Why Crisis Might Be the Best Thing That Ever Happened to You

Part two of three exploring why business leaders can't ask for help, what crisis makes possible, and the work of supporting people through both

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I told a client last week that 'crisis is beautiful'.

We were working through a coaching session about his career transition, and I'd just explained that the turmoil he was experiencing, the complete dissolution of his professional identity, was potentially the best thing that had ever happened to him. When I'd finished he said "I thought you'd lost the plot!"

Which is fair. From where he was sitting, inside the burning building, the idea that this catastrophe could be good for him sounded completely insane.

But crisis isn't just terrible. It is terrible, genuinely awful, the worst experience you'll have while you're in it. But it creates conditions that nothing else can create, and those conditions make possible a transformation that would be impossible any other way.

The reason transformation is impossible without crisis is because you have to be completely broken first. Your ego has to be shattered. The performance you've been maintaining has to become unsustainable. The gap between who you're pretending to be and who you actually are has to become so painful that continuing the lie costs more than admitting the truth.

Until that happens, until you hit absolute rock bottom, change is impossible. Not difficult. Impossible. Because you haven't got sufficient reason to do the work.

The problem with malaise

Most people live in malaise. Things aren't great, but they're not quite bad enough to force change. You're earning less than you should but enough to pay bills. Your relationship isn't fulfilling but not quite dysfunctional enough to leave. Your business is stagnating but not actually failing. Your career feels hollow but you're still getting promoted.

Good is the enemy of perfect. Tolerable is the enemy of thriving.

The average SME leader earning £13,000 a year while carrying all the risk and stress is living in malaise. It's not good enough to thrive, but it's not quite bad enough to force the reckoning. They accept the parts of themselves they've had to suppress, they accept the performance they have to maintain (read Article One: The SME Leader's Trap), they accept the gap between their authentic self and their exhibited self, because what choice do they have?

So they stay trapped, waiting for something to change, unable to make it change themselves because making it change would mean admitting the current situation is intolerable, which would mean admitting they've been tolerating the intolerable for years.

Crisis solves this problem by making continuation impossible.

Humility: The ego demolition

When the building is properly on fire, when you can't pretend anymore, when the performance becomes more painful than the truth, something breaks. And what breaks is your ego.

This is humility. Not the false modesty kind, the real kind. The kind where you genuinely recognise you don't have all the answers, you're not as capable as you thought, you need help, you've been wrong about fundamental things. Your self-concept gets demolished. The person you thought you were turns out to be a performance you were maintaining, and now the performance is over and you're left with the actual person underneath, who's smaller and more frightened and more lost than the performed version ever admitted.

This is excruciating. Your entire identity, everything you've built your sense of self around, gets stripped away. You're standing in the rubble of who you thought you were, and there's no rationalising it away anymore, no explaining it as temporary difficulty, no convincing yourself you've got it under control.

Your ego gets demolished and suddenly it stops protecting you from the truth. And without your ego's protection, you can finally see clearly.

Clarity: Seeing what actually matters

Your ego's demolished, the performance doesn't work anymore, and you get clarity for the first time in years, maybe ever. You can see what you actually want rather than what you think you should want. You can see your values rather than the values you were performing. You can see what matters rather than what you've been telling yourself matters.

The noise stops. The rationalisation stops. The self-deception stops, because you've got nothing left to deceive yourself with.

This is where you start to see the difference between your exhibited self and your heart-self. The exhibited self is the performance: the person you've been showing to clients and employees and family and the world. The heart-self is who you actually are underneath all of that, the person whose voice you've been ignoring for years because listening to it would have meant admitting the performance was a lie.

Crisis forces you to listen because the performance doesn't work anymore.

Authenticity: Finding out who you actually are

In that clarity, you find out who you actually are. And you find out who the people around you are. This is where you build authenticity.

Not your performed self, not your exhibited self, but your heart-self. What actually drives you. What you actually care about. What impact you actually want to have in the world. What social contracts you actually want, what beliefs you actually hold, what people you actually want to stand with, what projects you want to take on, what communities you want to serve.

For most people, this is the first time they've encountered their authentic self since childhood. Everything since then has been layered performance, conditioned responses, absorbed expectations from family and society and culture about who they should be and what they should want. Crisis strips all of that away because it has to. The performance doesn't work anymore. The conditioning doesn't protect you anymore.

You're left with just yourself, and you have to figure out who that actually is.

And here's what nobody tells you: this process of stripping away the performance also reveals who the people around you actually are. Some relationships survive the transition to authenticity. Others don't, because they were built on the performed version of you, and when that version disappears, there's nothing left to sustain them. This is painful but necessary, because building a life around your authentic self requires standing with people who can handle your authentic self.

Opportunity: Building something aligned

Once you know who you actually are, once you have clarity on your values and your character and your passions and your drivers, you get opportunity. Not in the sense of opportunities appearing from nowhere, but in the sense that you can finally see what opportunities actually align with who you are.

You're not trying to force yourself into shapes that don't fit anymore. You're not accepting compromises because you think you should. You're not performing success in areas that don't matter to you. You're not building a life around other people's expectations of who you're supposed to be.

You're free to build something that actually fits who you are, which means you're free to actually thrive rather than just survive.

This is the gift. Not that crisis is fun or that suffering builds character or any of that motivational nonsense, but that crisis breaks you free from performances and compromises and malaise that you would never have escaped otherwise. It demolishes the ego that was protecting you from truth, gives you clarity to see what actually matters, reveals your authentic self underneath the performance, and creates the space to build something around your actual values.

Why crisis has to do it

None of this is accessible while you're still performing. You cannot voluntarily demolish your own ego because egos don't work that way - they protect themselves, they rationalise, they explain away warning signs. Crisis has to do it by making the performance more painful than the truth.

And yes, this is brutal. Yes, it's the worst thing you'll experience while you're in it. Yes, it feels like everything's ending, because in a sense it is. The performed version of you is ending. The rationalised version of your life is ending. The compromises you've been accepting are becoming unacceptable.

But on the other side of that ending is the beginning of something built around who you actually are rather than who you've been pretending to be.

The retrospective gift

I've been through this multiple times. Business crisis, identity crisis, career crisis. Each time felt like the worst thing that could happen. Each time I was certain I'd ruined everything. Each time I couldn't see how anything good could possibly come from this much destruction.

And each time, once I was through it, I recognised it as the best thing that had ever happened to me.

It gave me humility, which meant I could actually learn rather than pretending I already knew. It gave me clarity, which meant I could see what I actually wanted rather than what I thought I should want. It gave me authenticity, which meant I could be who I actually am rather than who I'd been performing. And it gave me opportunity, which meant I could build something around my actual values rather than something built on compromises and rationalisation.

Before these crises I was living in malaise, performing success, trapped by conditioning I couldn't even see. Each one stripped away more of the performance until I was aligned, authentic, actually capable of thriving rather than just surviving.

But here's the problem: I'm standing outside burning buildings shouting that this is the best thing that could happen to you, and the people inside have their fingers in their ears trying to convince themselves everything's fine. Because from inside the building, before the crisis becomes absolute, this sounds completely insane.

Crisis as gift only makes sense in retrospect. While you're in it, it's just crisis. And the work of supporting people through crisis isn't about convincing them it's secretly good for them while they're burning. It's about standing in the building with them, not trying to pull them out before they're ready, not pretending the fire isn't real, just being present while the ego gets demolished and making sure they don't waste what becomes possible on the other side.

Which is difficult work, because most people trying to help can't get through the door to do it.

Next time: Walking into burning buildings - the work of crisis support

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I work with SME leaders navigating crisis and transformation. I spent twelve years running a manufacturing business through multiple near-death experiences before achieving an exit in 2024, and now I combine financial rigour, lived crisis experience, and coaching capability to support business leaders through the moments when everything's on fire. I'm based in Bath and you can find me at marcdrichard.com.