As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more aware of how much my situation impacts my wellbeing. The space I’m in. The place I call home. The people around me. All of it influences how I think, how I feel, and how I show up.
I’ve also become more willing to ask whether something needs to change instead of assuming I just need to work harder.
Angela Duckworth’s book, Situated: Find the People and Places That Bring Out Your Best, gave me language for this. The researcher who helped us understand grit now asks us to consider how our surroundings can help us put that grit to good use.
One question from the book has stayed with me:
“Can we learn to worship strategy as much as strength?”
For those of us accustomed to pushing through, that is a question worth sitting with.
1. Situational Awareness: Go Beyond Grit
We’ve written quite a bit about grit at Horizon Point. In Leaders, Set Manageable Goals to Lead and Run Well, I shared how breaking marathon training into smaller pieces helped make a big goal manageable. In Open the Door to Growth, Grit and Yourself, Emily connected perseverance and self-awareness with a workplace that encourages people to grow.
In Mommas Maintaining Grit?, I wrestled with what perseverance looked like while caring for a sick child and trying to meet work commitments. My husband, in-laws, and team helped make that week possible. I also questioned whether grit leaves enough room to reevaluate our goals and shift focus toward what matters in a particular season.
Looking back, I can see situational awareness in that story. The demands changed, and so did the support and priorities I needed. Passion and perseverance were still there, even when they looked different from what a quiz might measure.
Together, these pieces point toward the importance of the conditions surrounding our effort.
Duckworth takes that idea further in Situated. We often focus on willpower at the point between a thought and a response: resist the distraction, choose the better behavior, make yourself do the hard thing.
She encourages us to move to the left. Before the thought comes the situation. What could we change there to make the behavior we want easier to repeat?
If you want to focus, where is your phone? If you want to exercise, how easy is it to get out the door? If you want your team to speak honestly, what happens when someone raises a concern?
As Duckworth writes:
“A little willpower goes a long way when you use it to get situated first.”
For leaders, this means examining what surrounds the behavior we’re asking for. Our calendars, meeting practices, relationships, and responses to mistakes all shape what people do next.
What in your situation is helping you become who you want to be? What is making it harder?
2. Situational Agency: Do Something About It
Awareness gives us a starting point. Agency asks us to act on it.
Four ideas from the book stood out to me.
Set Up Your Space
Align where you are and what is around you with your goals.
This can be as simple as putting the book you want to read within reach or finding a quiet place for work that requires concentration. At work, it might mean making the tools people need easier to access or protecting time to finish work between meetings.
We ask people to manage their time while filling their calendars. We ask for collaboration without creating opportunities for connection. Getting situated means paying attention to whether the space and routines support the goal.
Pick Your Peers
One of my favorite examples is the commitment-card practice used by the De La Salle football team.
Players write their goals on an index card and commit to a named teammate. They exchange cards, and that teammate observes their follow-through during the next week. At the following team gathering, the partner reports on whether the commitments were met.
The card makes the goal visible. The relationship gives someone a reason to follow through.
Think about what this could look like on your team. Each person identifies one specific commitment for the week and shares it with a peer. They check in, offer support, and have an honest conversation about what happened.
That kind of accountability takes trust. It also gives us a practical way to help each other do what we said we would do.
Make Mentorship the Mode
Get one. Thank one.
Who helps you see possibilities you might miss on your own? Who offers perspective when you’re too close to a situation to see it clearly?
Seek out that person. Make time for the relationship. And thank the people who have already played that role in your life.
Then consider who needs the same from you. Mentorship can happen in ordinary conversations when we ask a thoughtful question, share what we’ve learned, or help someone recognize a strength they haven’t yet seen.
Champion Cultural Carriers
Pay attention to the people who make a culture’s values visible through their everyday behavior. Who models curiosity? Who welcomes someone new? Who makes it safe to ask for help?
Support those people, and examine the norms we accept simply because they are familiar. Status quo bias can keep us in situations long after we’ve stopped asking whether they fit.
This year, my family made a significant change. We moved more than 300 miles from where my husband and I grew up and the only hometown our children had known.
Being hometown kids raising kids in our hometown came with relationships and roots we value. It also came with expectations we had grown accustomed to following.
Moving has given us more margin, more proximity to the things we value and enjoy, and less pressure to conform to what we’ve always conformed to. It has helped us choose more intentionally how we want to live.
A move isn’t everyone’s answer. But questioning a familiar situation can help us see choices we didn’t realize we had.
3. Situational Responsibility: Help Others Get Situated
The book also prompted me to reconsider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
The familiar pyramid makes it easy to imagine we finish with one need and climb to the next. Duckworth revisits a more fluid understanding: Maslow did not draw that pyramid, and our needs don’t disappear as we grow. We continue to need safety, belonging, esteem, and opportunities to develop. Different needs come to the foreground at different times.
That matters at work. Someone can be ambitious and still need rest. A capable leader can still need belonging. A person doing meaningful work can still be worried about paying the bills.
Duckworth’s discussion of self-transcendence takes this further. Beyond developing our own potential is the opportunity to use it in service of something larger than ourselves.
That is situational citizenship: helping create conditions in which others can thrive, too.
We don’t all have the same freedom to change our circumstances. Leaders have a particular responsibility to consider the situations they create for other people. Can we offer clearer expectations, access to a mentor, room to learn, or a more sustainable workload?
At Horizon Point, growing people means paying attention to both the person and the workplace around them. Getting situated can help us bring out our best. Leadership asks us to extend that opportunity to others.
What lights you up? Go let it shine so others can see you—and do the same.
