Leigh's Leadership Lessons: Staying High Agency in Unsettled Times

In this solo episode of The Space In Between Podcast, host Leigh Morgan introduces a theme we’ll return to again and again this year: staying high agency in unsettled times. With clear-eyed realism about polarization, distrust, and today's often trying times, Leigh offers a grounded reframe: agency isn’t optimism or control—it’s the felt sense that your actions matter, even when circumstances are messy. She shares a powerful metaphor (how stars often flare brightest before collapse), a personal story about resilience and identity after a life-altering knee injury, and advice on how to stay steady without becoming hardened. You’ll walk away with accessible practices—know your boiling points, take three deep breaths, stay in relationship, refuse dehumanization, and hold people accountable without hating—so we can maintain integrity, strengthen connection, and bridge divides when the world needs this most. 

Transcript

 Hello and welcome to the. Space in between podcast. I'm your host Lee Morgan. Again, this podcast is for listeners who are fed up. Up with the hyperpolarized nature of the world today. And who crave. Craves spaces where current events can be discussed in construct. enlightening and delightful ways. Let's get.   📍  Hello, friend. I'm really glad you're here. Thanks for joining me on The Space In Between Podcast. Today I wanna share my thoughts on a very important theme that will animate the podcast this year. And the theme is this, staying High Agency in unsettled times, this matters at a personal level. It matters.

For anyone who leads teams or organizations or influences public policy, it matters in communities and in our families, and it matters profoundly at a societal level. I've spoken about agency before on almost all of my podcasts with guests. The notion of agency is a, is a part of the conversation. I'm bringing it up again now, and we'll include it as a theme for the whole year.

Because this moment demands it, the tide must turn on fragmentation and fear. I feel this in my bones and my blood. And in my heart. So why do I believe this so strongly? For starters, we are living inside two highly influenceable realities at the same time. The first is obvious. We're seeing an increase in distrust, more polarization.

There's lots of uncertainty and there's lots of stress as well. We're also witnessing, unfortunately, revenge fueled policies coming from leaders in high places. Too often power is exercised through fear threats and the gaslighting of entire people. In some places through real violence, these cultural attributes can be very loud and they are upsetting.

And if we're honest, things might get worse before they get better. It's no wonder it's easy to feel overwhelmed, and maybe you've asked yourself, as I have on occasion, what can I do to impact change, especially given the enormity of divides these days. Sometimes putting our heads down and taking a break from it all is a very helpful coping mechanism.

I wish everyone had that privilege. Another dimension to this reality is that. Our unsettled times are built on shaky, moral, ethical, and spiritual ground, ground that is not sustainable. Interesting. Side note, last week I was watching a documentary, which I am prone to do, especially PBS, the Nova Series.

Most excellent. I watched a documentary about how stars are birthed and how they die, and what I learned is that before a star collapses, it doesn't go quietly. It flares more. It's way more dramatic than ever before,  right before dying out. It actually looks brighter, but it's actually a symptom of its impending demise.

That is what's happening now. The hard part is that there is real suffering if we experience it, and it's also hard to bear witness to, but it will eventually give way to something far more positive. I'm convinced of that. In the meantime, I'll have to say that we are all accountable for doing our part to support not just ourselves, but to help those least able to weather the challenges of this moment.

Here's the second reality, and it's the one I want us to stay oriented toward. The tide is turning. Now it's quiet. It's not super sexy. It doesn't sell as many ads on social media as more fear-based posts, but you are a part of that tide turning in part because you're listening to this podcast, and I'm certain you are intentional about being positive change in many aspects of your life.

I am seeing the emergence of three specific things that are harbinger of the tide turning, and these are things that are both ancient and also relevant right now. The first is I'm seeing an acceleration of. Efforts to find deep human connection. The second thing is a stronger capacity to sit in complexity and nuance without feeling overwhelmed.

And third, a better ability to make empowered choices regardless of circumstance.  Every day, more and more of us are stepping forward imperfectly for sure, but intentionally even amidst the crazy headlines of grievance and finger pointing. And I'll tell you what, the way that I witness these things happening is mostly through what I would call small kindnesses.

It's when leaders of organizations. Think well about their employees and do so even when hard decisions need to be made. We also witness this when people say no to hatred and when we hold people accountable who are doing harmful things. The most important part about this, and this is where I see the tide turning, is more often we're holding people accountable without hating the haters.

This is really hard to do. I know it's really hard for me, but it's so much at the core of when we think about turning the tide away from mean-spirited, finger pointing to accountability, but without the meanness, this isn't happening everywhere. It's not happening all the time. There are days that I don't feel it.

I bet it's hard for you at times. Whether we realize it or not, I think what's happening is a wifeing of something new  and and maybe it's not new. I think notion of kindness of making the world a better place, well that's been a staple of life and society for thousands and thousands of years. It's just that within the noise of the last 10 plus years or so, there's a renewed.

Sense of it's time to, to get back to basics. That's what I think is happening. And to be honest, that's where agency comes in.  In psychology agency is defined as the felt sense that your actions. Actually matter and that they matter regardless of external circumstances. So that's a big tall order, right?

Agency doesn't require certainty and it doesn't require that we control everything in our lives. It does require intentionality. Practice and our active engagement, we can tap into agency best when safety and wellbeing are in place. And that is why for those of us who have our needs met, we need to work hard so that everyone has that felt sense of wellbeing and safety, because then there's a greater likelihood of agency and that's really important.

I also wanna note that. Agency doesn't come from standing above the chaos or ducking from it, although sometimes those are helpful coping mechanisms and can be really important for basic safety. But when we're talking about agency, it really  📍 comes from staying in relationship with ourselves, with others, and with reality as it is.

  Here's the other thing I've learned, and I wanna mention this because I don't wanna come across as being super naive or Pollyanna agency, is it's not a mood. It's not a new age concept tied to feeling joyful all the time, or it doesn't just happen because we do daily positive affirmations, although I should say.

I'm in favor of more joy, more of the time, and I do have some positive mantras that I say every day, but that's not where agency comes from. It actually is bolstered by those things. The deeper truth is that. We don't have to feel hopeful to feel agency. We don't even need to feel energized. Sometimes we might be tired and we don't even have to feel optimistic.

Sometimes we just need sober reality, like, oh my God, this is what's happening. But some of the most high agency moments in history were enacted by leaders who were scared, who were. Grieving for things not going well who were actually freaking exhausted, and yet they chose to act anyway. Harriet Tubman comes to mind.

Honestly, there's thousands of examples. You can probably pinpoint people around you who acted out of a place of agency when they weren't actually doing really well. And another example is our immigrant rights activists who literally stand in the way of illegal deportation I mean, that's a scary thing to do.

Most often agency doesn't show up in history books and social media usually doesn't capture it because it's something that comes from the inside out. It looks and feels like staying in conversation when you really wanna escape. Or taking three deep breaths before reacting when you're at your boiling point, or, and this is the big one, refusing to dehumanize the other even when it would feel totally justified.

It's saying yes to  📍 ourselves even when our nervous system wants us to shut down or to strike back.  I wanna share a very personal story about how I learned about agency. I'm still learning, but this experience I had was so important in my life and I can be a very slow learner. So this lesson stretched over a couple of years.

And as a backdrop for most of my life, agency to me meant mastery and a belief that if I tried hard enough, somehow I could bend my body or even most of my life circumstances to my will. I mean, I'm a Scorpio, we're willful people. That belief collided mightily with reality. I was playing basketball with friends when I heard my ACL rep.

That's a major ligament in our knees. This was my right knee. It was an unmistakable sound, and I knew something bad happened. Eventually, I underwent what should have been a routine ACL. Reconstruction surgery. Turned out the surgeon had a very, very bad day and placed the new ligament at the wrong angle, and that set in motion.

Years of pain, another surgery, hours and hours, and thousands of dollars of physical therapy, and also a very stubborn resistance. To my situation, I kept asking myself, why can't I will my way back to who I was up until then? If there was one thing I knew I could control, it was my physical body. It wasn't like I didn't get sick, but.

I just had this confidence about my body and my physicality. I mean, I was strong. I was an elite athlete in college. I could master pretty much any sport, although probably the wrong team would not want me in the boat because I'm short.  To be honest. I love being that super physical, strong person who was super confident walking through the world.

Suddenly I had a very different reality. To adapt to and I did not like it. What I didn't understand then was that the injury wasn't just about my knee. It was to my identity and the narrow sense of agency that I had wrapped a big part of my identity around. I stayed locked in a quiet battle with the circumstances over three or four years, honestly, trying harder to fix my knee and telling myself.

That acceptance of a permanently altered name and giving up a core part of who I was. Eventually a friend sat me down and said, and this was huge. Lee, it's time that you accept your body as it is and embrace it for what it can do. You are healthy, you are able, you are capable. Fine. The ways. This is a blessing and not a curse.

And as blunt as that was, it landed, I finally got it. Letting go of control actually gave me freedom to make friends with my newly configured body, and that meant I had to go inside and think about who I was. What did I stand for? What did I care for? Regardless of what my body could do, that was very powerful.

 I gave up a few things. I stopped wearing heels, which to be honest, was not a sacrifice. I gave up sports that I loved. no more skiing, tennis, or basketball, but I focused on other hobbies that I love, like golf cycling, and I can still dance. I learned to love my knee for being resilient given the trauma it had endured, and I gave myself a little grace in that regard as well.

The lesson learned was that agency is an internal mindset. It is about  📍 both letting go and finding grounding and acceptance regardless of circumstances.

 There's a line from Martin Luther King that feels especially alive right now as I'm talking, and it goes like this. You've probably heard it before. Darkness cannot drive out. Darkness. Only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out Hate. Only love can do that. It's a powerful quote, but it's often misunderstood as softness, but it's not.

For King love was moral courage in action. It was agency without hatred. During these times, which are kind of crazy, low agency leadership can give momentary certainty to people who feel fearful. It can be contagious. But the other side, and this is where the tide is turning, is that high agency leadership is also contagious and it can spread like wildfire through teams, through families, and through communities.

You don't have to be a big highfalutin leader. You can just be someone who goes to work as a part of a team and exerts your leadership by doing your job well. That's the good news. We all have the capacity to spread agency, agency interrupts cycles of harm by refusing to become a part of that harm. So as we move into 2026 and through it, this is the invitation.

I'll keep extending to you and I'll extend it to me again and again. To stay high agency as possible and to give yourself grace for all the times you need a little break to reset and reground and find that internal locus of control, which is agency. This is not soft work. It's the work that allows leaders, people from all walks of life, members of teams and communities near and far to endure.

What can feel like in settling times, and it can help us all play a critical role every day to help turn the tide to a more vibrant and high frequency world. I'm just gonna put my stake in the ground on that. We don't have to have it all figured out, but we do need to stay engaged and support each other along the way.

I'm really glad you're here. I'm glad you're waiting into high agency with me and so many others. This is literally what it means to be in the space in between. Wishing you a wonderful year. Thanks for joining me today. Bye for now. 

 📍 I hope you. Enjoyed this episode of the space in between podcast. If. If you did, please hit the like button and leave a review. Wherever you listen to the show. And check out the space. Space in between.com website, where you can also leave me a message.