I have spent an embarrassing amount of my life frustrated by people I thought simply would not help themselves.

Not people dealing with circumstances they genuinely couldn't change.

I mean the person who seemed to have options and wouldn't take them. The person experiencing the predictable consequences of their own choices while behaving as though life had simply happened to them. The person expecting everyone around them to absorb a problem they could meaningfully influence themselves.

My internal response was usually some version of:

You participated in creating this. There are things you can do about it. At what point are you going to participate in fixing it?

There have been times when interacting with someone felt like watching them drown in three inches of bathwater.

I'm standing there looking at the edge of the tub thinking:

Pull your face out of the fucking water.

And for a long time, I genuinely couldn't understand why they wouldn't.

Part of that comes from my own relationship with agency.

One of the deepest beliefs underneath how I move through the world is that I would rather die than live at the mercy of something outside of myself.

It's extreme.

It's also been extraordinarily useful.

When something goes wrong, my brain immediately starts looking for leverage. What can I influence? What are my options? What needs to happen next?

I don't particularly care if I like the available choices. I want to know which ones still belong to me.

That worldview has made me incredibly capable.

It has also made me incredibly judgmental at times.

Because when you can see the edge of the bathtub, it's very easy to assume the person with their face in the water can see it too.

I've had to learn to slow down the conclusion I draw from that. I'm still learning it.

Sometimes what looks like unwillingness is actually a difference in what someone can see.

My experience of a difficult situation might be:

I refuse to be at the mercy of this. What can I do?

Someone else's might be:

I am at the mercy of this. What can I do?

Those sound remarkably similar.

They're not.

I'm starting with the assumption that there is something available to me. I may not know what it is yet. I may hate every option. But I'm already looking for it because powerlessness isn't the premise I'm starting from.

Someone who already feels powerless can look at the same circumstances and genuinely not see the choices that seem painfully obvious to me.

That doesn't mean every display of helplessness needs to be explained away.

People can be unwilling. People can be entitled. We absolutely create problems for ourselves and then get pissed off when the consequences arrive.

But understanding why someone feels helpless doesn't require you to agree that they are.

You can understand why someone is on the floor and still believe they're capable of getting up.

As a leader, that's a much more useful place to operate from than either extreme.

Assume someone is helpless and you'll probably start rescuing them. Assume they're simply unwilling and you may judge them for something you haven't actually understood.

Neither tells you what the problem actually is.

Maybe they don't see the choice. Maybe they see it but don't believe they can make it. Maybe they don't have the skill required to follow through.

Or maybe they see everything perfectly clearly and simply refuse to take responsibility for it.

Those are very different problems, and they require very different responses.

The mildly inconvenient part is that you're not always the person standing outside the bathtub.

Neither am I.

You can be extraordinarily capable at work and completely lose your footing in a relationship. You can handle enormous financial pressure and become destabilized by something happening with your kid.

The person you want to shake by the shoulders in one area of life might be far more capable than you are somewhere else.

Capacity isn't a team you're assigned to.

There will be places where you can see the edge of the bathtub immediately.

And there will be places where somebody else is looking at you wondering why the hell you won't lift your head.

Understanding that doesn't require lowering your expectations of people.

It requires getting more accurate about what's preventing them from meeting those expectations.

Because if you're responsible for helping someone become more capable, knowing why they're still on the floor matters a hell of a lot more than judging them for being there.