Using Difficult Circumstances to Become a More Impactful NGO Leader

Are you feeling overwhelmed by uncertainty in the humanitarian and development sector?

As a leader in this field, you're no stranger to unpredictability. But when circumstances feel out of your hands, it can lead to paralysis, anxiety, and doubt about your next steps. In this episode, I share a powerful shift in perspective that can help you break free from fear, refocus, and take meaningful action—even in times of crisis.

Here's what you'll discover in this episode:

• Why resistance to reality creates more suffering—and how acceptance leads to empowerment.
• How to reframe challenges as opportunities to grow stronger, instead of feeling like a victim of circumstances.
• Practical strategies to move from overwhelm to clarity, so you can lead with confidence despite external uncertainty.

Don’t let difficult circumstances hold you back—press play now and learn how to take control as a modern NGO leader!

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Want to know how to lead better?  It starts by understanding your leadership style.   To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.  Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.

Are you ready? Let's get started.

Hello, my aspiring modern NGO leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. You may have noticed that the last two or three weeks I have been somewhat absent. I haven't sent out as many emails or really recorded new podcasts. And the reason for that is It's probably in line with a lot of what you all are experiencing right now.

[00:01:00] And that is, I was overwhelmed. I was feeling very anxious and waking up every morning around 3 a. m. wondering what was going to happen next. And, right now it's February 2025. We are about a month in to the new Trump administration in the U S and it has come with a lot of chaos. And for me, especially as an American, this has had a lot of levels

of anxiety and panic and fear. And I wanted to record this for you because I'm now in a much better place to be able to do so. And also to be able to share some things that have really helped me move forward to be able to take this type of action and help others and also help myself if I'm going to be completely honest, [00:02:00] and I think that these things will also help you.

And a lot of it has to do with perspective, yeah, like the way that we are looking at what's happening right now, not just in the US, but globally in humanitarian and development work. And I hope that you will take some of what I'm saying today and try it and use it for your own benefit.

So I have found myself, as I said, feeling rise of anxiety and panic and fear. And it usually has something to do with after I see some kind of a news update about what's happening in the U S or hearing from a friend who's experiencing something and it has been very difficult and all of this [00:03:00] fear and anxiety has really made me paralyzed.

It's made me unfocused. It's made me feel, in a state of just not sure what to do next and really feeling, a lot of, a lot of, uncertainty. So recently I have made a slight shift that has helped me feel a lot calmer and get out of the anxiety more quickly. As I said, I'm going to share that with you now, but I think it's important to really think about an order to better understand how do we get out of this or how do we move forward?

We need to first look at what is it that makes us suffer during these types of time periods. And in humanitarian and development work, we have a lot [00:04:00] of time periods like this, right? When there are things that are happening that are not necessarily in our control, for example, natural disasters, or even manmade disasters and conflicts, or the changing political environment that's turning the tide against humanitarian and development work and so on.

And I think what makes us suffer. Are several things. And one is that we feel out of control, like we feel that things are happening to us and that we don't have a say in those things. And that can make us feel threatened and anxious of the future or anxious of what's going to happen next and afraid.

And so we become victims to our circumstances. We feel that there's nothing we can do [00:05:00] and we might even essentially give up, which is kind of what I, I don't know if I phrased that I gave up over the last two weeks, but I definitely felt lost and like there was not much I could do. So with everything happening right now, you know, there's a lot of layoffs going on, a lot of project closures.

But there are also a lot of things that happen all the time that are not within our control. Natural disasters, manmade insecurity, so on. All of this can feel very threatening and that also the other thing that I think causes a lot of suffering as when we think this should not be happening. This is not part of the plan or this is happening to me and there's nothing I can do about it.

So I have also felt that way, over the last few weeks out [00:06:00] of control, like there's nothing I can do about the political situation, for example, in the U S that, , it's,, Seems to be going down this place where of course I can look at what can I do in terms of calling senators and so on, but it feels like the bigger picture is out of my control.

And then I remember what I teach my students on my course becoming the modern NGO leader and that modern leaders. It's part of our role is to take responsibility for our results in our life and our work. And that we can not control everything, but we can definitely focus on what is within our control and we can accept what is happening

to us and empower ourselves to make the most of a [00:07:00] situation. This is what we do when we use coaching, we help the human brain get out of the fight or flight, get out of the fear and anxiety and go into a more useful place to act from and be motivated in a way that we feel inspired. To move forward. So rather than something happening to us, we look for how it is happening for us or what we want from it.

And we decide intentionally how we want to benefit from it. And I know that sounds kind of strange, but it's definitely possible. And I'll explain why. But before we can decide how we want to benefit from something happening, we first need to accept that it is happening. If we resist, then we're not going to face it full on and we're not going to be able to take as much action that will be [00:08:00] useful to moving forward.

So if you're telling yourself that this should not be happening or this is not what I had planned or resisting that whatever is happening is happening, then you are not accepting it. You are denying it. And I just think it's good to just at least acknowledge not that you have to force yourself to accept it, but at least accept that you are denying it.

Because when we deny something is happening, for example, we think, Oh, I should have, I should have had another year of funding. This cannot be happening right now. Or I should have had the ability to finish the project without a natural disaster occurring.

When we think that way and we don't accept what's actually happening, then we're not going to be acting from a place of, accepting reality. We're going to be, taking action from a [00:09:00] place of resisting, and that's just not as useful. So it's been really hard for me to accept that my country, the United States

Torrey: is starting to be seen as untrustworthy. And I get it. I understand why, but it's definitely hard to accept that. And it's hard to accept that the U S government would lack the empathy to, phase humanitarian funding out over time rather than Cut it suddenly and that the U. S. government would cut thousands of jobs of hardworking people, including its own citizens.

These have been very hard realities for me to accept. But the thing is As we know in the humanitarian world, there is always good and there's always bad. There is always going to be the bad. We [00:10:00] don't have one without the other. And it is interesting how our resistance to what is happening, to believe that it should be happening differently

or that this should not be happening is what causes a lot of our suffering. It's not that if we accept reality, it means that you are giving up. It's actually the opposite. It means that when you accept what's happening, what's actually happening, then you are able to

decide what to do next and to move forward and decide from a more rational place and to take back what's in within your control. So humans, as we all should know, have an incredible ability to experience hard things. We are very, very resilient. However, some people are more resilient than others. And that is partly because [00:11:00] they have probably experienced more hard things over their lifetime because resilience is like a muscle.

If you're not used to using it, then you're not going to be as resilient as someone else who has been through a lot of hardships. I also like to remember all the resilience demonstrated by the incredible people that I have met or worked with in my over 12 years in humanitarian and development work, people who have endured incredible hardships and still came through and thrived afterwards, people who are now even more than they were before my heroes.

And who I empathize with even more. For example, the people I work with in Syria and Afghanistan who tell me about the lengths they have to go through just to transfer [00:12:00] money, to be able to do a project or to bring programs to women and how they have to use technology to be able to do so in a way that's not detected by the Taliban.

Or the time I was in South Sudan and all the instability, which was a way of life there. And when my team members, after the civil war broke out in 2013, fled to the bush and hid because they were afraid to be killed. So regardless of what you want to happen and you think should be happening, life is going to happen the way it does.

Changes are always happening and they're always coming. We know that we work in humanitarian and development work and the idea that it always works out how we want it to go is an illusion. [00:13:00] We will always face challenges. It's just part of life and accepting that is actually very empowering. We can decide that these challenges are happening

to us and become victims, or we can decide that they're going to happen for us and take back our power to be able to decide how do we want to benefit and gain from this experience? For example, look at Viktor Frankl or Nelson Mandela, how many years they spent in prison that they could have become victims and just withered away.

How many other countless victims of concentration camps died around Viktor Frankl in part, because they became victims that they didn't have the purpose that he writes about in man' search for meaning? [00:14:00] But instead, Viktor Frankl and Nelson Mandela chose to focus on how to use that experience to become stronger.

And they emerged from their imprisonment to use those experiences to become the world leaders that we now remember today.

So what about you? Is there an area where you are saying this should not be happening or that you find yourself resisting? And how can you make this difficult situation, something that can be happening for you rather than to you and something that will make you a better, stronger version of yourself?

This is like a game leveling up. We're leveling up now and you can decide how you want to level up or if you opt out, then you can become a victim to the [00:15:00] circumstances. So we can't always choose the way life goes. There will always be difficult situations. That is reality. But without the difficult, we would not have the easy.

They must both exist in order for one to be true. You must have the bad to have the good. So accepting what is, and then choosing how you want to use it for your own growth can be one of the most powerful experiences of your life. For me I am using this difficult time to lean into my own emotions and to be able to experience living more fully and living bigger because as I become more comfortable with experiencing Uncomfortable emotions,

I can start to [00:16:00] take bigger risks and make bigger impact in my work.

It may seem impossible right now, but believe me, you can choose to use your difficult situation to become a stronger, better version of yourself. It's simply a matter of accepting, deciding and then acting. This is how as a modern NGO leader, you can regain control.

And with it, the clarity on what to do next. All right, my friends until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership [00:17:00] style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.

Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!