There were flip charts everywhere and I was getting it wrong.
Not in the way you wrestle with a word when you’re trying to find the right one for a crossword puzzle or a thank-you note. I mean the kind of wrong where you wake up at 3 a.m. and the problem is already there, waiting for you. The kind where you find yourself staring out a window in the middle of a conversation because your brain is still pulling on a thread you haven’t been able to unravel yet.
The word is reckoning.
I’ve been building a new keynote — working title Reckonings: Moments of Truth That Change Everything — and it’s also the working title of my next book, which is currently being pitched to publishers. The way I typically work through a big idea is by testing it out loud, with real people, before I trust it on a stage. So this week, I was standing in a room with a thought partner — someone whose job it is to push back, ask harder questions, and refuse to let me get away with anything soft.
The walls were covered in flip charts. There were marker scribbles and half-formed diagrams everywhere. I kept drawing shapes trying to show him what I was seeing in my head. He kept asking me the same question.
“What problem are you trying to solve?”
I didn’t have a clean answer. Not at first. And that’s the place where the real thinking happens — in the gap between what you think you know and what you can actually say out loud without wincing.
Here’s what I eventually said.
I think a lot of people are stuck. Not in a dramatic, crisis-level way. In a quiet way. In a this is just how it is way. They’re going through their routines, fulfilling their roles, checking the boxes, and somewhere along the way the spark dims. You fall into patterns. You inherit expectations. You accept identities that fit you once but may have stopped fitting a long time ago. Over time, you go numb to possibilities you used to see so clearly.
You are functioning. But you are no longer fully awake.
That’s the problem I’m trying to solve.
It starts with blindness. Not a moral failure. Not willful ignorance. Just the simple reality of not knowing what you don’t know. No one wakes up and decides to be completely unaware of the most important signal in their life. Blindness is an unconscious unknowing. It’s where we all begin.
Then comes awareness. Something catches your attention. A comment from someone you trust. A piece of feedback you can’t shake. A moment of discomfort that makes you pause. The signal appears. You begin to sense that something isn’t quite right — even if you can’t name it yet.
Here’s the thing about awareness that nobody warns you about.
You can’t go back.
Once you see the signal, you cannot unsee it. Once you know, you cannot unknow. Blindness was a kind of bliss — not a good kind, but a comfortable one. Awareness strips that away. There’s no returning to the version of yourself who didn’t know. It removes the only excuse you had.
Then comes reckoning.
And this is where I got it wrong. Twice.
My first instinct was that reckoning and awareness were the same thing. The awakening. The moment the signal registers and you finally see it. I kept using the words interchangeably on those flip charts, and my thought partner kept frowning at me, and I couldn’t figure out why until I slowed down and actually looked at what I was drawing.
Awareness is when you see the truth. Reckoning is what you do with it. They are not the same thing, and collapsing them into one moment is exactly how people let themselves off the hook. I see it feels like enough. It isn’t.
So I corrected the diagram. And then I made a different mistake.
I started treating the reckoning like the catastrophe. The big blow-up. The crisis. The moment everything falls apart and you have no choice but to deal with it. I drew it at the far end of the gauge — red zone, pressure maxed out, system breaking down.
My thought partner stared at the wall for a long moment and then said, “If that’s the reckoning, what are we trying to prevent?”
He was right. I had it backwards. The crisis is what happens when the reckoning doesn’t occur. The reckoning isn’t the explosion. It’s the last chance to stop one.
I stood there looking at the diagram and something shifted.
Reckoning isn’t the awakening. It isn’t the catastrophe. It’s the moment in between — after you’ve seen the truth and before the consequences arrive. It’s the fulcrum. The choice point. The moment that forces movement, whether you’re ready or not. You cannot stand in a reckoning and stay the same. You either act or you calcify. But something moves.
We stood up and high-fived. Because when it finally clicked, it was obvious — the way things only become obvious after you’ve been wrong about them twice.
This is the moment of truth and choice. Act, and you release the pressure. You move through the reckoning and out the other side into something better. Don’t act — and the pressure builds until it breaks.
Choosing to do nothing after a reckoning is not the same as being blind. It’s worse. Because blindness is not knowing the cage exists. Choosing inaction after a reckoning means you have the key to your own jail cell — and you refuse to use it. You sit in the dark and hold the key in your hand and tell yourself the door is locked. The door is not locked. It has never been locked. The only thing keeping you inside is the decision not to turn the key.
And here’s what I want you to understand: the gauge works the same way whether the needle is measuring a person or an organization.
The leader who is too comfortable with how things are. The team that has been running the same play for a decade because nobody has been willing to say it isn’t working. The culture that was built for a version of the company that no longer exists. These aren’t organizational problems. They are reckonings that nobody has been willing to have.
Organizations don’t get stuck because of bad strategy. They get stuck because the people leading them are stuck — unwilling or unable to confront the truth the signal has been sending. The needle climbs. The pressure builds. And everyone keeps showing up to meetings and moving things around on whiteboards and calling it progress.
A leader who won’t have their own reckoning cannot lead an organization through one. You cannot ask your team to move toward a truth you haven’t been willing to face yourself.
This is why the reckoning is the beginning — not just for you personally, but for every room you walk into as a leader. The status quo doesn’t change because someone built a better PowerPoint. It changes because someone finally stood at the fork and chose to move. To act on what they knew was true even when acting was uncomfortable. To break the pattern that had become a prison — not to blow things up, but to rebuild them in alignment with what they now knew to be real.
That’s the reckoning. That’s where change actually starts.
After reckoning comes accountability. Not accountability in the punitive sense. Not the “someone must pay” version. I mean accountability as a demonstration. This is where you take the truth you’ve acknowledged privately and show it publicly through your behavior. You change something. You make a decision that aligns with what you now know to be true. You act.
If accountability happens, you grow. Your leadership gets clearer. Your life starts moving in a new direction.
If it doesn’t, the needle keeps moving until the system hits crisis. The kind that didn’t have to happen.
My sparring partner, before we wrapped up, asked me one final question.
“What do you want the audience to feel when they stand up at the end of the talk?”
Not fear. Fear paralyzes.
Not relief. Relief dissipates.
Resolve.
Because resolve is what produces action. Resolve is what you feel when you’ve been handed a truth and you decide to do something with it instead of setting it down.
Reckoning is the moment leadership actually begins.
I’m still working on this. The diagrams on my wall are still half-finished, and I’ve been wrong about enough of it already to stay humble. But that’s exactly why I bring it here first — to you, before the stage, before the publisher, before it gets polished into something that no longer shows the fingerprints.
You are not just my readers. You are my collaborators. And I have a real question — not a rhetorical one, not a closer. A question I actually need answered because it will shape what I write next.
Where do you get stuck?
Is it between blind and aware — the signal is there but you haven’t let yourself see it yet? Or is it between reckoning and accountability — you’ve seen the truth, you’ve felt the weight of it, but you’re still sitting in the cell holding the key?
Reply by sending me an email. I’m genuinely asking, because the answer changes where the book puts its weight.
And if you’ve already had your reckoning — if you’ve stood at that fork and chosen to move — I want to hear that story too.
Onward and upward,
Kristen
email: kristen@kristenziman.com
