The Crisis Beneath the Crisis

You know you're performing. Uncomfortable or unable to show your true self.

The work version of yourself that speaks in careful, corporate language, stripped of anything that might be considered unprofessional or too revealing. The version that holds back in meetings, maintains appropriate distance, never lets anyone see what's actually going on beneath the surface. You tell yourself this is just how professional life works, that everyone does it, that the compromises are temporary and the rewards will come eventually.

Meanwhile you're medicating the disquiet with Netflix binges, weekend drinking, scrolling through social media at midnight, buying things you don't need to feel briefly like you're getting somewhere. You confuse these moments of escape with happiness, distraction with contentment, and the whole time you're being dragged further out of alignment with who you actually are until the distance between your core self and the person you're pretending to be becomes unsustainable.

Then crisis hits. The business collapses, the redundancy notice arrives, the relationship implodes, or you just wake up one day and realise you can't do this anymore. The instinct is to find the technical solution, any solution that stops the bleeding right now: cash flow models, operational restructuring, new job applications, whatever keeps you alive through the next quarter. This is rational, necessary, urgent. It's also where most turnaround efforts begin and end, which is why so many of them fail or simply postpone the next collapse.

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I've spent twelve years navigating near-death experiences in business and the last year training with the Samaritans to sit with people in emotional crisis, and the patterns are identical. Every professional crisis contains two components that interact in ways people systematically underestimate: the technical challenge of survival and the emotional reality of fear, paralysis, shame and rage. Most interventions address only the technical component because it feels more tractable, but this misses why intelligent, capable leaders become paralysed in crisis, why they can see the answer and still cannot execute it. The emotional component isn't separate from the technical problem, it determines whether technical solutions actually get implemented or just sit in beautifully formatted decks gathering dust.

But there's a third layer beneath both of these, something that only becomes visible when you're forced to question everything: whether who you've become is actually who you are.

The Performance

I was wearing bespoke suits and polished black shoes because that's what you did at the Swiss bank. Walk in wearing brown shoes and you'd get heckled and abused as soon as you stepped out the elevator, and through the door. I found myself going from chippy northerner to posh version, southern version, whatever would make a client think they were dealing with a refined English gentleman who spoke in an appropriately London-centric way. I stopped saying bath and grass the northern way and started saying bath and grass like I'd been raised in the Home Counties. I warped my entire vocabulary into a version of myself I thought other people wanted to see because the armour felt important, because professional standing demanded it.

Ironically I moved to the city of Bath and realised years later I was still saying it the southern way, still using all these words that had become second nature, still holding myself in that particular way where you're present but never truly there, maintaining the transactional vacuousness that professional environments demand. The armour had fused to my skin and trying to slowly shed it turns out to be difficult in ways I didn't anticipate.

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When I coach other people going through similar territory I hear the same pattern: they have a work version and a home version that barely resemble each other, they talk in specific ways at the office - monotonous, careful, completely stripped of personality - holding themselves at arm's length from everyone in their professional worlds because letting people see who they truly are feels too vulnerable, too risky in such extracting, transactional environments.

I worked with a manufacturing director who had the entire turnaround mapped out: consolidate the two sites, renegotiate supplier terms, cut the product range by 40% to focus on high-margin lines, bring production planning in-house instead of relying on the sales team's chaos. He could articulate every step, had modelled the cash flow impact, knew exactly which conversations needed to happen and in what sequence. Six months later nothing had moved. Every decision point became a negotiation with himself about whether this was really the right moment, whether he'd considered all the angles, whether pushing this change would damage relationships he'd spent years building. What looked like careful deliberation was actually paralysis born from operating in a role that required him to be the steady corporate diplomat when his core instinct was to be the disruptive problem-solver who moved fast and broke things. He'd spent fifteen years learning to suppress that instinct, rewarded for being the safe pair of hands, and now when the business needed someone to make hard calls quickly he literally couldn't access that part of himself anymore. The strategy was sound but executing it required him to be someone he'd trained himself not to be, so every decision felt like pushing water uphill.

This is why purely technical interventions fail. You can stabilise a structure that was built by someone operating out of sync with their core self, but unless you address the underlying misalignment you're just resetting the clock on the next collapse. The leaders I work with wait too long to address crisis because they've been rationalising away warning signs, and self-deception about misalignment is as critical as cash flow in determining outcomes. They've been performing a version of themselves the environment demanded, and when that performance becomes unsustainable the crisis arrives not just as business failure but as personal reckoning.

The Unpicking

I learned this by painfully slowly unpicking who I'd morphed into across twenty years, stripping back the layers of conditioning to figure out what remained underneath. What I discovered is that whilst everything about you changes - your skill sets evolve, priorities shift, responsibilities multiply, beliefs transform radically across decades - at the heart of it you're still the same person you've always been. Not identical in circumstance or capability but recognisably continuous in some essential way that persists beneath all the surface variation. The sixteen-year-old version of me, the twenty-five-year-old, the forty-three-year-old now, we're all fundamentally the same character operating in wildly different contexts.

Getting back to that core, anchoring yourself in who that person actually is rather than who they've been trained to appear to be, that's where alignment starts. It means bringing your behaviour into consistency with your core values minute by minute, trying to minimise the daylight between how people perceive you and how you see yourself. This needs to show up everywhere: how you treat your children, your team, your partner, the people you choose to invest time in, the projects you give yourself to.

In my case I'd warped myself so far out of perspective that I ended up in a corporate world I'd armoured myself up for but wasn't suited to. The experience shaped me but created a vacuousness in my engagement. Then I ran a manufacturing business for twelve years, and whilst I was proud of what we achieved and learned huge amounts, it wasn't my passion, it wasn't what I was at heart. Now that I've done a good deal of unpicking I've ended up following my heart to the people and projects I actually want to spend my time on.

I knew I wanted to be in service to people less fortunate than me. I could have chosen any number of charities but for some reason the idea of being at the end of a phone for people who were suicidal, in crisis, in complete turmoil, that spoke to me in ways nothing else did. Now that I've gone through the Samaritans training I can see the common thread I'd been blind to for decades: my obsession and fascination with the emotional and technical turmoil people go through, the psychology of crisis, my desire to help people come through it to the other side and thrive. This runs through everything I talk about with people in my life, what I read, what I listen to, what I immerse myself in.

Because I believe that crisis is the bleeding edge of humanity. Clarity, opportunity, humility and authenticity live there in ways they don't exist anywhere else. When everything's collapsing, when the performance becomes impossible to maintain, when the fear and shame become undeniable, that's when you can finally ask who you actually are beneath all the conditioning and compromise. That's when the alignment question becomes unavoidable. Supporting people to learn through that bleeding edge of human experience, helping them come through crisis not just surviving but operating from a place of genuine alignment with their core self, that's who I am and what I'm about.

What Changes

Once you understand your values and how they manifest themselves, you can start holding yourself to account moment by moment. You see more clearly the people you want to invest time in, the projects you want to give yourself to. Even if you can't articulate the common threads yet, bringing yourself back to who you are allows you to be passionate about what you choose to take on. That passion means you give yourself in service without being transactional, and decision-making becomes clearer in ways it never was before because you're not fighting yourself at every turn.

This is where transcendence happens, where the boundaries between self-interest and service to something larger start to dissolve because they're no longer in tension. The work doesn't become easier but it becomes sustainable in a way that performing a role never is, because you're not burning energy maintaining the gap between who you are and who you're pretending to be.

The technical component still matters. You still need the cash flow model, the operational restructuring, the execution of obvious solutions that fear has been blocking. But without addressing alignment you're treating symptoms rather than causes, postponing the next crisis whilst operating out of sync with yourself. With alignment you're not just surviving, you're building something that can sustain because it's anchored in truth rather than constructed from compromise.

The crisis beneath the crisis isn't the business failure or job loss or reputation damage, it's the misalignment that made you vulnerable to those failures in the first place. Address that, anchor yourself in who you actually are, bring your behaviour into consistency with your core values, and you create conditions not just for survival but for operating at the bleeding edge of what you're capable of, in service to something that actually matters to you rather than just another performance that will eventually crack under pressure.

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Marc Richard works with business leaders navigating crisis and transformation. If you're facing challenges that go deeper than technical fixes, or if this article resonated with your own experience of misalignment, you can reach him at marc@marcdrichard.com, or book a call.