LEADING VISIONARIES

Expanded Notes

Clarifying the ideas that move too fast in conversation.

Podcasts reward breadth over depth. My conversation with Anjel ranged across identity, transition, and what an executive coach actually does in the room, but the question of desire, which is the engine underneath all the rest of it, got moved through very quickly. I want to stay with it here.

The basic point is the one the Lacanian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati makes more clearly than almost anyone: we do not own our desire. Our desire owns us. The ordinary picture, the one most people carry, is that I am a self who has desires. I generate them. I direct them. I choose among them. Building on the framework developed by Jacques Lacan, Recalcati flips that. The subject does not possess desire; the subject is moved by it. Desire arrives from somewhere we cannot fully see (early relationships, the languages we were raised inside, the structures of the family before us), and it shapes us before we get a vote. We wake up wanting things we did not decide to want.

This is harder to accept for executives than for almost any other group I work with, and it is worth saying why. The leader's professional identity is built on agency: decisions made, outcomes delivered, strategies executed. To be told that the most important engine of a life - the wanting - was running before any of that machinery was installed is, for some leaders, intolerable. They have organized their entire self-presentation around being the author of their choices. Recalcati is suggesting, gently, that they are also a character in a story they did not write.

The interesting move is what comes after the recognition. Recalcati does not stop at "you do not author your desire" and leave you there. He says: precisely because you did not author it, you have to take it on. The work is not to escape the forces that shape you. It is to recognize the desire that has been driving the bus and start treating it as your own, even though you did not start it. Authentic agency, in his vocabulary, begins by admitting you did not start the engine. You can still steer.

This matters in midlife in a particular way. Most of the leaders at this stage have spent decades executing a desire they never examined. The desire was inherited, ambient, family-shaped: the immigrant son's desire to be safe, the academic's desire to be exceptional, the founder's desire to be irreplaceable. It worked, and it got them where they are. Then, somewhere in their forties or fifties, the desire that drove them stops being the same desire that wants to drive them now. The engine is still running. The wheels are still turning. The destination, however, has quietly changed, and the leader is the last one to know.

Recalcati offers another distinction here, and it sharpens this point. There is a face of desire that is restless and oriented, the singular pull that makes some lives matter to the people living them, the thing that makes you “you”. And there is another face, which the consumer culture around us mistakes for freedom: desire as pure sliding, the next thing and the next thing, every object a placeholder for an arrival that never comes. The treadmill, in short. Most leaders who arrive at coaching describing exhaustion are not on the first kind of desire. They are on the second, and they have been on it for years without naming the difference between the two.

The work is not to escape desire (impossible, and a mistake even if it were possible). The work is to listen to which one has been driving, and to decide, slowly and in conversation, whether you still want to go where it has been taking you.
If something in this lands, it is worth noticing. It’s easy to believe that these leaders arrive at this kind of conversation because they have failed. It is rather the opposite. They arrive because the desire that organized the first half of their professional life has done its work, and the second half is being asked to belong to a different one. That second desire is not always easy to find. It rarely surfaces alone. But it is rarely missing, either. It is usually waiting to be heard by someone whose role is not to stabilize the version of you that is now in question.