A few years ago, I spent an entire Sunday wrestling with a refrigerator. A friend was renovating his kitchen and had a nearly-new refrigerator he couldn’t use anymore. He offered it to me at half price. The dimensions were identical to what I already had. It seemed like an obvious win. Friends helped me haul it in, move the old one out, and by the time everyone left, I was ready to call it a good day.
Except the door wouldn’t open.
The new refrigerator fit in the space, but it kept catching on the wall. I spent the rest of the day leveling it, tilting it, adjusting it every way I could think of. Nothing worked. The only solution I could find was removing the molding around the kitchen doorway, which left a visible gap where the drywall met the frame. At eight o’clock that night, I stood in my kitchen, exhausted and irritated, looking at a kitchen that was now less finished than when I started.
My partner walked in, looked at the gap, and asked if I’d meditated that day. I said no. Of course not. She smiled and said, “Is that gap going to bother you every time you see it?” I said yes, multiple times a day. She looked at me and said, “Well, there’s your practice.”
I wanted her to be wrong. She wasn’t.
Every time I passed that gap, I had a choice about what to do with the frustration that rose in me. Accept it. Argue with it. Let it define my mood. Or practice the very things I was always encouraging others to do.
I tell that story often to my coaching clients, usually when they’re facing a challenge they feel like they should have solved by now, or a difficulty that keeps returning, and they’ve started to wonder what’s wrong with them that they can’t get past it. What I want them to hear is this: having difficult challenges isn’t evidence of failure. It’s evidence that you’re leading. The challenges that keep showing up, the ones that frustrate you, the ones between what you intend and what actually happens, those are not obstacles to your leadership practice. They are your leadership practice.
The next time a familiar difficulty resurfaces, and you catch yourself thinking you should be past this by now, I’d invite you to pause before the judgment. Leadership isn’t a destination you arrive at having resolved every hard thing. It’s the ongoing, imperfect, sometimes maddening work of showing up anyway. The gap in the wall isn’t a sign that something went wrong. It’s just practice.
