A very successful coaching way-station is when your client clearly sees that they are co-creating the world they are living in.  "By Me" in Michael Beckwith's Model of the Four Stages of Consciousness.  They see that outcomes aren't just happening to them.  They are co-creating them.  Getting to this place relieves a lot of suffering.  I know it did for me.

While being stuck in victimhood is awful, people can get strident and stuck here too.  They believe it is all on them.  That Fate is What You Make.

But the world and the people and events around you are also shaping you and the choices you make. The people who agree with you, the people who challenge you, the successes, the difficulties...are changing you moment to moment, in ways you are not even aware of. In short, you are the writer, making choices, and at the same time, being written and shaped by everything around you.

"If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Carl Sagan

This is not just psychological gobbledygook. There are echos of this perspective from diverse schools of thought.

In Moby Dick, Captain Ahab waxes: "Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike."

Now talk of God tends to make a lot of people nervous, especially when it's bat-droppings crazy people like Captain Ahab doing the talking.

Here is another view, from the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: "If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are."

Still too much woo-woo for you? How about the late, physicist and card-carrying empiricist, Carl Sagan: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."

What did Sagan mean by this? Look at all the forces acting on a wave on the ocean: underwater structures, changing ocean temperatures, atmospheric conditions, wind, tides, gravitational pulls, lunar forces, planetary motion, and on and on. A single wave literally comes into and goes out of existence because of all those forces. If asked, "when did that wave begin and when will it end," I think Sagan would say: It began when the universe began and it will cease when the universe ceases.

The complex, fast-moving times we live in demand new leaders who know they are the writer and the written. A leader in a meeting might have a sense of what s/he wants to do. S/he doesn't think: these opposing viewpoints are distracting and annoying, how do I impose my will? S/he thinks: these other stakeholders are, not only, not against me, they are me! And I need to let them shape what I do and how I do it.

The new leaders then are radically inclusive. They are willing to release the tiller because they recognize that Leadership is a role in a field of complexity, not a fixed position. They follow the flow and let the voices and perspectives of emergent leadership take over. They know there is a win-for-all somewhere in the mix and they tack towards it.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." Here's a good one to start with: just as light is both a particle and a wave, you are the writer and the written.

You don't need an extended retreat or a cosmic epiphany to see that you are the writer...making conscious choices... and the written...shaped by people, events and forces. seen and unseen.

The first step is just to stop acting as if it's not true.

Dennis Adsit, Ph.D. is the President of Adsum Insights and designer of The First 100 Days and Beyond, a consulting service for leaders in transition who need to get off to the best possible start in their new jobs.