When the Strategy Is Connection ♥️
What Two Years of Coaching Taught Me About Knowing When to Stay and When to Leave
Greetings Beloved,
I have been coaching someone for two years.
I will not share names, because permission wasn’t granted and because the specifics of the story matter far less than what the story illuminates about power, relationship, and the particular kind of courage it takes to choose yourself.
What I can tell you is this.
The individual was inside an organization where the culture is deeply top-down. Where favoritism runs through the decision-making like a current that everyone can feel and no one is allowed to name. Where the stated values on the wall and the lived reality in the room have grown so far apart that the gap itself has become its own kind of harm.
When we connected, there was so much to unpack. More importantly, it quickly became clear to me there was a deep and genuine commitment to the mission of the organization, a love for the people served, and a not-yet-answered question about whether where the problem existed: with the individual or the environment.
The answer took time to arrive. However, the waiting was worth it.
What two years of loving accountability looks like
I want to say something honest about what I do as a coach, not because I am interested in promoting myself, but because I think there is a distorted image of coaching in the culture that does not serve the people who might need it.
Coaching, the way I practice it, is not primarily about strategy. It is not about accountability in the punishing sense of the word. It is about creating a relational container safe enough for someone to see themselves clearly and compassionately enough that what they see does not destroy them.
Over two years, I watched this leader do something remarkable. Try. Try to use relationship before leaving. Named the experience with the people above. Brought curiosity rather than contempt to the interactions that hurt most. Held up their end of the relational contract even when the other party could not or would not.
And in doing that, received the clearest possible evidence about what was and was not within their power to change.
The supervisor was unwilling to lean on humanity. Not hostile, exactly, but closed, unwilling to step outside the hierarchy into the kind of genuine relational contact that would have made the situation navigable. The problem was not a misunderstanding that better communication could fix. The problem was a relationship that one party had decided, whether consciously or not, not to have.
No amount of relational skill can repair what another person would not show up for.
What Love Before ALL's Approach clarified
At Love Before ALL, we believe that relational health is the primary infrastructure of organizational culture. However, we also know that relational health requires at least two parties willing to be in genuine contact with each other.
Dr. Adrienne Maree Brown, whose work in "Emergent Strategy" (2017) has become essential reading for anyone thinking about how change happens at the scale of relationship and community, writes that "what we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system." When a supervisor refuses genuine relationship, they are practicing a pattern and that pattern, practiced daily, becomes the culture.
My partner could not change the pattern. They could only decide whether to keep absorbing its cost.
The choice was not to. The commitment to fully find a new position eventually landed them one. The choice was to explore a new environment with potential capacity to hold them.
I am not celebrating their departure. I am celebrating that they knew when to. And I am celebrating that the two years we spent together helped them build the inner clarity to make that distinction.
What they shared near the end of our time together is something I carry with me: that my loving and firm accountability had turned them into someone better at their craft and more willing to see from other perspectives even when those other perspectives belonged to people who had caused harm
That is the “Grow the Me” of the LBA Method working the way it is supposed to work. Not making someone into a more perfect professional. Making them willing to tap into the fullness of their humanity and extending the same courtesy to others.
🧠 The Brain Science
The research on workplace relational dynamics and nervous system health is consistent and sobering.
When we are in hierarchical relationships where the person above us is unwilling to engage in genuine mutual regard, where the relationship is one-directional, extractive, or defined entirely by compliance, the body registers this as a chronic low-grade threat. The amygdala stays activated. Cortisol remains elevated. And over time, the cumulative effect is what Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, in "The Deepest Well" (2018), describes as allostatic load (the biological wear and tear of chronic stress on the body and brain).
The decision to leave a toxic work environment is not a failure of resilience. It is, often, an act of profound self-knowledge; the recognition that the nervous system cannot heal in a container that keeps wounding it.
🎯 What LBA Elevates
We do not celebrate leaving at Love Before ALL. We celebrate clarity. We celebrate the willingness to try relationship first, to bring genuine skill and genuine love to the attempt, and to know with compassion rather than bitterness when the attempt has reached its limit.
And we celebrate the courage to choose an environment that can actually hold you.
⭐ Leadership Practice: The Relationship Honesty Check
This week, I want to invite you to look at one relationship in your professional life where you have been working harder than the other party to keep the connection alive.
Ask yourself: have I done everything within my power to tend to this relationship with skill and love? And is the other party willing to meet me there?
You do not have to answer the second question in a single sitting. However, you do have to ask it.
🌸 The Invitation
If you are navigating a workplace environment where relational health is the obstacle, where the culture has decided that genuine human contact is unnecessary, our partnership work begins with exactly that diagnosis.
And if you are a leader who is doing the inner work of figuring out when to stay and when to go, the LBA Connection Circle is a free monthly space to think it through with someone who will hold you with both honesty and love.
With deep appreciation for your courage,
Annie 💛
Your Curious Cultural Architect
Growing compassion from the inside out.
Producing Results & Caring for People