See the Series Introduction for Just Tao It, Part I: HERE
See the Just Tao It Series Introduction Tao/It on-ramp, PART II: HERE
See Just Tao It, Chapter 1: HERE
From my interpretation of the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 73 (Unpublished):
In daring or caution,
harm and benefit
arrive together.
The wise do not choose
between them.
It is in heaven.
Not trying, It conquers.
Not speaking, It answers.
Not summoning, It attracts.
It seems at rest
as It acts.
Being infinite,
It is far and wide.
Being present,
It lives inside.
—
This paradox becomes critical when leaders face their greatest tests—and when entire civilizations stand at crossroads.
One of the great leadership delusions is the belief that courage means more force.
Push harder. Move faster. Dominate the room. Win the argument. Control the outcome. Never hesitate. Never doubt. Never appear weak.
You’ve seen this leader. Maybe you’ve been this leader—the one who mistakes activity for progress, volume for clarity, decisiveness for wisdom. The one who equates hesitation with weakness, even when hesitation might be discernment trying to break through.
But history is crowded with leaders, organizations, and nations destroyed by courage to the neglect of restraint—empires overextended, companies that acquired themselves into irrelevance, leaders whose confidence became their epitaph.
It is also crowded with failures born from restraint to the neglect of courage—democracies that appeased authoritarians, institutions that studied injustice while refusing to act, leaders who analyzed themselves into obsolescence.
Silence in the face of corruption. Delay in the face of danger. Endless analysis while systems decay. Institutions too afraid to confront what everyone already knows.
This is why the Tao’s warning matters.
In daring or caution, harm and benefit arrive together.
The mature question is not which side is good.
The mature question is:
what happens when one grows powerful enough to neglect the other?
Adult development research helps explain why this polarity is so difficult to navigate. Across decades of work by Robert Kegan, Jane Loevinger, Susanne Cook-Greuter, Jennifer Garvey Berger, Bill Torbert, and others, a pattern emerges: real development is not about acquiring more knowledge. It is about transforming how we make meaning.
Earlier stages of development often seek certainty, stability, approval, control, or superiority. The world becomes divided into winners and losers, insiders and outsiders, right and wrong. Leadership becomes performance. Identity fuses with ideology, expertise, status, or belonging.
Later development begins when people can step back from the systems that once defined them. Kegan described this as moving from being subject to a way of seeing the world to making that way of seeing the world object for reflection.
Think of it this way: an earlier-stage leader may ask, “Which approach is right—courage or caution?” A more developed leader asks, “How do I honor both, and when does each become necessary?”
Later development does not remove conviction. It increases the capacity to hold conviction without becoming possessed by it.
That shift matters because complexity changes the nature of leadership itself.
Technical problems can often be solved with expertise alone. The machine breaks; you fix it. The code fails; you patch it.
Adaptive challenges are different.
In adaptive challenges, the problem is partly us—our assumptions, identities, fears, relationships, and ways of making meaning. No expert can solve them for us. More force rarely solves them. It usually deepens them.
The struggling marriage. The organization losing trust. The polarized society. The destabilizing climate.
These require leaders capable of both Action AND Reflection, Conviction AND Humility, Courage AND Restraint.
Cook-Greuter’s later-stage work becomes especially important here because it recognizes that mature development increases the capacity to work with paradox, ambiguity, and interdependence rather than demanding false simplicity.
Many leadership failures are not failures of intelligence. They are failures in the capacity to leverage tension over time.
Strength to the neglect of restraint becomes domination.
Restraint to the neglect of courage becomes paralysis.
Nationalism to the neglect of interdependence becomes isolation and aggression.
Interdependence to the neglect of sovereignty becomes fragility and drift.
Even wisdom traditions deteriorate when certainty overwhelms openness. (See Wiser Decisions on Religion.)
The Tao does not remove tension.
It points to relationship to tension.
That becomes especially important when we consider the shadow.
Robert Johnson warned that whatever remains rejected, denied, or unconscious does not disappear. It gathers force in the dark—growing stronger, more distorted, and more dangerous precisely because it is ignored.
The leader who denies vulnerability eventually breaks down publicly. The organization that suppresses conflict erupts in turnover, lawsuits, or scandal. The nation that ignores its shadow elects it. Let that sink in for a moment. Or a few.
What we refuse to face does not vanish.
It waits.
Johnson also argued that the shadow contains not only darkness, but buried strength—what he called the “golden shadow.” The courage we feared would make us dangerous. The tenderness we feared would make us weak. The authority we were taught to distrust. The moral clarity we learned to suppress to belong.
Organizations bury golden shadows too. Nations do too.
A culture that worships domination often buries vulnerability until loneliness, addiction, violence, or despair erupt beneath the surface.
A culture terrified of conflict may bury courage until resentment ferments into backlash.
Sooner or later, the shadow collects interest.
This may be one reason mature leadership is so rare.
Real development threatens identity.
Cook-Greuter observed that later development often requires loosening attachment to the very identities and meaning systems that once created success.
That can feel like death to the ego.
Because in a very real sense, it is.
The identity that got you here—the expert, the achiever, the winner, the righteous one—must loosen its grip. Not disappear, but stop being the sole author of meaning.
No wonder so many leaders resist.
Success whispers: Why change what’s working?
Until suddenly, catastrophically, it isn’t.
Which is why many highly successful leaders stop developing precisely where their success rewarded them most.
The expert becomes trapped in expertise.
The achiever becomes trapped in achievement.
The patriot becomes trapped in ideology.
The revolutionary becomes trapped in righteousness.
The institution becomes trapped in protecting itself.
And beneath all of it sits fear.
Fear of uncertainty.
Fear of losing status.
Fear of becoming nobody.
Fear of discovering that what once worked no longer does.
But the Tao keeps pointing somewhere else.
It seems at rest
as It acts.
Not passive.
Not inert.
Not weak.
Responsive.
Grounded.
Aware enough not to confuse reaction with strength.
Perhaps this is what wiser leadership now requires.
Not leaders who eliminate tension.
Not leaders who perform certainty.
Not leaders who mistake force for courage.
But leaders capable of remaining awake enough to hold complexity without surrendering discernment, humility, or action.
The Tao offers no technique for this. No five-step process. No certification.
It offers something harder and more essential: presence.
The capacity to notice when courage becomes domination.
The capacity to notice when restraint becomes paralysis.
The capacity to act from groundedness rather than fear.
The capacity to ask before acting.
Before a significant decision, try asking:
Am I acting from courage or from the need to appear courageous?
Am I practicing restraint or avoiding necessary action?
What fear appears when I imagine honoring the neglected pole?
The answers may not feel comfortable.
They may still tell the truth.
And truth, held with humility, becomes the ground from which wisdom acts.
Because thriving in a complex world may depend less on our ability to conquer uncertainty than on our ability to remain human within it.
Here’s a Polarity Map for Courage And Restraint:
INVITATIONS:
Take a customized Polarity Self-Assessment for Courage AND Restraint CLICK HERE.
To use an “AI-trained Chat w/Cliff for Step 1, Seeing” CLICK HERE.
Ready for the Polarity Advantage? Go deeper into Polarity Thinking, see our online self-directed Credentialing and Introduction to Polarity Practice or in-person training with Barry Johnson and me at Kayser Ridge by CLICKING HERE.
