Flip the Frame

When I stepped into the Chief Financial Officer role at one of the largest VA healthcare systems in the country, it felt like entering a building on fire.

The place was a labyrinth of broken processes, political warfare, impossible demands, and decades of institutional decay. Every day brought a new crisis: budgets in freefall, audits stacked like sandbags, leadership infighting, unions ready to erupt, veterans underserved, inspectors circling, staff burned out, and a sense that the whole machine was grinding itself into dust.

And for a long time, I took every failure personally.

Every backlog.
Every missed metric.
Every fire I couldn’t put out fast enough.
I read it all as proof of something I had always feared:
I am not enough.

That old lens — the one shaped by childhood instability, rejection, and the relentless pressure to earn belonging — colored everything. I walked into meetings assuming judgment. I interpreted neutral expressions as condemnation. I treated the chaos as an indictment of my competence.

Then one night, long after everyone had gone home, I flipped the frame.

I was alone in my office, fluorescent lights buzzing faintly, paperwork spread across the desk like shrapnel from another day’s battle.

And for the first time, I asked a different question:[
]What if this isn’t proof I’m failing?
What if this is proof I’m the one who can handle what others won’t even touch?

In an instant, the entire scene rearranged itself.

The complexity wasn’t a verdict — it was validation.
The fires weren’t failures — they were confirmations.

The system wasn’t collapsing on me — it had been collapsing long before I arrived, and I was one of the few willing to walk into the mess instead of running from it.

The facts didn’t change.
The lens did.

And once the lens flipped, capability came into focus:
decisiveness sharpened, solutions surfaced, courage grew, and the work became not a burden but a calling.

Cognitive science calls this reframing. In real life, it feels like someone finally cleaned the glass you’ve been staring through for decades.

This week asks the same of you:

Where are you still interpreting challenge as inadequacy?

What story collapses when you invert the assumption?

What becomes possible when you rewrite the frame instead of letting the frame write you?

Because sometimes the difference between drowning and leading is nothing more than the angle from which you’re willing to see yourself.