Beyond the Stuck: How Problems Pave the Way for Growth and Capacity
- Maria Malmgren
- Jul 10
- 4 min read
If you've worked with me, you know I believe leadership isn't confined to the workplace. It's a way of being, a conscious choice we make in every aspect of our lives.
Yet, often, leadership doesn't feel bold or visionary. Instead, it feels like pushing big rocks uphill, or like a van, stuck in the snow.
It can feel like endlessly circling the same issues – a lot of hard work and conversation, but no energy, no momentum, no real forward movement.
Sound familiar?
Problems and feeling stuck are not only normal; they're an inevitable part of life, leadership, and teamwork.
What if, instead, we welcomed these moments as an invitation to pause, lean in, and truly take stock?
Because what really matters is how we respond.
In my coaching practice, I guide individuals and teams from feeling stuck to achieving clarity, alignment, and sustainable action.
Currently, my clients are navigating a multitude of challenges – from relationship issues and health concerns to career plateaus, organizational leadership gaps, office politics, mental health declines, and significant life decisions. Through coaching, they are gaining valuable insights and choosing to take powerful actions, such as:
Through our work, clients are empowered to:
Noticing the issue, the problem, the stuckness, earlier
Moving past the 'victim trap' more quickly
Taking more accountability for their part and contribution
Holding themselves with compassion as they consider it all with increased detachment
Asking themselves what’s important for them and how they want to show up
Not blaming others or taking it all so personally
Expanding their 'accordion of options' – moving from seeing one or two possibilities to recognizing many
Developing a variety of helpful and healthy coping strategies, and
Trusting themselves (and others) to navigate challenges and make the right decisions.
These invaluable tools are often learned because clients encounter issues and get stuck. The key difference is their decision to reach out for support, driven by a desire to:
know themselves better,
understand their peers differently,
communicate more honestly while still holding empathy for the other, and
do all this and more, in alignment with their values and from a place of strengths.
To help my clients achieve the above, I continue to learn and acquire new personal and team development tools. And like any professional with new, powerful tools, (vroom, vroom vroom …) I'm genuinely excited about my recent learnings and certifications. These new approaches expand how I can support my clients' transformations and shifts.
While each of these tools offers a distinct approach, they all share a common goal: helping you see the problem, understand its inherent value, and ultimately get unstuck.
Everything DiSC Assessment
Everything DiSC® offers a practical and compassionate lens to understand behavioural styles, your own and others’. Whether I’m coaching one person or a full team, DiSC helps us to:
Understand their preferred way of working
Appreciate their unique differences in style, pace, and focus
Communicate and adapt more skillfully to others
Because when we stop taking others’ behaviors personally and start seeing them as patterns we can work with, we become more flexible, less reactive, and significantly more effective. This is how true capacity grows.
The Five Behaviors of a Cohesive Team
Based on Patrick Lencioni’s model, this assessment is powerful for individuals and teams that want to build trust, navigate and even embrace conflict, and stay focused on collective results and aren’t quite sure how.
The Five Behaviors assessment measures how well I or my team are able to create:
Trust
Healthy conflict
Commitment
Accountability
Results
By naming what's working and what's hindering progress, we can initiate the right conversations. Conversations that move us forward. This work isn't just about solving problems; it's about building the muscle for evolving together.
And last but not least, Systemic Team Coaching
Sometimes it's hard to know what’s stuck ~ me? My team? Or is it pressure points in the system we are part of. As a Certified Systemic Team Coach, I help teams zoom out to see the bigger picture:
Who are our key stakeholders?
What’s our purpose and what value are we here to create for them?
How are our current dynamics helping, or hindering, that purpose?
This approach builds awareness of team roles, relationships, and gets us talking about the purpose beyond the room. It helps surface hidden patterns and supports us in making conscious, coordinated shifts. When we, our team starts seeing ourselves systemically, capacity opens up. As does impact. As do our results.
These tools, along with my other approaches, provide insight, structure, and a framework for empowering you to navigate complexity with greater clarity and choice.
Most importantly, they cultivate capacity:
Capacity for reflection
Capacity for more honest conversations
Capacity for aligned action
Within ourselves and each other.
When we as individuals and our teams have more capacity, we show up differently. We make decisions with greater confidence. We move through tension instead of avoiding it.
We lead with intention, not reactivity. We no longer fear the real or metaphoric snow storms and heat domes because we know we will somehow find our way through it.
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