From Expat to Executive, A Journey of Leadership Through Interpretation and Improvisation
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In this series, Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, offers reflections from her coaching and mindfulness practice on how people discover insight, meaning, and resilience in the changing landscape of modern life. Her perspective is rooted in years of working with people from many cultures and in a driven curiosity that understands human growth as life in motion.
In a previous article, I explored how living abroad can expand mental flexibility, a capacity essential to effective leadership. In today’s rapidly shifting world, the ability to interpret and improvise is key: leaders must adapt, question assumptions, and respond with openness to uncertainty. Relocating strips away familiar routines. Everyday interactions require conscious adjustment, and what was once automatic becomes foreign. This disruption presses leaders to reconsider assumptions previously taken for granted.
The experience reflects the challenges of modern leadership: adapting to unfamiliar situations while maintaining a clear sense of identity and expanding how we think and respond.
Leadership is the discipline of interpreting what exists while improvising what comes next. To develop as impactful leaders requires a similar kind of adaptation. Leaders need a willingness to keep learning and to broaden their perspective.
As professionals move into more senior roles, the psychological demands increase significantly, whether or not the external environment changes. Decisions must be made in increasingly uncertain territory and carry greater consequences. Leaders work with teams that are more diverse in expertise, background, and expectations. Approaches that once brought success begin to show their limits, requiring new ways of thinking and acting. Much as living abroad changes familiar patterns, they no longer provide the same guidance.
These changing demands highlight the importance of mental flexibility in leadership. It enables leaders to adapt and perform effectively as situations become more complex and uncertain. Understanding this capacity is essential to effective leadership.
What is mental flexibility in leadership?
Mental flexibility is the capacity to view situations from multiple perspectives, question our own assumptions, and adjust our responses without abandoning our values. It is the ability to pause before reacting automatically and to consider that more than one interpretation may be valid.
In leadership, it shows up as curiosity rather than rigidity. It allows leaders to remain confident in their past experience while staying open to revision. It means being decisive and exercising authority while recognising that certainty and openness can coexist.
Mental flexibility enables leaders to remain engaged when outcomes are unclear, allowing for thoughtful and creative inquiry rather than automatic reactions.
Interpretation and improvisation
Music offers a helpful way to understand leadership as a balance between interpretation and improvisation.
In classical performance, interpretation brings the music to life. A musician studies the score and plays what is written, yet each performance differs in nuance. Tempo, phrasing, and tone shape what listeners hear. The composition stays the same, but it is renewed through the musician's own voice.
In jazz, this analogy grows more dynamic. A musician often starts with a standard tune, which serves as a common language for the group. From this shared foundation, musicians may either closely interpret the established melody or improvise, transforming the piece while using its structure as a guide.
A pianist like Bill Evans often reinterpreted standards while remaining close to their structure. The melody stayed recognisable, and the harmonic progression was respected. Yet within that framework, he introduced subtle shifts that deepened the emotional texture.
By contrast, Miles Davis was more willing to improvise in ways that stretched or reshaped the original form. He altered tempo, silence, atmosphere, and arrangement so dramatically that the familiar tune felt transformed while still remaining the basis of the piece.
Both approaches require mastery. Interpretation deepens what exists, improvisation expands on it. The most effective leaders know when to interpret and when to improvise. Success depends on recognising the system's architecture before changing it. This deliberate balance between interpretation and improvisation is the heart of impactful leadership and the main argument of this article.
The neurological side of flexibility
There is also a neurological explanation for why mental flexibility matters for human growth. The brain is designed to conserve energy and prefers familiar, automatic pathways because they allow us to act quickly and confidently. Yet this efficiency can also create rigidity.
When we encounter unfamiliar situations, those pathways may no longer work. The brain responds through neuroplasticity, its ability to form new neural connections throughout life. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for perspective-taking, emotional regulation, and complex decision-making, becomes more active when we face novelty and ambiguity. In those moments, we begin to question assumptions and consider alternative responses.
With repeated exposure to new perspectives, these pathways strengthen and what initially feels uncomfortable gradually becomes integrated. This also helps explain why experienced leaders can sometimes become less flexible: neural patterns that support expertise can reinforce familiar interpretations of problems.
Psychologist Carol Dweck describes how a growth mindset supports this process by framing ability as something that can develop rather than remain fixed. Steven C. Hayes emphasises psychological flexibility, the ability to act in alignment with our values even when discomfort arises. And Daniel J. Siegel explains how integration, linking different elements into a coherent whole, strengthens resilience in both individuals and systems.
Experience as foundation, not limitation
Experience gives leaders confidence and discernment. It sharpens judgment and builds credibility, without it, leadership lacks depth. But when experience stops evolving, it can harden like cement. Past successes become reference points, and new ideas are judged through old frameworks. Proposals that do not resemble earlier successes may be dismissed too quickly. Growth slows when experience stops evolving.
Mental flexibility allows leaders to draw on experience differently. Like a trampoline, it becomes solid enough to stand on yet flexible enough to propel new thinking. The past provides structure and momentum for new ideas and perspectives.
Rather than relying solely on past successes, flexible leaders interpret changing environments and improvise new approaches. This ability to draw from experience while inventing the next step is essential for innovation and strategy in rapidly evolving contexts.
Learning across disciplines
Leaders who lead successful industries go beyond a single domain of expertise. For example, Steve Jobs is often described as a technology visionary. Yet what distinguished him was not purely technical expertise. His interest in calligraphy and typography shaped how he approached computing. By allowing ideas from the humanities to influence engineering, he helped redefine how technology could look and feel.
Innovation emerged from integration. This willingness to combine perspectives from different fields mirrors the cognitive flexibility required of leaders navigating unfamiliar problems.
A leader in the Scottish countryside
I once worked with a senior leader whose doctor advised him to take a sabbatical. The stress he had been carrying had begun to show physically. Reluctantly, he rented a small cottage in the Scottish countryside with the intention of doing nothing.
At first, the stillness felt uncomfortable. Without constant decisions and deadlines, he realised how accustomed he had become to urgency. As the days passed, he began to notice the shifting weather patterns around him.
He picked up a camera. Each morning, he photographed the same point in the sky from the same spot outside the cottage. The frame remained constant. His position did not change. Yet what appeared within that frame was never identical, light varied, colours shifted, angles altered. What remained the same was him and his camera, while everything else changed.
Over time, he became increasingly curious. He began asking himself what made the colours differ so dramatically from one day to the next. Why did the sky appear sharper after the rain? Why did certain mornings feel muted while others seemed luminous? At first, he was simply captivated by the beauty of what he was seeing, but his interest soon moved beyond aesthetics. It led him to read about the physics of light about refraction, the atmosphere, and how particles in the air alter perception. What began as observation became inquiry.
Gradually, he began to see parallels with his leadership. The same situation, viewed at a different time or from a slightly different angle, could reveal something new. He noticed how conditions shaped his perception and influenced his responses. He returned to work not only rested but also more attentive. Ideas he had previously defended were revisited through a new lens, and conversations were approached with curiosity and a desire to discover. The daily discipline of photographing the same sky expanded his mental flexibility.
Challenging ourselves beyond what feels relevant
Growth often begins when we take on challenges that do not appear directly connected to our professional goals. Learning a new language, exploring photography, experimenting with improvisation, or engaging with unfamiliar technology stimulates new neural pathways.
Leadership development requires cultivating mental flexibility, the capacity to interpret what is and improvise what could be, even beyond traditional professional boundaries.
It requires asking simple questions: what else is out there? What am I missing? This means returning to the position of a learner, not knowing, which strengthens our ability to adapt. Over time, this expanded cognitive range influences how leaders approach complexity and change.
A final reflection
Living abroad reminds us that growth begins when unfamiliar experiences shape us. Leadership development asks the same.
Mental flexibility transforms experience into a driver of change. It allows leaders to use what they know while remaining open to what they do not yet see.
In markets defined by acceleration and competitiveness, cognitive rigidity becomes a liability. Organisations do not struggle because they lack expertise, they struggle when certainty blocks curiosity. When leaders understand their foundations and remain willing to revise them, change becomes instructive.
For leaders, the question is simple: How can we deliberately place ourselves in situations that challenge our thinking and inspire a new way of seeing?
Read more from Elizabeth Ballin
Elizabeth Ballin, Professional Certified Coach
Elizabeth Ballin, PCC, is an ICF-accredited professional coach and mindfulness practitioner working globally with people and professionals from many backgrounds. She combines emotional insight, cultural intelligence, and practical structure to support meaningful growth. She brings a lifelong multicultural awareness, deepened by twelve years of coaching across more than twenty cultures, which helps her attune to the emotional and practical realities her clients face. Her writing spans themes such as curiosity, creativity, well-being, communication, judgment, and the inner shifts that support meaningful growth in the complexity of modern life.
