I was a kid living overseas, far from everything familiar, trying to figure out where I fit. Recess was a sanctuary. The tetherball court. The monkey bars. The unspoken rules of a playground where you proved something about yourself every single day just by showing up.
One afternoon, I decided I was done with ordinary. I had watched my peers perform a trick on the monkey bars — skip a bar, reach further than the next grip, grab the one after it. I had studied it. I had rehearsed it in my mind. I was certain I understood it.
I reached. I missed. I fell headfirst toward the ground, arms flailing, instincts firing too late. Both bones in my right forearm snapped clean through.
I want to tell you the fall was dramatic. It wasn’t. It was fast, quiet, and completely of my own making. And I have spent years understanding that the lesson wasn’t about being more careful. The lesson was about what happens in the space between letting go and landing — and whether you have the preparation, the self-awareness, and the honesty to reckon with that space before you reach again.
That space has a name. Scholars call it a liminal space — from the Latin limen, threshold. It is the gap between what was and what hasn’t arrived yet. And it is the most important, most avoided, most misunderstood territory in leadership. For me, the liminal space has shown up in my life in self-doubt, uncertainty, and judgment. Whether it’s an opportunity I dream of or a transition away from a friendship or something familiar, the liminal space is also a point of transformation.
Consider this…what if we stopped treating the fall as the failure, and started treating the space itself as the teacher? What if the threshold wasn’t something to survive, but something to study? Because the liminality isn’t what breaks us — the refusal to reckon with it is. The leaders who emerge transformed from uncertainty aren’t the ones who escaped the space fastest. They’re the ones who were honest enough to stay in it long enough to learn what it’s trying to teach them.
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