Stay pure or walk out—he thought those were the only two moves.
Marcus — Senior Manager
Marcus messaged me between sessions, in his words, “feeling spicy.” His company had taken on customers whose politics and industry he couldn’t stomach, and the old instinct was rising in him—the one he’d used his whole career. Quietly refuse. Or quit. He’d done both before.
The pattern was familiar to him and, once he described it, familiar to me. He’d catch his company drifting from its values, his internal standard would shoot up impossibly high—“I have to be one of the good ones, I have to walk the walk”—and over a couple of weeks he’d spiral down into a functional funk until the only move that felt clean was the exit. Purity or the door.
What I named for him was that the all-or-nothing was itself the trap. The real question was never “stay pure or leave.” It was “where do I actually have control, and what is the next right thing I can do with it?”
We did a few concrete things. We sorted, over and over, what was in his control from what wasn’t—because his own brain would hand him the whole broken system to carry, and he’d buckle under it. We worked on catching the funk earlier: writing down the signals and the facts when it started, not the “why,” because the why is a story and his story always came out in dark colors. We looked for the small levers he actually had—an effort he could champion, colleagues he could quietly build a coalition with—so he was pushing his thumb onto the other side of the scale instead of walking away from it. And later, as he stepped up to lead, we practiced starting with a question instead of an opinion, and translating his frameworks into the words the other person actually used.
What changed was the whole posture. The leader who came in rehearsing his resignation ended up with a mandate to build a real management team, running the best meetings his peers said they’d ever sat in, and measuring his own hope higher than when we started. Same constraints, same imperfect company—but he’d stopped confusing “I can’t fix everything” with “I can’t do anything.”
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