A friend said something to me recently that I have not been able to put down.
We were talking through a difficult situation. The kind where you can see the shape of the problem but not the way out of it. And somewhere in the middle of it she said, almost in passing, “but you’re in the driver’s seat.”
It was meant as reassurance. You have control. You can steer.
I have been thinking about it ever since. Because that was right. And also because being in the driver’s seat is not the same thing as being safe.
There is a particular kind of fear that comes from being a passenger in a car that is about to crash. You see it coming. You brace. Your hands find something to hold. But there is nothing you can do with your body that will change the next three seconds. You are entirely in someone else’s hands. The terror is total but it is also, strangely, simple. You have no decisions to make.
The driver’s fear is different.
The driver sees the same thing coming. But the driver has the wheel. And in those three seconds the driver’s mind is doing something the passenger’s is not. It is calculating. Correcting. Reaching for the manoeuvre that will save this.
That feeling, the one where you believe you can still fix it, is the most dangerous feeling in the car.
Anyone who has done proper defensive driving training knows this already.
When a car starts to skid, every instinct in your body tells you to slam the brakes and turn hard away from the danger. And those instincts are wrong. Braking hard locks the wheels and takes away the one thing you still have, which is grip. Turning sharply away sends the back of the car swinging in the opposite direction. The correction causes the crash.
What you are taught instead feels like madness. Ease off. Look where you want to go rather than at what you are afraid of. Steer gently into the skid. Loosen your hands.
More accidents happen from over-correction than from the original mistake.
I think about that a lot. The problem was recoverable. The panic was not.
In leadership, the driver’s seat is where good people quietly become difficult ones.
You can see it when a project starts going wrong. The leader who was collaborative last month starts pulling decisions inward. Meetings get shorter. Approvals get tighter. They stop asking and start instructing. Not because they have become arrogant but because somewhere underneath it a voice has started saying if this is going to be saved, I have to be the one to save it.
That voice feels like responsibility. It is usually hubris wearing responsibility’s clothes.
Hubris is an old word and we have flattened it into something simpler than it is. We use it to mean arrogance, the loud kind, the person who thinks they are better than everyone else. But that was never quite what it meant. In the Greek tragedies where the word comes from, hubris is the moment a person decides the ordinary limits do not apply to them. Not that they are better. That they are exempt. The hero who believes this one time, in this one situation, the rules that govern everyone else will bend for him because of how badly he wants it to work.
It never announces itself as arrogance. It arrives as conviction. It feels like caring more than everyone else in the room.
I have written before about how the version of you that got promoted is not always the version that succeeds. This is the sharpest example of it. The skills that make you a brilliant individual contributor, the ability to grip the problem and not let go until it yields, become the exact thing that puts you in the ditch when you are responsible for other people.
Because the team can see the correction happening. They can feel the wheel being yanked. And the instinctive response of every capable person being over-managed is to take their hands off their own part of the work entirely. Why hold anything if it is going to be taken from you.
The leader tightens because things are slipping. Things slip faster because the leader tightened.
In work, it looks like the person who cannot hand anything over.
Not because they do not trust their colleagues in theory. But because at some level they believe the outcome is load bearing on them specifically. They will stay later, rewrite the draft, and take the call at 9pm that someone else could have taken.
And it works, for a while, which is the cruel part. Hubris is rarely punished immediately. It is usually rewarded first.
Then one day you look up and realise that you have built something that only functions while you are holding it. That is not strength. That is a car with one hand permanently on the wheel, and no ability to let go even to rest.
This is why process matters more than most leaders admit. A system you can trust is the only thing that makes letting go survivable.
In relationships, the driver’s seat is the hardest to give up.
Because here the thing you are steering is not a project or a team. It is another person. Or the shape of something between two people. And the instinct to correct is enormous.
You can feel something going wrong and you start managing it. Choosing your words more carefully. Steering conversations away from certain things. Doing more, giving more, trying to hold the whole thing together through sheer effort because you have decided, somewhere quietly, that you are the only one keeping it on the road.
What that usually does is remove the other person from the driving entirely. They stop reaching for the wheel because you never let go of it. And then you resent them for not holding it.
Two people cannot steer the same car if one of them refuses to take their hands off.
And then there is the thing bigger than you.
My friend’s phrase cut me because it reminded me of the opposite thing. The moment when you accept that you are not the only actor in the situation.
For a lot of people, including me, that takes a spiritual shape. The prayer at the end of your own competence. The moment where you say I have done what I can do and I am releasing the rest. There is a reason that moment brings such a specific relief. It is not giving up. It is the acknowledgement that the outcome was never entirely yours to produce.
For someone who does not hold that belief, the shape is different but the mechanism is identical. It is the colleague you finally tell the truth to. The person who looks at the situation from outside the car and says the thing you could not see from behind the wheel.
What all of these have in common is the same release. The thing that saves you is almost never a tighter grip. It is another pair of hands.
Control is not the enemy. You are in the driver’s seat for a reason, and somebody has to steer.
But I have come to believe that the measure of a person is not how tightly they can hold something. It is whether they can recognise the moment when holding it tighter stops being strength and becomes the thing that breaks it.
That moment arrives for everyone.
- In a team that is slipping.
- In a project that is going wrong.
- In a relationship that has quietly become a performance of effort.
The car starts to skid and every instinct says grip harder, turn faster, fix this alone.
Ease off. Look where you want to go. Loosen your hands. The help you need has probably been sitting beside you the whole time, waiting for you to make room for it.
