I haven’t written a blog since May.

Not because I ran out of things to say. Quite the opposite, actually. The world has been so loud, so relentlessly brutal, that somewhere along the way I found myself struggling to find the words.

One thing after another. The World Cup, the hounding and tragic death of Jason Arday, the new earned settlement proposals, the seemingly endless political developments that keep reminding us how power operates, who gets to exercise it, and who is expected to live with its consequences.

I had so much I wanted to write about. I even started June’s blog, The Difference Between Discomfort and Harm, but never published it.

The world felt too heavy to write about, and for someone who usually finds her way through the world by reflecting, questioning, connecting dots and putting thoughts into words, that silence felt strange.

Then, recently, something happened.

I was invited to join a leadership development session as an observer. I was there to meet the participants, observe the learning and gather reflections to share with the team. The day was about power, and towards the end, the facilitator introduced Stephen Covey’s Circles of Concern and Influence, a framework many of us have encountered in leadership development spaces. The idea, broadly speaking, is to focus our energy on what we can influence rather than becoming consumed by what sits outside our control.

And then a participant asked a question. I can’t remember their exact words, but the question was something along the lines of: What if some of us still want to work towards a better world, even when what we dream of sits outside our circle of influence? What if we want to pursue something that seems impossible, something that doesn’t even fit within the three horizons we’ve been exploring?

The facilitator encouraged them to focus their energy on what they could change, and I watched the participant sit back down, visibly struggling to hold back their tears.

Something moved in me, because I wasn’t just looking at a participant struggling with a leadership concept. I was looking at someone whose imagination was reaching beyond the boundaries of what they were being told was possible. Someone who dared to dream of a different world, even when the frameworks around them couldn’t quite accommodate that dream.

And all I could see was Harriet Tubman.

I asked the facilitator if I could say a few words before leaving. I thanked everyone for welcoming me into their learning space, mentioned that I’d be returning to facilitate a session on reimagining rest, and then said something along the lines of:

“And speaking of reimagining, who’s familiar with Harriet Tubman?”

A few hands went up. Most people weren’t familiar with her story, so I told them.

I told them about a Black woman who escaped slavery in the United States in 1849, only to return, again and again, to help others escape. A woman who risked her freedom and her life because she refused to accept that the world she had been born into was the only world possible.

I told them that Tricia Hersey, whose work on rest as resistance has profoundly influenced my own practice, honours Harriet Tubman as a radical dreamer, and I reminded them that Harriet didn’t wait for someone to tell her that freedom was within her circle of influence. She didn’t accept the boundaries of what was considered realistic or achievable. She dared to imagine something beyond them, and then she acted on that imagination.

She didn’t simply work within the horizons available to her. She helped create a new horizon altogether.

I said to the room that without people who dared to dream beyond what was considered possible, so much of the liberation we have inherited would never have happened. The struggles against slavery, colonialism and oppression were not led by people who accepted the limits of their influence … they were led by people who refused those limits.

I concluded: So if you have that spark in you, that desire to radically dream of a different world, please don’t hold it back.

When I finished, the participant came running towards me,

“Can I hug you, please?”

We hugged.

The facilitator was moved too, and from around the room I could hear people saying, “Wow. Wow. Wow.”

I left that room carrying something I hadn’t felt for months.

Something had awakened in me again.

And on my journey home, I found myself thinking about Stephen Covey, Harriet Tubman, and a younger version of myself.

Nearly thirty years ago, Reem, in her late teens and early twenties, was deeply inspired by Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

So inspired, in fact, that when I landed my first proper job as a university lecturer in Damascus, I couldn’t resist bringing some of his ideas into my classroom.

Apparently, discussing leadership, agency and the power of choice with my students instead of sticking to immunology was enough to get me into trouble with Assad’s secret intelligence police.

Yes, really.

And there I was, nearly three decades later, encountering Stephen Covey again.

There was something nostalgic about it. A little walk down memory lane. But there was also something quite extraordinary about realising how profoundly my understanding of leadership had changed.

The younger Reem was fascinated by the idea that we could exercise agency over our lives, that we could choose how to respond to our circumstances, that we could become more effective in shaping our futures. And I can still appreciate why those ideas mattered to her.

But the Reem sitting in that room last week has lived through a great deal since then. She has experienced what happens when systems use violence to maintain their authority. She has worked alongside communities resisting oppression, people navigating displacement, racism, exclusion and institutional power. She has spent years exploring decolonisation, somatics, conflict transformation and collective liberation.

And somewhere along that journey, the question changed.

It was no longer simply, “How can I become more effective within the world as it exists?”

It became, “Who decided the world had to exist this way in the first place?”

And perhaps more importantly, “Who gets to decide what is possible?”

This is where I find myself increasingly sceptical of leadership teachings that emerge predominantly from the worldviews and experiences of privileged white men, whose ideas have shaped so much of what we have come to recognise as leadership wisdom. The younger Reem certainly found value in Covey’s work, but I’ve become far more interested in what these frameworks leave unquestioned.

Covey’s circles can help us think about where to direct our energy, how to exercise agency and how to avoid becoming overwhelmed by things we cannot immediately change. There is value in that.

But what happens when the boundaries of our influence are themselves products of oppression?

What happens when the things we are told we cannot change are precisely the things that need changing?

And what happens to our collective imagination when we repeatedly teach people to focus on what is realistic, achievable and within their influence?

And it made me think about our own practice as facilitators. We spend so much time inviting participants to question assumptions, challenge power and imagine alternatives. But how often do we extend that same invitation to the frameworks we’re using to facilitate those conversations?

How often do we treat established leadership models as knowledge to be transmitted rather than ideas to be interrogated?

I find myself inviting participants to question: Whose worldview shaped this model? What assumptions about power does it carry? Whose experiences does it reflect? Whose realities does it fail to account for? And what becomes possible when we move beyond it?

And I cannot tell you how much collective wisdom emerges when we make room for those questions.

People bring their histories, their lived experiences, their cultures, their ancestors’ wisdom, their struggles and their imaginations into the conversation. Suddenly, the framework is no longer the authority in the room. It becomes one contribution among many, and the learning becomes so much richer.

So perhaps this is an invitation to fellow facilitators too.

We need our radical dreaming as much as the people we facilitate.

Even when we’re delivering programmes we haven’t designed. Even when we’re working with content we’ve inherited. Even when the framework is familiar, established and widely celebrated.

We still have agency in how we hold it, how we question it, and how much room we create for people to imagine beyond it. Because facilitation is never simply about delivering content. It is also about the relationship we create between knowledge, power and the people in the room.

And sometimes, the most important learning happens when someone dares to question the very framework we’ve been asked to teach, which brings me back to the distinction between navigating systems and transforming them.

One asks us to understand the rules, recognise our influence and learn how to operate more effectively within the conditions we have inherited. The other invites us to question the legitimacy of those conditions altogether.

One helps us survive and sometimes thrive within existing structures. The other asks why those structures exist, whose interests they serve, and what it might take to create something different.

And I don’t see these as mutually exclusive. Of course we need to navigate systems. Sometimes our survival depends on it. Sometimes navigating them skilfully gives us the resources, relationships and opportunities to challenge them. However, navigation must not become the horizon of our imagination.

If we only ever work within the boundaries of what we are told we can influence, who gets to redraw those boundaries?

Harriet Tubman didn’t possess institutional authority. She didn’t have the protection of wealth, status or political office. The structures of power around her were designed to deny her humanity, let alone her agency. And yet she acted.

Not alone, of course. Her courage was part of wider networks of resistance, solidarity and collective struggle. Liberation has never been the achievement of one extraordinary individual, however extraordinary that individual may be.

And here’s another limitation of so much mainstream leadership teaching. We are encouraged to imagine leadership through the individual, their habits, their effectiveness, their influence, their success.

But what about collective agency? What about the power that emerges when people organise around a possibility that none of them could achieve alone?

What about those who refuse to accept that the current distribution of power determines the limits of our imagination?

This, to me, is where leadership becomes a practice of liberation rather than simply a practice of effectiveness.

When leadership development stops being about simply helping people find their voice within existing structures and starts enabling them to question why some voices carry authority while others carry risk.

The one who thought she was simply sharing ideas about agency and choice with her immunology students, without fully appreciating how threatening those ideas could be to a system built on obedience. The one who hadn’t yet found the language of decolonisation or collective liberation, but who was already questioning the boundaries imposed around her.

And perhaps I recognised something else too.

After months of watching the world become increasingly brutal, after months of feeling the weight of injustice, violence and impunity, I encountered someone who was still daring to dream.

Someone whose imagination hadn’t surrendered.

And in reminding them not to abandon that dream, something in me came back to life too.

I’ve been thinking about that hug ever since.

About the pregnant silence and the “WOW” echoing in the corners of that room.

About how sometimes all it takes is for someone to remind us that the boundaries we’ve inherited are not necessarily the boundaries of what is possible.

And about how much we need spaces where radical imagination is not treated as naivety, but recognised as an essential part of transforming our world.

Nearly thirty years after discovering Stephen Covey, I find myself less interested in the habits of highly effective people and far more interested in the practices of collectively liberated people.

And that’s where I want to return to this Power Awareness series.

Today, I’m not coming with another account of everything that is wrong with the world. There is no shortage of those!

I’m coming back with a reminder that the systems we inhabit were created, maintained and legitimised by people, and that people, acting collectively, can also transform them.

So perhaps the next time someone tells us to focus on what sits within our circle of influence, we might ask a different question.

Who drew the circle?

And what might become possible if we dared to redraw it together?

This is my first blog since May in the On Power Awareness series.

It feels good to be writing again.

 

© Reem Assil 2026, All rights reserved

Photo credit: Giant mural shows Tubman extending a hand to people walking by. The mural is by Michael Rosato in Cambridge, Maryland. (Courtesy of the Harriet Tubman Byway)