make it safe for them to struggle, and to keep moving forward even when we’re on the floor.

So yes, I’m on the floor again. The weight is real. But I’m still moving forward, and I’m making sure my team knows it’s okay if they’re on the floor too. Because leading through change isn’t about being ready. It’s about being present, being honest, and moving through this season—the Bison Way.