The Leadership Action Cycle: A Guide to Leading Through Societal Crises Without Freezing, Fumbling, or Failing
You’re a leader. The world is on fire. What’s your first reaction?
In these turbulent times, the pressure to act is relentless. Yet many leaders find themselves stuck either frozen in indecision or barreling ahead without reflection.
It’s not that these leaders lack strategy, or vision, or information, or intelligence, or even desire.
The real culprit is in how leaders’ nervous systems respond under crisis, creating barriers that prevent effective leadership action.
Why Leaders Struggle to Take Effective Action in Crisis
Our bodies and nervous systems are incredibly intelligent, having evolved sophisticated adaptations to keep us safe. These mechanisms operate largely below our conscious awareness, serving as a powerful, positive survival strategy in times of crisis.
When the stakes are high, your body and mind in service of survival, will use lessons learned in the past to guide your behavior. These adaptive responses, though they may sometimes seem misaligned with modern challenges, are fundamentally positive mechanisms designed to protect you. Our actions during stressful times like these are not about not caring or lacking ability or willpower—it’s about the way stress rewires our responses in service of self-protection.
As a result, for many leaders, our default reaction in the face of big challenges is to either overthink every move or act too quickly, neither of which typically represent our best, most effective responses as leaders.
The Action/Sensitivity Cycle inspired by Kurtz, 1990’s Hakomi Method reveals why some leaders:
Freeze and avoid hard decisions.
React in ways that don’t create real change.
Fail to sustain their efforts through to completion.
Are unable to recognize when they’ve done enough.
If this sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone—understanding these responses is the first step to transforming them into effective leadership.
Introducing the Effective Action Cycle
Today, we introduce the Effective Action Cycle—a framework inspired by Ron Kurtz’s Hakomi Method. This framework helps leaders like you pinpoint where you’re stuck and turn inaction into purposeful, values-aligned leadership.
Imagine effective action as a cycle of four steps. When leaders are operating at their best, they:
Develop Awareness/Insight: They ask, “What do I need?” and tap into their inner signals. They also look around and ask, “What is needed in my team/my organization/the world right now?” and tap into their external, interpersonal, and systems awareness for the answer.
Respond with Effective Action: They take deliberate steps that address those needs.
Nourish the Need: They ensure that their actions fully meet the underlying requirements.
Experience Relaxation/Satiation: They pause to integrate the success and prepare for the next challenge.
On a personal level, this can look like recognizing your hunger, preparing a meal, eating mindfully, and then enjoying the satisfaction of being nourished.
At work, this might look like identifying a cultural issue facing your team, resolving it effectively and completely, and then taking the team out to celebrate a job well done.
Introducing the Crisis-Response Archetypes: Frozen and Frenetic
Let’s meet two leaders who embody the two extremes of crisis response: Alex and Jordan, two successful leaders who find themselves leading during a major period of upheaval.
Alex is the frozen leader. When a crisis hits, Alex overthinks every detail, gets trapped in analysis paralysis, and misses the subtle signals from within. In short, Alex freezes.
Jordan is the reactive leader. Constantly on high alert and often overwhelmed by the barrage of external stimuli, Jordan jumps into decisions impulsively, rarely pausing to reflect or consider the impact on the team. In short, Jordan jumps into action.
Both archetypes have often been cast in stereotypically gendered roles—Alex as the cautious, introspective, female-bodied leader and Jordan as the bold, impulsive, male-bodied leader—prompting you to reflect on not only upon which patterns resonate with your own experiences, but whether this matches your held stereotypes as well.
Let’s walk with Alex and Jordan through each stage of the Effective Action Cycle to see how their distinct nervous systems shape their reactions—and what they can do to break free from these patterns.
Once we grasp the Effective Action Cycle and the ways our nervous systems respond at each stage, we can begin to work with these innate mechanisms rather than against them. Effective leadership isn’t about forcing action—it’s about tuning into your needs and aligning your responses with the demands of the moment.
Four Barriers to Effective Action – A Guide to Effective Action during Crisis
At every stage of the Effective Action Cycle, leaders encounter distinct challenges that signal where their personal barriers lie. Let’s break down each stage through the experiences of Alex and Jordan, and understand what their reactions reveal about the hurdles they face.
1. Awareness / Experience Insight
Sounds Like: “I Don’t Even Know What I Need”
The Challenge: In crisis mode, having the awareness to recognize necessary signals that something’s amiss is incredibly difficult. Without this clarity, it’s hard to know you need to take action at all.
The Barriers: Leaders may struggle to identify their needs because they are disconnected from their bodily sensations—missing the subtle cues of overwhelm or fear. Conversely, some leaders, overwhelmed by hyperarousal, are unable to process these sensations before becoming inundated, leaving no time to complete the stress response cycle and avoid collapse.
Alex’s Experience: Alex has denied her own needs for so long, she barely recognizes her own internal alarm-bells notifying her she’s burning out. She’s spent so much time pushing through that it’s dulled her ability to feel the subtle cues of overwhelm. Every internal whisper goes unheard, leaving her more exhausted.
Jordan’s Experience: Jordan’s team keeps telling him that they’re struggling. He doesn’t know what to do with this information, and it makes him uncomfortable, so he ignores it.
2. Respond / Take Action:
Sounds Like: “Uhhh…What Do I Do?”
The Challenge: Shifting from awareness to action is a delicate balancing act. Leaders often wrestle with the tension between overanalyzing every option and impulsively leaping into decisions, making it difficult to choose the right course of action.
The Barriers: Leaders may hesitate because past experiences of being criticized for taking initiative have eroded their ability to act spontaneously, while others default to impulsivity when overwhelmed by information.
Alex’s Experience: Alex remembers the last time she took decisive action–her supervisor didn’t agree and chewed her out in front of the whole department. Now, she spends an inordinate amount of time looking for the best possible option. Suddenly, she has too many choices, and faces analysis paralysis. Every potential action is weighed and re-weighed until no decision is made at all.
Jordan’s Experience: When Jordan’s team faces a complex, but not insurmountable challenge. His team presents him with a well-thought out, detailed plan for how to respond. The plan is complex, but effective. It’s too much for Jordan to wrap his head around, so he impulsively makes a decisive, sweeping action that leaves his team flabbergasted.
3. Nourishment / Satisfying the Need:
Sounds Like: “I Can/Can’t Do This Alone”
The Challenge: Taking action is only the first step—ensuring that the action fully meets the underlying need is a different challenge altogether. Leaders often struggle to see their initiatives through to a satisfying completion because they struggle to sustain the efforts or neglect to leverage available support.
The Barriers: Leaders might experience learned helplessness or fear criticism, causing them to avoid seeking support or delegating tasks. Others become overly self-reliant, missing opportunities to accept help even when it’s offered freely.
Alex’s Experience: Alex lands on a plan and is initially excited about the possibilities. A few weeks in, a colleague comes to check in on her, only to learn that Alex has abandoned her plan. She waves off her colleague’s concern, care, offer to help, and empathy. She’s back at square one.
Jordan’s Experience: Jordan decides to plow forward with his plan. When colleagues offer to help, he says he’s got it, though he’s not completely sure he does. He’d never let anyone on his team know, though. He’ll figure it out–he knows that if you want a job done right, you have to do it yourself.
4. Relaxation / Enjoy Satiation:
Sounds Like: “Gotta Keep Moving”
The Challenge: In our culture of relentless busyness, pausing to appreciate your achievements can seem counterintuitive. Yet, without this step, you miss the chance to learn from them, integrate successes, experience the satisfaction of a job well done, and space to recharge.
The Barriers: Leaders often struggle to savor their accomplishments due to constant exhaustion and the relentless push to move on to the next task. This perpetual busyness blocks restorative rest, self-reflection, and the ability to fully process and appreciate completion.
Alex’s Experience: By the time Alex sees her plan to completion, she’s absolutely exhausted. She’s too burnt out to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well done, and too tired to rest. She can’t relax, and she can’t let go.
Jordan’s Experience: As soon as Jordan sees his project through to completion, he’s got another one lined up. He never reflected on the last one, so he’s back to the same shenanigans all over again. He never allows himself the downtime to reflect, integrate his experiences, process his feelings, or savor the reward of completion.
These common barriers remind us that every stage of the Effective Action Cycle is a learning opportunity—one that paves the way for transformation from reactive patterns to deliberate leadership.
Moving from Confused Inaction to Conscious Leadership
The journey from freezing, fumbling, and flailing to effective leadership starts with recognizing where you’re stuck.
Whether you find yourself stuck in Alex’s world of overthinking and paralysis or stuck in Jordan’s realm of relentless activity, the key is to build new neural pathways that allow you to cycle through awareness, action, nourishment, and rest with clarity.
The Leadership Action Cycle is an effective framework for anyone determined to lead with grounded, aligned purpose in an era of constant crisis. It empowers you to tune into your internal signals, make deliberate decisions, and cultivate an environment where both you and your team can thrive.
Ask yourself:
Where do you see yourself right now?
Are you caught in the trap of inaction, or are you sprinting without direction?
If these questions strike a chord, we invite you to take the next right step for you.
This learning series dives deep into each action stage and respective barrier, offering practical strategies and real-world insights to help you evolve from unconscious responses to conscious leadership. If you’d like more support, we’re here for you.
Take The Next Right Step For You
In a world where crises are the norm, your ability to navigate the Leadership Action Cycle can be the difference between being overwhelmed by the chaos or transforming it into opportunity.
If you need help gaining insight or turning that into action, we are here to help.
Our approach ensures you’re not just surviving the crisis—you’re thriving and leading the change.
When you learn to work with your nervous system rather than against it, you unlock a profound source of energy and creativity. This approach not only elevates your leadership but also aligns with your highest calling to create positive change.
We’re here in your corner, ready to help you rewrite your playbook with intention, purpose, and the courage to break free from outdated habits. Get in touch today to see what we can do for you.
Embrace the cycle.
Embrace your power.
The future is waiting for leaders like you.
