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It is Sunday evening. The weekend was good, or good enough, but somewhere around six o’clock a weight settles in your chest. Tomorrow. The stakeholder who drains you. The project that has quietly become a political minefield. Maybe the fear you do not say out loud, that your position is less secure than it should be. You are not even at work yet, and work has already taken your evening.
I know that Sunday feeling, because I have lived it more than once. And I want to give you the one idea that changed my relationship with it. I first came across it in my own coaching, and then again as one of the foundations of an executive leadership program I went through. It is the most useful frame I have ever found for the feeling of being trapped. This essay is about the difference between behaving like a hostage and behaving like an author of your own situation.
The trapped feeling is rarely the real absence of options
Several times in my career I have felt I could not go on. Too much work. Too much politics. A relationship with a manager or a key stakeholder that had soured. And here is what those moments taught me. The situation is hard, yes, but it becomes unbearable the moment you start to feel powerless inside it. The suffering is not only the situation. It is the helplessness you add on top of it.
George Kohlrieser, a hostage negotiator turned leadership professor, wrote a book called Hostage at the Table. His central idea is this.
In almost any situation, you are either behaving like a hostage, someone things are done to, or like an author, someone who acts.
A literal hostage truly has no choice. But the rest of us, most of the time, are not literal hostages. We are people with choices who have stopped being able to see them. The trapped feeling is rarely the real absence of options. It is the loss of sight of them.
You always have a choice
So here is the shift, and it is total. You always have a choice. Always. The situation may be genuinely hard, and the choices may all be uncomfortable, but they exist, and the instant you see them again, the helplessness lifts, often before anything in the situation has actually changed.
The trapped feeling is not produced by the cage. It is produced by forgetting you are holding a key.
Authorship does not mean you can fix everything. It means you refuse to be a passenger in your own life.
The system: three doors
Kohlrieser gives you the principle, that you are an author, not a hostage. What he does not hand you is the list of choices for your specific Monday. So here is how I translated his principle into three concrete doors. When you feel trapped, your options fall into three categories. Walk them in order.
Category one. Mitigate what you cannot resolve. Some situations will not change, and your power is in how you hold them. The difficult manager may never become a different person. But you can step back and ask yourself why they act as they do, what pressure they are under, what they fear. Understanding does not excuse, but it moves you back into the author’s seat. The situation is identical. Your relationship to it is transformed.
Category two. Act to resolve. Many situations can change if you find the courage to move. Kohlrieser has a phrase for this, putting the fish on the table, naming the thing nobody is saying out loud, instead of letting it rot under the surface. Saying no to the third major project before it crushes you. Naming the political tension directly instead of absorbing it in silence. Most trapped feelings survive only because we have not yet tried the direct action sitting right in front of us.
Category three. Change the situation entirely. We forget this one most of all. If the load or the situation becomes genuinely too great, and you can feel the other three lives starting to buckle under it, you always retain the right to consider a change of role. Not as a failure. As an authorship decision of the highest order. The job is one position in one organisation. Your four lives are your entire existence. When the first is truly breaking the other three, leaving is not weakness. It is the clearest possible refusal to keep living as a hostage.
When the prison comes home
Why this is the most four-life topic of all. The hostage feeling never stays at work. It is what makes you absent at the dinner table while physically present. It is the tension your partner feels across the room without being able to name it. It is the sleep that will not come on Sunday night. Live as a hostage to your career, and you bring the prison home, and the other three lives serve the sentence with you. But the author’s posture works in all four lives. So much of what quietly breaks a marriage is two people behaving like hostages to a situation neither one will name out loud. Reclaim authorship at work, and you have already started practising the exact skill the other three lives need most.
Don’t balance. Architect.
So your one action, the next time the trapped feeling arrives, is to name your three doors. Write them down. Mitigate, act, or change, with one concrete option under each. You do not have to walk through any of them today. Just prove to yourself that they exist. That alone moves you from hostage to author.
Don’t balance. Architect.
I am Philippe. I will see you in the next one.
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Sources
• George Kohlrieser, Hostage at the Table (Jossey-Bass). Affiliate link in description. The three doors are Philippe’s own translation of Kohlrieser’s hostage/author principle, not the book’s framework.