The Stories Running Your Leadership May Not Be True Enough

Most leaders believe they are managing people, projects, systems and outcomes. In reality, they are also managing stories.

Not just the official story of the quarter or the strategy deck. Leaders are constantly interpreting what events mean, what pressure says about them, what conflict reveals, and what kind of person they must become to remain credible and respected.

You can chair the meeting, manage the conflict, deliver the presentation and hold the line – all while an old story quietly runs in the background: “I am the one who carries this.” “If I slow down, everything will unravel.” “In this organisation, depletion is simply what it takes.”

From the outside, this looks like composure. From the inside, it often feels like controlled strain inside a narrowing script. Many leaders have become exceptionally skilled at functioning while living inside stories that once helped them survive but have now hardened into identity. What often goes unnoticed is that these praised stories may be expensive adaptations rather than accurate maps of what is possible.

This is why Story is the middle movement in the SSS Framework. If Safety helps a leader become regulated enough to remain present, Story helps that leader notice the meaning they are making of what is happening. Strategy then emerges not from panic, image management or inherited scripts, but from a thicker and more truthful encounter with reality.

The Body Knows the Story Before the Mind Explains

By the time a leader names that a story is costing them something important, the body has usually been signalling for a long time. The chest tightens before a particular meeting. The breath shortens when thinking about the future. Energy swings between overdrive and fog. A vague but insistent bodily sense that “something is off” lingers even when performance metrics remain strong.

The body is not merely reacting after the fact. It is one of the primary places where leadership stories are lived. Stories live in posture, guardedness, urgency and the felt sense that certain risks or conversations are dangerous before the mind has explained why.

Most organisations track revenue and milestones. Wise leadership also attends to the thickness or thinness of the stories people are living inside and to the felt aliveness of the work itself.

Why Story Follows Safety

Leaders cannot reliably access curiosity, reflection, imagination and relational openness when the body is living in chronic mobilisation or partial shutdown. Story follows Safety because stories are not interpreted from nowhere. They are interpreted from nervous systems.

A leader in chronic mobilisation will interpret ambiguity differently from a leader with access to steadiness and presence. In one state, uncertainty feels like threat and reflection feels indulgent. In another, those same realities can be encountered as information or invitation.

Without enough safety, story work distorts: self-reflection becomes self-criticism and curiosity collapses into judgement. Many leaders become highly articulate about their narratives while remaining physiologically trapped inside them. Safety creates the conditions for truthful story work, and Story prepares the ground for wiser Strategy.

The Seductive Thin Lady

Under pressure, the nervous system often prefers a coherent, linear story to a complex, unresolved one. This is the domain of the Seductive Thin Lady — the linear, problem-saturated story that offers clarity, consistency and emotional economy at the cost of complexity, contradiction and innovation.

She does not invent events; she organises them. She selects what fits the line, threads it into a familiar plot, and presents the result as the whole truth. In leadership contexts, thin stories often sound responsible, mature and socially rewarded:

• “I am the one who carries this.”

• “If I slow down, everything will unravel.”

• “In this organisation, depletion is inevitable.”

• “We are a high-performance culture; this is simply what it takes.”

These stories are rarely wholly false — that is what makes them persuasive. But they are thin. They filter out the signals that might open a different future.

Over time, what began as a survival story can harden into identity: “I must always carry more than others.” “My worth lies in being endlessly available.” What began as protection becomes destiny.

Thin stories are reinforced by the wider story culturescape — the organisational habits, reward systems and social assumptions that make certain narratives feel natural and respectable. If your team praises overwork as commitment, the story “rest is weakness” will feel plausible. Leaders are not only living inside stories; they are authoring climates in which others will either shrink or flourish.

Externalisation, Deconstruction and Thickening the Story

Externalisation creates distance. It helps leaders recognise that a problem is influencing them without being identical to them. Deconstruction then traces how the story gained authority — its cultural lineage and the assumptions it presents as common sense.

Together, externalisation and deconstruction reveal both the personal grip of the story and the wider architecture sustaining it. Story work also listens for the absent but implicit — the values that distress or exhaustion often carry in the background. Beneath over-responsibility, there may be care. Beneath frustration, there may be a commitment to fairness, integrity or meaningful contribution. When these values surface, the story thickens.

A thick story can hold contradiction without collapse. It honours repetition without confusing it with destiny, and includes grief, failure, repair and hope without forcing them into a single flat conclusion. Thick stories do not remove difficulty. They make it more possible to live truthfully within difficulty without surrendering the future to it.

A Small Practice You Can Try Today

Before your next significant leadership moment or decision, try this brief externalising sequence:

1. Name — What story is currently loud in me about this situation or myself?

2. Externalise — If this story had a name, what would it be?

3. Inquire — What does this story promise me? What does it cost me? What has it edited out?

4. Notice — Is there any small moment recently that does not quite fit this story?

This simple sequence creates reflective distance. It loosens fusion with the old narrative and makes space for a thicker, more truthful account to begin emerging.

The Leadership Story Snapshot

Many leaders already sense that the stories they are living inside no longer fit the complexity they face. They are still delivering and respected, yet something vital feels thinner, more constrained or less truthful than it once did.

To help you explore this more personally, I have created the Leadership Story Snapshot — a short reflective self-check designed to help you notice how strongly thin, linear narratives may currently be shaping your leadership, and how much access you have to thicker, more contextual and more truthful accounts.

It will not diagnose you or reduce your leadership to a number. Instead, you will receive a personal score and a short educational reading to help you interpret what your current relationship with story may be making easier — or more difficult.

You can complete the Leadership Story Snapshot by clicking here.

After completing the Snapshot, you will receive an invitation to join the priority guest list for the upcoming Sculpting Wonder Leadership Conversation series.

The body and the stories we live inside may have been trying to tell you something for a while. It may be time to become more sensitised to their wisdom.

If this reflection already feels personally relevant, you are also welcome to book a complimentary conversation with François. This is a confidential, no-pressure conversation to explore what re-authoring may be asking of you in your own leadership context.

You can book a complimentary conversation by clicking here.

Sculpting Wonder

Over the coming weeks, the Sculpting Wonder Leadership Conversation series will continue exploring how safety creates the ground for story work, how thin stories become identity and culture, how externalisation and deconstruction open space for thicker accounts, and how the SSS Framework – Safety, Story, Strategy – offers a more sustainable and truthful way of leading.

This reflection draws from Week 5 of that journey and from Chapter 5 of my forthcoming book, Sculpting Wonder — a book for high-performance leaders who are still delivering outwardly but who want to recover the aliveness, presence, meaning and imagination that make leadership worth inhabiting.

If this conversation matters to you, I invite you to complete the Leadership Story Snapshot, receive your personal reading, register for the priority guest list, and follow the series as it unfolds.

Looking forward to thinking with you.

Warm regards,

François Wessels
The Story Sculptor | Founder, ReSculpting™