[Excerpted from my book-in-progress. This is the beginning of the penultimate chapter on Truth #9. I’d love to know what it sparks for you. Hit reply, send me your thoughts—you may find yourself in the acknowledgements. 💛 Also, as the book is coming together, things are shifting at Radiant Change. Scroll down for some big news.]

Looking at the living world around us, we perceive all kinds of things.

A leaf here, a bird there. Music and traffic. Mountains and sky.

Even our own bodies, minds and selves we perceive as substantial and static things. This is who I am.

But the evidence is mounting in favor of a new understanding of our reality—that these living things are not things at all, but processes. Or rather, the confluence of many processes: respiration, digestion (for animals), photosynthesis (for plants), reproduction and decay (for everybody), to name a few.

According to the emerging discipline of processual biology, what we consider a solid, static thing is a temporary stabilization of those processes, as perceived by us—through our process of perceiving it.

What might this mean for our understanding of our world, our relationships, ourselves? What shifts within us when we identify as a process rather than a person? What becomes possible if we can see one another not just as human beings, but as human becomings?

“Everything we attempt, everything we do, is either growing up as its roots go deeper, or it’s decomposing, leaving its lessons in the soil for the next attempt.”

—adrienne maree brown

TRUTH #9: CHANGE IS ITERATIVE

How to Become Confident

In my coaching work, I’ve found that what many leaders want to become, more than anything, is confident. Even founders and CEOs. (Maybe especially founders and CEOs.)

Confident that their change will succeed. Confident in their guidance to others. Confident in how they feel in their role, in their system, in their skin. Maybe someone has advised them to seem more confident. Maybe they think they should believe in themselves more by now, but imposter syndrome is lurking in the shadows, telling them that despite all their efforts and achievements, they’re still not good enough.

It’s important to remember that confidence is a feeling. Like happiness, sadness and anger, it’s not a state that we attain and then live in forever. It comes and goes.

But we can cultivate confidence, and it’s worth doing so with intention—and not just waiting for ourselves to run out of f*cks to give—because confidence is core to our work of leading change.

Confidence is the strength hiding within the Knowing trap, which, as you may recall from Truth #5, is a two-sided coin. On one side is arrogance, an overuse of confidence, and on the other is imposter syndrome. They aren’t the opposing forces they appear to be, in fact they often coexist and reinforce one another—we may project arrogance to prove we aren’t the imposter we feel like, for example. What they have in common is that both believe there is a correct answer that can be known.

This is our big clue.

We get stuck in the Knowing trap by our desperation to know (or to be seen as knowing) the answer. But this isn’t real confidence. It’s just a mirage of certainty.

So the way to cultivate confidence is not through amassing knowledge and experience and declaring our knowing. It’s through becoming increasingly at ease with not knowing. Confidence grows when we lean into curiosity, not certainty.

We’ve been practicing with curiosity since Truth #3, when we brought this most illuminating of attitudes to the systems we live and lead in. In Truth #4, we met resistance with curiosity and discovered that the big feelings people are feeling are pointing directly to unmet needs. In Truth #6, we got curious about our own needs and where they intersect with the needs of the folks we find ourselves in conflict with.

Now we’re going to bring curiosity to the change itself. Because we need to develop our confidence about this change, despite the fact that—and I know nobody wants to hear this—we don’t actually know what will happen.

Sure, we’ve got some great ideas we’ve co-created with brilliant people in service of our purposeful vision. But will they work? Not just on paper but in the glorious mess of your complex ecosystem?

We don’t know. And we can’t know.

Yet.

[end of excerpt]

In Practice: Endings + Beginnings

The rest of the chapter focuses on the iterative nature of change: we try something, learn what works and what doesn’t, and let what we learn shape our next attempt.

It’s less of a plan than an unfolding. A continuous exploration structured in a series of experiments. Which is exactly what we’re doing here at Radiant Change.

For the past three years, I’ve been experimenting with (and through) the Radiant Change community of practice. More than 50 leaders joined us to lean into transformational leadership as a practice, putting the 10 Truths to work in their teams, organizations and communities. I’ve learned so much from these leaders, and I'm deeply proud of what we made together.

As our members know, at the end of this month, the community of practice is sunsetting. Not because it failed, but because it has worked. The community showed me the impact that Radiant Change can have, and challenged me to share it in ways that can reach more people and shape more organizations.

I’m more convinced than ever that we need to change our relationship to change, and more confident than ever that this is the way.

The community’s closing will make room for the next iteration of Radiant Change: the book (coming in 2027) will be supported by the Radiant Change Leadership Suite—everything leaders need to apply the 10 Truths to the very real changes unfolding in their work and in their world.

The future is uncertain—always, but especially now as we fumble our way forward in the dark, deeper and deeper into this polycrisis. There’s so much we can’t know, but of this I’m certain: the new reality that will emerge on the other side will be defined by how we show up to lead, right here, right now.

Thank you for your leadership, my friend.

Onward together.

Kristen Lisanti
​Radiant Change​
​How Change (Really) Works