She had everything she needed.
The budget was approved. The CEO had given his blessing. The project — the kind that comes along once in a career — was finally ready to move. After months of planning, stakeholder alignment, and relentless advocacy, the Director had cleared every hurdle.
Every hurdle except one.
Her own manager.
The Problem With Cautious Leaders
The VP had been instrumental in securing the budget. She understood the opportunity, believed in the vision, had championed the initiative all the way to the executive table. And then, the moment real execution began — the moment the abstract became concrete — something changed.
Fear moved in.
It's a pattern I see often in senior leadership: a leader who is genuinely capable, genuinely well-intentioned, becomes so consumed by the weight of responsibility that they can no longer move toward the very thing they've been working to achieve. Every meeting becomes a landscape of What if? and But... and Are we sure? The caution that once served them — the careful thinking, the risk awareness — becomes a wall.
The Director came to our coaching session furious. She had done everything right. She had the mandate, the resources, the team. And she was completely stuck.
We sat with that frustration for a while. And then we arrived at something important together: the obstacle wasn't external. It wasn't a structural problem or a resource gap or a misaligned stakeholder. The obstacle was her manager's fear — and the only person in a position to address it was her.
It was up to her to lead her leader.
What "Leading Up" Actually Means
There's a version of "managing up" that's really just political maneuvering — learning to package your ideas in ways that make senior people feel comfortable, navigating egos, staying one step ahead of objections. That's useful. But it's not what I'm talking about here.
Leading up, in the way I work with clients, means recognizing that leadership is not defined by your position on an org chart. It means understanding that sometimes the most important leadership act you can take is creating the conditions for someone above you to access their own courage and clarity.
It requires both skill and a particular kind of humility: the willingness to serve the vision rather than your own frustration, even when that frustration is completely justified.
The Director had the frustration. What she needed was the strategy.
The Meeting
At the next project meeting, she asked for the first ten minutes. No slides. No agenda. No data.
"Close your eyes," she told the room.
There was a moment of uncertainty — the kind that happens whenever someone breaks the unspoken rules of corporate meetings. But they closed their eyes.
She didn't talk about timelines. She didn't address risks or mitigation strategies or quarterly milestones. Instead, she painted a picture. She described the project as already complete — the product launched, the impact made, the team proud. She talked about what it felt like to have done it. What success looked like from the inside.
"Imagine it," she said. "It's already done. It's ready. We just need one signature to step into that reality."
When they opened their eyes, something had shifted. The fear hadn't disappeared. But it had been joined by something larger: a vision vivid enough to hold its ground.
The VP looked at the document in front of her, remembered why they had all started, and signed.
She and I sat down after that meeting — coffee in hand, like always — and pulled apart exactly why it worked.
Why It Worked: The Neuroscience of Vision and Fear
What the Director did in that meeting wasn't manipulation. It wasn't a motivational speech. It was a precise, if intuitive, application of how the human brain actually works under conditions of anxiety and uncertainty.
Here's the first piece: the brain cannot hold vivid positive anticipation and fear simultaneously.
This isn't a metaphor — it's physiology. When we imagine a future in rich sensory detail, our nervous system responds as if that future is already happening. Heart rate, stress hormones, emotional state — all of it shifts in response to a vividly imagined reality. The Director wasn't asking the room to think about a hopeful future. She was walking them into it, bodily. And in that state, the fear didn't have the same grip.
But there's a second layer that made the intervention even more powerful, and it comes from behavioral economics.
We are far more motivated by the fear of losing something we already have than by the prospect of gaining something new.
This is loss aversion — one of the most robust findings in the psychology of decision-making, documented extensively by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. The pain of a loss registers roughly twice as powerfully as the pleasure of an equivalent gain. It's why we hold onto bad investments too long, why we stay in situations that no longer serve us, why the status quo exerts such gravitational pull even when we know better.
The Director used this insight — consciously or not — with precision.
By describing the project as already real, already complete, already won, she reframed the decision in front of the VP. The choice was no longer "do we move forward into the unknown?" The choice became "do we walk away from something that already exists?" Inaction was no longer safe. Inaction was now the loss.
She didn't argue against the anxiety. She gave the room something stronger to feel — and she changed the emotional calculus of the decision entirely.
The Lesson Beyond This Story
I want to be careful here, because it's easy to read a story like this and extract the wrong lesson.
The lesson is not: use visualization to manipulate people into doing what you want.
The lesson is something more nuanced and, I think, more important: fear responds to vision, not to data.
When a leader is paralyzed by anxiety, adding more information rarely helps. More data, more risk analysis, more detailed project plans — these speak to the rational mind, which is not where the paralysis lives. The paralysis lives in the nervous system. In the threat-detection mechanisms that evolution built into us long before spreadsheets existed.
To move someone out of fear-driven inaction, you have to meet them where they are — in their body, in their emotional state — and offer them something different to feel. Not false reassurance. Not pressure. A genuine, vivid, embodied sense of what becomes possible.
That is a leadership skill. It requires emotional intelligence, creativity, and a deep understanding of what actually drives human behavior. And it is learnable.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Not every situation calls for a room-closing-their-eyes moment. The principle, however — meeting fear with vision rather than data — applies in dozens of everyday leadership contexts:
A one-on-one with a team member who is stuck in perfectionism and can't ship. A difficult conversation with a peer who keeps blocking a decision. A board presentation where the room is focused on risk rather than opportunity. A performance conversation that keeps cycling back to the same defensive patterns.
In each of these situations, the instinct is often to add more information, make a stronger argument, provide more evidence. Sometimes that works. But when the resistance is rooted in anxiety, the breakthrough usually comes from helping someone reconnect with why any of this matters — making the destination feel real and worth moving toward.
A Note on "Leading Up"
I've been coaching senior leaders for nearly three decades, across organizations as varied as UN agencies, government ministries, and military commands. And one of the most consistent patterns I've observed is this: the people who are most effective at creating change are not always those with the most formal authority. They are the ones who understand that leadership is fundamentally about creating conditions for others to be at their best — including, sometimes, the people above them.
Leading up doesn't mean undermining your manager or working around them. It means caring enough about the outcome — and about them — to help them access a version of themselves that is capable of moving.
The Director didn't resent her VP. She understood her. And that understanding was the foundation of everything that followed.
If You're Navigating Something Like This
The situation the Director faced — a manager whose fear is the obstacle, a vision that can't move forward without their buy-in — is one of the most common and most frustrating challenges I hear from senior leaders.
If you're in it right now, here are three questions worth sitting with:
What does your manager actually fear? Not what they say they're worried about — the stated risks, the objections, the questions. What is the underlying fear? Loss of control? Visibility? Accountability? Understanding the root makes it possible to address it.
Have you made the vision real enough? Not just compelling or logical or well-supported by data — but real? Can your manager see it, feel it, step into it? If not, no amount of evidence will move them.
Whose vision is it? If your manager doesn't feel connected to the outcome — if it feels like your project rather than ours — the psychological investment won't be there. How do you make them a co-author of the future you're describing?
These are coaching questions, and they don't have easy answers. But sitting with them seriously tends to open up new possibilities.
Ayelet is a PCC-certified executive leadership coach and the founder of SigSoog Leadership Coaching. She works with senior leaders across international organizations, government, and the private sector, drawing on nearly 30 years of coaching experience and a neuroscience-informed approach to whole-life leadership.
If this resonated — or if you're navigating something like this right now — she'd love to hear from you.