The Pattern I Couldn't See: Why Crisis Is Always Personal

For months, I have been introducing myself differently depending on who I was talking to.

To business advisors and leaders: "I do business turnaround - cultural transformation and operational restructuring for £2-20m companies."

To people asking about Harshlight: "I'm working on AI's social impact - specifically the workforce displacement crisis nobody's preparing for."

To friends asking about my volunteer training: "I'm learning how to provide emotional support to people in crisis."

Three completely different things. Except it's just dawned on me that they weren't. They aren't.

The Manufacturing Years

I spent 12 years leading a manufacturing business through repeated near-death scenarios. Lost 85% of revenue when our biggest client left. Faced administration threats during COVID. Made decisions that cost me sleep and affected people I cared about.

What I learned wasn't in any textbook.

When you're staring at the numbers knowing exactly what needs doing but can't pull the trigger - that's not a business problem. That's a personal crisis. The technical solution was always obvious. Cash flow management, cost restructuring, difficult conversations with staff. I knew what needed doing.

What paralysed me was everything else. The fear. The shame of admitting we were struggling. The weight of responsibility for people's livelihoods. The ego wrapped up in being the person who had all the answers.

The business problems were solvable. The personal crisis of leading through chaos whilst maintaining any sense of who I was - that's what nearly broke me.

If you've ever known exactly what you needed to do but couldn't make yourself do it - you've experienced this gap. It's not weakness. It's the absence of skills nobody ever taught you.

Following the Thread

After exiting the business, I became obsessed with AI's social impact. What happens when businesses automate faster than society can adapt? When entire sectors face displacement?

I kept asking: can this crisis be an opportunity? How do we navigate from a job we dislike that's disappeared, through to genuine self-awareness, and onto opportunities where we'd actually thrive?

That question led me to build the Harshlight 7 - a technical framework covering constraints, work preferences, cognitive style, values, skills, passions, and becoming. All the dimensions someone needs to map themselves properly for career transition.

So I started offering job transition coaching, armed with this comprehensive technical solution.

And that's when I discovered the same problem again.

People didn't need help with CVs and job search strategies. They needed help with the emotional paralysis. The imposter syndrome. The social contracts restricting them from seeing themselves differently. The ego wrapped up in their existing role. Lives mortgaged into specific commitments.

I had a technical framework. They had an identity crisis. And I started wondering - if this pattern holds across business crisis and career crisis, aren't we setting up millions of people to fail? Teaching them solutions whilst ignoring the emotional capability they'll need to execute them?

The Moment Everything Connected

That realisation sent me to the Samaritans. I wanted to understand how to truly hold space for people in crisis. How to sit with someone's fear without trying to fix it. How to listen in ways that actually help.

The training exposed me to every type of human crisis. Relationship breakdown. Addiction. Suicidal ideation. Financial collapse. Health emergencies. Different circumstances, but I kept hearing identical emotional patterns.

Then one night, I was talking to someone close to me about suicide. Really listening, the way I'd been trained. And something shifted that I couldn't undo.

I heard my own voice from years earlier, sitting at that desk in the manufacturing business, staring at numbers I knew how to fix but couldn't bring myself to act on. I heard the executive I'd coached last month, paralysed by the fear of starting over. I heard this person in front of me, overwhelmed by circumstances that felt impossible to escape.

Different crises. Identical paralysis.

Shock and denial. Fear that locks your body. The desperate need to be heard without judgement. The slow, painful journey toward acceptance. That singular moment when someone can finally take responsibility and act.

The technical problems were always different. Restructure a business. Find a new career. Choose to keep living. But the emotional journey was remarkably consistent.

And here's what kept striking me: in the business crisis world I work in, technical expertise and emotional capability rarely live in the same person. Plenty of consultants can diagnose the numbers. Plenty of therapists and coaches understand the human side. But the gap between them - helping someone develop the emotional capability to execute technical solutions they already know they need - that's treated as outside most people's remit. That's where people get stuck. That's where I got stuck.

What I'm Actually Doing

I help people navigate crisis they can't handle alone.

Sometimes that's a business owner who knows their company needs radical restructuring but can't bring themselves to make redundancies. Sometimes it's someone facing career displacement who knows they need to retrain but feels paralysed by fear. Sometimes it's understanding how we prepare an entire workforce for technology disruption before it happens.

The work always involves both dimensions - technical and emotional. What needs doing, and what's stopping you from doing it.

What drives me is teaching people the skills that enable them to navigate any crisis. Communication that actually reaches people. Self-awareness that cuts through denial. Emotional regulation that lets you think clearly when everything's falling apart. The ability to sit with profound discomfort without collapsing into panic.

These are learnable capabilities. Some schools teach them through social-emotional learning programmes. Some companies train their leaders in emotional intelligence. Some people seek them out through therapy or coaching. But they're not universal, not integrated with technical education, not something most people have systematic practice with before crisis forces them to learn. We treat them as optional add-ons rather than fundamental requirements for navigating an uncertain world.

Which means we're sending people into an uncertain, disruption-filled future without the fundamental skills they'll need to survive it.

The Question That Won't Leave Me Alone

I had a conversation recently with my friend Rich. His wife Sarah teaches secondary school English. She loves the job but wishes parents respected teachers more, wishes children weren't dominated by exams and league tables, wishes education could be about something deeper than producing future doctors and lawyers.

Rich asked me: given everything you've learned, what should education actually look like?

I gave him an answer but the question continues to eat at me.

Because we're teaching children technical content - maths, English, cultural heritage, all necessary - whilst completely neglecting the capabilities that will actually determine whether they can navigate the complexity waiting for them.

How to communicate through emotion. How to work with people different from themselves. How to make decisions when the path isn't clear. How to cope with failure and uncertainty. How to understand themselves well enough to make choices aligned with who they actually are.

The technical knowledge matters. But without emotional capability, they'll know what they should do whilst being unable to actually do it. Just like every adult in crisis I've ever worked with. Just like I was, sitting at that desk twelve years ago.

What Comes Next

I don't have all the answers. I'm still figuring this out.

But I know I want to spend whatever time I have left on this Earth exploring this space - where technical problems meet emotional capability, where crisis becomes transformation, where people learn to navigate chaos rather than being consumed by it.

My ambition is to become deeply knowledgeable across many different forms of crisis - not as someone who claims to have solved it all, but as someone who's done the work of understanding what people actually need when everything falls apart. Business failure. Career displacement. Health emergencies. Relationship breakdown. Financial collapse.

More than that, I want to discover what transcends the specific circumstances. What are the universal patterns? Which capabilities enable someone to navigate any chaos, not just the particular disaster they happen to be facing?

Because if those universal frameworks exist - and I believe they do - then we can teach them. Not after crisis hits, but before. Not through trial and error during the worst moments of people's lives, but systematically, deliberately, early enough to actually matter.

The business turnaround work funds the exploration. The Harshlight advocacy tests these ideas at societal scale. The Samaritans training puts me alongside people in the deepest crises imaginable. They're all feeding the same obsession.

Imagine a generation that enters adulthood already equipped with the emotional capability to navigate disruption. That doesn't freeze when the path gets unclear. That can hold steady through chaos whilst the people around them panic.

That's what we're failing to build. That's what I want to help create.

In my next piece, I'll share what I told Rich about education - because if we're serious about preparing people for an uncertain future, we need to start with children, not wait until they're drowning in adult crises.

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Marc Richard | I help people navigate crisis they can't handle alone - combining technical restructuring with the emotional capability needed to actually execute it. Also exploring AI's workforce impact through Harshlight. Based in Bath.