Navigating Change When You Did Not Choose It
Change is often framed as something leaders initiate. Changes that are strategic and transformational create bold pivots. We love heroic stories of the leader who saw what others didn’t and drove the organization into the future. However, some of the most defining moments in our careers don’t start with us, they start with a phone call, a memo, a conversation we weren’t expecting; a layoff out of nowhere, restructuring that dissolves the team you spent years building, leadership change that shifts the entire culture in a matter of weeks, move to a new country, or family situation that quietly rewrites your timeline. In those moments, the real question isn’t how well you lead change. It’s how you hold yourself together when change is happening to you.
Leadership culture has a complicated relationship with control. We’re taught, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that strong people stay on course. That excellence means steering, not drifting. Loss doesn’t wait for a good time, and sick leaves don’t ask for your calendar. Organizational upheaval, economic disruption, unexpected career turns, these things also arrive without permission, and they don’t care how well-prepared you thought you were. What they expose rather quickly is that excellence was never really about perfect planning, but about what you do when the plan falls apart.
What I’ve noticed is unchosen change carries an emotional weight that most high performers don’t give themselves permission to acknowledge. There’s real grief for the future that no longer exists. There’s anger at the circumstances, sometimes at specific people and underneath it all, there’s often a quiet identity crisis: who am I if this role, this team, this path no longer exists?
People who’ve built their sense of self around competence and consistency tend to struggle here. The instinct is to move fast, get to the next thing, prove you’re fine, don’t let them see you stumble but rushing past the emotional reality of disruption doesn’t make it go away. It just means you carry it unprocessed into whatever comes next. Really navigating this effectively requires you to sit with what happened before you start running boldly toward what’s next.
I want to be clear that adapting to change you didn’t choose doesn’t mean pretending it was okay. It also does not mean performing gratitude for a situation that was unfair or minimizing what you actually lost. It means coming back to one honest question: Given what’s true right now, what’s still possible? That’s where true resilience lives; not in denial nor in toxic positivity but in an honest look at reality followed by a deliberate decision to keep asking relevant questions. Some doors do close and some paths genuinely end but, in my experience, possibility rarely disappears entirely, it just asks you to look somewhere you weren’t looking before.
Over time, I’ve heard from a lot of people who went through something they didn’t choose; a layoff, a forced relocation, a career derailment, and came out the other side with a clarity they didn’t have before. This didn’t occur because the disruption was good but because it forced them to see things they’d been too comfortable to examine: How much of their identity was wrapped up in a title. Which relationships actually held when the status disappeared. What kind of environment they’d been quietly tolerating versus genuinely thriving in. How much strength they were carrying without knowing it.
Growth is rarely linear, and the most significant transformations I’ve witnessed in leaders and in myself didn’t start with a plan, they started with something breaking down. In this week’s episode of Restless Excellence podcast, I talk about exactly this; the kind of change that arrives without an invitation, and what it takes to move through it. Give it a listen here.
Within the Restless Excellence framework, I keep coming back to the tension between high performance and sustainable leadership. Unchosen change lands right in the middle of that very tension. The old playbook says: move faster, work harder, prove your value again and sometimes that’s necessary but sustainable excellence asks for something different; it asks you to pause long enough to understand what this change is teaching you. Sometimes that lesson is about resilience, sometimes about the boundaries you never set, and sometimes it’s about recognizing that the path you fought so hard to stay on isn’t one you want to continue.
When that’s true, navigating change stops being about recovery and becomes about redefinition.
If you’re in the middle of something you didn’t choose, here are some Reflection Questions:
What’s actually within my influence right now? Even in real disruption, there are almost always small areas where agency exists. Start there.
What values do I want to carry into whatever comes next? Titles and roles can disappear overnight. Values tend to be the most stable thing we have.
What might be possible now that wasn’t visible before? Sometimes a closing door is the only reason we ever looked at the one beside it.
One Last Thing, we measure so much of our success by how faithfully we executed the plan, but life doesn’t move in straight lines, and neither do careers. The real test isn’t whether change happens to you, but what you do when it does. Especially when you never saw it coming and never would have asked for it.
Some of the most important chapters of our lives start with a sentence we never intended to write nor hear but once written or delivered, they still belong to us and still shape the story we carry forward.
If this issue resonated with you, I invite you to continue the conversation by listening to the Restless Excellence podcast on your preferred platform.
© 2026 Tonya Richards. All rights reserved.
Restless Excellence™ is a trademark pending.
All essays and original content published in this newsletter are the intellectual property of Tonya Richards and may not be reproduced, republished, or presented as original work without prior written permission.