For the last several years of my corporate career, I was waiting for a version of my organisation that never came.

It always felt reasonable to wait. There was always a reason to believe things were about to settle. A new CEO would arrive with a new vision, and for a few months the air would change — this would be the beginning. Then came the restructure that was going to fix what the last one hadn't. Then another CEO. Then another restructure. Each one arrived wearing the language of a fresh start.

And I stayed, because hope is patient and I am loyal, and because the next version always seemed close enough to be worth waiting for.

Then the merger came. And I understood, with a clarity that almost embarrassed me, that the merger didn't mean the restructures were ending. It meant years more of them. The beginning I'd been waiting for wasn't late. It was never coming. I had been mistaking a pattern for a phase.

That was the moment something in me turned.

Hope, evidence, and habit

Here's what I've come to understand about waiting — in my own case, and in the cases of nearly every senior leader I now work with.

We tell ourselves we're being patient. Patience is a virtue; it feels like maturity, like faith, like not giving up too soon. But underneath most patience are three very different things wearing the same coat.

There is hope — the belief that the situation could improve. Hope is about potential. It looks forward.

There is evidence — what the situation has actually done, repeatedly, over time. Evidence looks backward, and it doesn't flatter.

And there is habit — staying simply because you've stayed, because leaving requires a decision and staying requires none.

The trouble is that hope and habit both feel like patience. Only evidence tells you which one you're actually running on. And most of us never stop to check the evidence, because the hope is so much more pleasant to live inside.

For years, my hope said: the next reorg will be the one that works. My evidence — five restructures deep — said something I didn't want to hear. I just wasn't listening to it yet.

The question that changes the waiting

The shift, when it came, wasn't a burst of courage. It was a change of question.

I stopped asking "When will this get better?" — a question that keeps you facing the organisation, waiting on it, handing it authorship of your future.

And I started asking "What am I actually waiting for — and has it ever once arrived?"

That second question is unkind in the best way. It moves you from potential to pattern. It asks you to look at what has happened, not what might. And when I looked honestly, the answer was plain: I had spent years being the faithful steward of someone else's beginning — implementing other people's fresh starts, absorbing other people's restructures — while quietly postponing my own.

I decided I no longer wanted to be the steward of a beginning. I wanted to be in charge of one.

What I did with the answer

I'd love to tell you it was a leap. It wasn't — it was a build.

I'd realised, somewhere in all those reorgs, that the part of the work I loved most had stopped being the strategy and started being the people — the conversations where someone saw themselves differently and moved. So I followed that thread deliberately. Within a year I had trained, become ICF certified, and launched my own practice with real clients.

Not because I was reckless. Because I had finally let the evidence outweigh the hope — and discovered that the beginning I'd been waiting for an organisation to hand me was one I could author myself.

That is the whole of what I now do with senior leaders: help them tell the difference between a situation that is genuinely turning and one they are simply hoping will. The first is worth your patience. The second is quietly spending your life.

I think of one client — a VP made redundant — who was ready to wait until after the holidays to even begin, certain nothing would move until the new year. That certainty was habit, not evidence. So instead of waiting, he acted: updated how he presented himself, and started the conversations he'd assumed were pointless before January. He was in three active conversations for senior roles before the holiday had even arrived.

The version of the situation he was waiting for — a "better time" — was never going to arrive. The better time was the moment he stopped waiting for it.

The reframe

So here is the question I'd leave you with — the same one that turned me:

The version of this you're waiting for — has it ever, even once, actually arrived?

If it has, wait well; some things are worth the patience.

But if you've been telling yourself next time for longer than you'd like to admit, it may not be patience you're practising. It may be habit, wearing hope's coat. And the beginning you keep waiting to be given is almost always one you're allowed to start yourself.

If that question landed somewhere real, my free 5-day course — Become the Professional Others Can't Ignore — is where I'd begin. It's built for leaders ready to stop waiting and start authoring what's next.