Leading When You’re Also Struggling

Here’s something nobody talks about enough: what do you do when you’re supposed to lead the room and you’re also the person who most needs to be led?

Your game is off. Or something in your life is hard. Or you’re carrying something heavy that has nothing to do with sport. And you’re still expected to be the person who holds the standard, sets the tone, shows up for your teammates.

That tension is real. And it deserves a real answer.

Read this passage slowly.

Let that sit for a second before you move.

Paul is talking about his own weakness here. Something he called a thorn in the flesh — some limitation, some suffering, something he asked God to remove. And the answer he got was: my grace is sufficient. My power is made perfect in weakness.

This is not a verse about pretending to be fine. Paul is not pretending. He’s saying: the weakness is real, the struggle is real, and in that exact place the power available to him is also real.

For a leader who is struggling, the temptation is to hide it. To perform stability they don’t have. To keep the room from knowing that the person carrying it is also being carried by something.

But the leader who lets their struggle be seen — who says “I’m not at my best right now, and I’m still here, still showing up, still in this with you” — that leader does something for the room that the leader who pretends to be invincible cannot do. They show everyone else that you can lead through difficulty. That you don’t have to be at your best to be fully present. That grace is sufficient even for this.

You don’t have to have it all together to lead. You just have to keep showing up.

Vulnerable question. Don’t force it. The leaders who answer this honestly usually create a turning point for the whole team.