Reflections on Connection-Centered Leadership - Issue 34: There's a Difference Between Being Anchored and Refusing to Move
Life is full of surprises. Perhaps one of my biggest, and arguably one of the best (though it took a few days to believe it), was finding out I was pregnant with our youngest daughter.
I had a seven-year-old, a three-year-old, and an infant when we learned she was coming. We'd dropped the maternity rider on our insurance and given away the newborn gear. We were done.
But here she came.
We had to pivot and adapt, but she was exactly what we needed to complete our family.
She had to assimilate into a family already on the go, and we had to learn to become a family of six. There were big changes for all of us. I've often said she is the most flexible person in our family. She could sleep anywhere, was confident beyond measure, and somehow learned to be content in almost any situation.
Looking back, I wonder how much of that flexibility came from entering a world that was already moving. Rigidity wasn’t a sustainable concept, so she held plans loosely and learned not to major in the minors.
There is another part of that story I hadn't considered until recently. She entered a family system that was already firmly anchored. We knew who we were. The relationships, values, faith, routines, and sense of belonging that made us a family existed before she arrived. She became fully anchored to that family while all five of us learned to move enough to make room for her.
She didn't require us to become a different family. She required us to become flexible enough to accommodate the changes our family was undergoing with the new addition.
There is a difference between changing direction and losing direction.
I've been reminded of that lately as plans have shifted, timelines have changed, unexpected possibilities have emerged, and things I thought would unfold one way have required another route…again. My instinct can be to interpret movement as instability. I like a plan. I especially like a plan that behaves itself and unfolds according to the timeline I assigned. Cue the whole: a person may make their plans, but the Lord directs their steps line.
Life has rarely shown much interest in cooperating with the predictability I would ascribe to it. But then again, rigidity dressed as stability is actually a recipe for failure.
Over the past few weeks, I've been using bridges to explore the architecture of Connection-Centered Leadership. As the photograph from Grandfather Mountain above suggests, apparently, we're not finished with them yet. We started with the individual pieces that become capable of carrying greater weight when they are securely connected. Last week, we considered tension and the opposing forces a healthy structure must sometimes learn to hold.
There is another element of a well-built bridge that feels especially appropriate this week.
It moves.
Years ago, when I was in residence at Gordon-Conwell’s Charlotte campus, I visited Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina and crossed the Mile High Swinging Bridge. The name doesn't exactly hide what you're about to experience.
The bridge moves.
When you're suspended high above the landscape and can feel movement beneath your feet, rigidity suddenly sounds like a very desirable engineering feature. I would personally prefer the structure responsible for keeping me a mile in the air to remain very, very still.
But movement isn't necessarily evidence that a bridge is unstable.
Structures designed to withstand changing conditions need sufficient capacity to respond to those changes. Wind changes. Temperatures change. Weight shifts as people and traffic move across a span. A structure incapable of responding to changing forces may appear strong until its rigidity becomes its weakness.
There is a difference between being firmly anchored and refusing to move. I think we sometimes confuse the two in ourselves.
We call something conviction when it may actually be rigidity. We hold tightly to the original plan because changing it feels like failure. We confuse consistency with doing something the same way long after circumstances have changed. We can become so committed to how we expected something to happen that we lose sight of what we were trying to accomplish in the first place.
Flexibility isn't abandoning the foundation. It depends upon knowing where the foundation is.
The stronger our foundation, the greater freedom we have to adapt our response without losing ourselves in the process.
How many of us have plot twists and turns in the story of our lives that we wish weren’t written? What actions beyond our control have affected the climate of our lives? We long for stability; we believe it will anchor us through the storms.
Life's surprises can knock the most stable person for a loop. The effect can be magnified when trauma has taught the nervous system to experience unpredictability as threat, or when neurodivergence makes transitions, uncertainty, or disrupted expectations especially difficult. When the bridge of our life starts to sway, movement can feel far more threatening than adaptive.
This awareness changes the questions I ask when circumstances change. Instead of immediately wondering whether I am off course, I can ask what actually needs to remain anchored and what may need permission to move.
My values may remain anchored while my strategy changes. The mission can remain intact while the timeline moves. A boundary can remain firm while the conversation around it changes. I can hold a conviction while remaining curious enough to consider information I didn't possess when I first formed an opinion. A leader can change a decision when new information emerges without becoming indecisive. A family can change its routines without changing connections.
And sometimes the destination remains exactly the same while the route looks nothing like the one we planned. Through flexibility, we can adjust the plan to stay the course.
This requires more than being adaptable for adaptability's sake. If everything is flexible, we have no structure at all. There are things that should hold.
There are convictions I don't want to reshape according to whatever room I enter. There are values that should continue to guide my decisions even when following them becomes inconvenient. There are boundaries whose purpose is protection, not rigidity. Commitments deserve consistency, even when circumstances become difficult.
As with so much of life, balance is found in the tension between extremes. Flexibility without anchoring can become drifting, chasing whatever feels good in the moment. Anchoring without flexibility can become rigidity, leaving us unable to respond when the conditions around us change.
Connection-Centered Leadership gives me a way to discern the difference.
Vertically, my connection with God gives me somewhere to remain anchored regardless of the storms of life and when circumstances move around me. Faith does not require circumstances to remain predictable. Sometimes it is precisely because they aren't predictable that I discover whether my security was in God or in the plan I had created.
Inwardly, flexibility requires enough awareness to distinguish between my values and my preferences, my identity and my role, my mission and my method. Sometimes the thing I'm defending isn't foundational at all. It's familiar. There is freedom in recognizing the difference.
Outwardly, connection requires flexibility because people are not predictable variables in our lives. The person in front of me may make choices I could never predict. New information may change what I thought I understood. Listening may reveal that the response I prepared before the conversation began isn't the response the moment requires.
Flexibility gives us the freedom to respond rather than simply react.
That brings me back to our youngest daughter.
She entered a family whose foundation had already been laid, and she became securely anchored within it. But her arrival required the structure to move. Schedules changed. Roles shifted. Resources were redistributed. Five people had to make room for a sixth, and eventually it became difficult to remember what our family had felt like before she was part of it.
The surprise didn't destroy the structure. God had designed the structure of our family with sufficient capacity in its connections, held by the right tension, and flexible enough to make room for the surprise.
I think there is something in that for me in this season.
Not every changed plan means I am off course. Not every delay means I am stuck. Not every unexpected opportunity requires abandoning what I was already building, and not every closed door means the destination was wrong.
Sometimes what feels like instability is adaptation.
Sometimes the blueprint remains sound while the building process requires adjustment.
And sometimes something we never planned for arrives and asks whether what we've built is secure enough to make room for something we couldn't see coming.
Perhaps strength isn't demonstrated by proving that nothing can move us. Maybe it is knowing what must remain anchored so we have the freedom to move when the conditions require it.
Questions I'm Sitting With This Week
What in my life truly needs to remain anchored, and what might need permission to move?
Am I holding onto something because it reflects my values and convictions, or simply because it is familiar?
Where might I be interpreting necessary adaptation as failure, instability, or a loss of direction?
What could become possible if I allowed the route to change without abandoning where I'm called to go?
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