At the Edge of Myself: A Reflective Narrative on Leadership, Disruption, and the Work of Staying Present
This episode explores the discomfort of sudden leadership change, from the antenarrative and psychological contract to the emotional labor of staying composed when everything feels unstable.
There are moments where leadership stops feeling like something do and becomes something that we are subject to. These are not the moments we would ever have chosen or designed. yet somehow they are those moments that arrive uninvited, often carrying disappointment, sometimes sharp enough to bruise the ego before I have time to make sense of it. - and they matter
I have come to think of this as being at the pointy end of leadership.
It is a particular sensation—of no longer standing above a situation, nor even alongside it, but finding myself underneath it, pressed by something larger. Sometimes that force is a system, sometimes a decision, sometimes a quiet but undeniable shift in how I am seen or positioned. And sometimes, if I am honest, it is my own framing of events that begins to close in on me.
I work in the field of leadership while also working for myself, which means I occupy a dual stance: I am both observer and experiencer. I watch systems unfold while simultaneously being shaped by them. I see patterns in others that I later recognise, often uncomfortably, in myself. This doubling sharpens my awareness of what it means to lead at the edge—particularly when that edge begins to infringe on my own idea of who I am.
What I have learned is that these moments are rarely about the event itself. The specifics change—a missed expectation, a shift in direction, an unanticipated outcome—but the conditions repeat. There is a familiar structure beneath the surface: the loss of control, the destabilisation of identity, the quiet rupture of something that once felt understood
So how can we dance at the pointy edge of being an imperfect leaders harnessing edge-walking, reflexive resilience, and the power of clear, human conversation to make sense of uncertainty
Chapter 1
Living at the Pointy End
Aoife Rialtas
Welcome to the show everybody! I'm Aoife And I want to start today by asking you to picture a moment in your career when the ground beneath your feet didn't just shake -- it completely dissolved. You're sitting in a meeting, or looking at an email, and you realize that leadership isn't something you are actively doing anymore. It's something you are suddenly subject to. I call this the pointy end of leadership. It's that sharp, deeply uncomfortable sensation of being pressed by a system or a decision that is much larger than you, where your ego gets bruised before you even have time to process what just happened.
Aoife Rialtas
When we find ourselves in these moments, we enter what the theorist David Boje calls the ante-narrative. That is a-n-t-e narrative -- the messy, fragmented space before a coherent story actually forms. Nothing makes sense yet. Your natural instinct in the ante-narrative is to move incredibly fast. You want to frame the situation, assign blame, or spin a narrative to stabilize the meaning and protect your identity. But Karl Weick, who wrote the book on organizational sensemaking back in 1995, reminds us that clarity is retrospective. It only emerges after the fact, not during the chaos. Rushing to find an answer actually narrows our understanding too soon. So the real work -- and it is incredibly hard work -- is learning to stay a little longer in that ambiguity, even when it feels like pure exposure.
Aoife Rialtas
And let's be honest about why this is so painful. It's because it strains what Denise Rousseau termed our psychological contract. These are the unspoken, deeply held expectations we carry about our relationship with an organization. When those expectations shift without warning, what we thought was stable suddenly becomes conditional. It feels incredibly personal, even though intellectually we know it's just structural. To survive this, we engage in massive amounts of what Arlie Hochschild called emotional labor. We manage our internal feelings to project a calm, coherent public performance. We steady our voice while our stomach is in knots. But we have to ask ourselves: is this authentic leadership, or is this just performativity -- performing the role we've been taught leadership is supposed to look like?
Chapter 2
The Art of Edgewalking
Aoife Rialtas
This tension brings us to a concept that has completely reframed how I think about my own work: edge-walking. Researchers like Gary Kreiner and his colleagues have written about edge-walkers as people who constantly operate at the boundary between different identities and expectations. If you work for yourself while consulting for large organizations, you know this boundary intimately. You are both inside and outside the system. You can see the patterns, but you are still deeply impacted by them. It's a space of incredible autonomy, but also intense precarity. When the system shifts, you feel it not just as an intellectual data point, but as a physical shock to your system.
Aoife Rialtas
If we want to build true resilience at this edge, we have to reject the old definition of resilience. It is not about rigid endurance. It's not about taking a beating and showing no bruises. Instead, sociologist Margaret Archer describes resilience as a form of continuous internal conversation -- a deep reflexivity where we constantly make sense of ourselves in relation to the world. It means using something like Stephen Brookfield's four lenses to examine our own reactions, see how others are experiencing the same moment, talk to trusted colleagues who expand our view, and use theory to realize that our highly personal pain is actually part of a well-documented systemic pattern.
Aoife Rialtas
When we do this, we can ask a quietly transformative question. Instead of reacting with "what went wrong here?" we ask: "what is this an instance of?" That single question creates space. It moves us from reactivity to reflection. And it leads us to the most fundamental, unpolished practice of all: having the clear conversation. Not a performative, corporate-speak meeting, but a human conversation that names the uncertainty, builds trust, and acknowledges that before any of us are leaders, we are human beings. That is how we lead at the edge. Thanks for listening today, and I'll see you next time.