The Butterfly, the Heart, and Seven Ways to Lead Through Change Without Losing Yourself
- 1 day ago
- 10 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
Ann Smets is a Human Potential & Soul Integration Facilitator and founder of Soulestara. She bridges physical health, nervous system regulation, and energy alignment to support individuals and leaders in achieving clarity, vitality, health, and sustainable performance.
What if one of the greatest strengths in leadership is not the ability to keep everything under control, but the ability to remain grounded when it inevitably changes? During my deeper studies of Taoist Inner Alchemy, I encountered a simple image that has stayed with me ever since: a butterfly resting on an open hand.
We can enjoy its beauty, marvel at its presence, and appreciate the moment completely. But the moment we close our fist and say, “Stay,” something changes. What began as joy becomes attachment.
For leaders navigating uncertainty, transformation, and relentless change, this small butterfly carries a surprisingly powerful message.
Why we hold on to what works
We are trained, professionally and psychologically, to hold on to what works: the winning strategy, the high-performing team, the successful business model, the state of flow, the sense of momentum.
We don’t simply enjoy good things, we naturally try to preserve them. Then, often without realizing it, we begin building our sense of stability around keeping them there.
The trouble is that this instinct, however understandable, can slowly turn joy, achievement, and even personal or spiritual growth into something to chase rather than something to experience.
There is nothing wrong with ambition, desire, or wanting something beautiful to continue. Wanting more is part of being alive, and it often drives innovation and excellence. The difficulty begins when our inner stability becomes dependent on a particular external condition remaining unchanged.
Markets shift. Teams reorganize. Careers evolve. Relationships change. Bodies age. Success itself changes shape. If our sense of wholeness depends on any of these remaining fixed, we are standing on ground that is, by nature, always moving.
Taoist philosophy offers another possibility: learning to participate fully in life without demanding that life remain the same.
Interestingly, modern psychology has language for something remarkably similar: psychological flexibility. A 2026 review examining 88 studies in workplace settings describes psychological flexibility as the capacity to continue moving toward valued goals despite stressors and difficult internal experiences, rather than becoming trapped in rigid attempts to control or avoid them.
Perhaps the ancient open hand and the modern psychologically flexible mind are pointing us toward a similar truth. We don’t become powerful by controlling every change. We become powerful by changing our relationship with change.
1. Enjoy the butterfly without needing it to stay
Imagine the butterfly landing on your hand. You don’t need to look away because you know it will eventually leave. Nor do you need to close your hand around it to prolong the experience. You can simply enjoy it.
This distinction is subtle but profound. Psychologists use the term “savoring” to describe our capacity to notice, appreciate, and deepen positive experiences. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis of 20 randomized controlled trials involving more than 4,800 participants found that savoring interventions produced meaningful improvements in positive psychological outcomes.
In other words, allowing ourselves to deeply experience a beautiful moment is not frivolous. It matters.
Here’s the paradox I love: the open hand does not experience less joy. It may allow us to experience joy more fully.
For leaders, this could mean celebrating a successful quarter without immediately worrying about reproducing it. Appreciating an exceptional team without assuming its composition will never change. Enjoying recognition without turning that recognition into the foundation of one’s identity.
Leadership practice: When something is going particularly well, resist immediately asking, “How do I keep this?” First ask, “Am I actually allowing myself to experience this?”
2. Accept that change is not the same as failure
One of the most difficult lessons for high performers is that change can feel like failure even when nothing has gone wrong.
A strategy that worked brilliantly for five years may stop working. A valued employee may leave. A business may need to reinvent itself. A role that once felt deeply aligned may suddenly feel complete. Our instinct is often to restore what was, but nature rarely works backward.
Taoism invites us to observe life as movement rather than permanence. Seasons change without considering summer a success and winter a failure. A river does not believe it has lost its way because the landscape forces it to change direction. This perspective has enormous relevance for leadership today.
Increasingly, leadership research emphasizes adaptability and resilience in environments shaped by technological disruption, economic uncertainty, and rapid organizational change. The challenge is no longer simply to create stability. It is to help people move intelligently through instability.
That begins with the leader’s own relationship with change. Sometimes the end of a chapter is not evidence that we failed to hold onto it. It is simply evidence that the chapter ended.
Leadership practice: When something changes unexpectedly, notice whether your first question is, “How do I get things back to the way they were?” Experiment instead with asking, “What is this change asking me to see?”
3. Choose truth over comfort
Underneath our resistance to change, the mind is remarkably consistent in the stories it creates: “This shouldn’t be happening.” “Once this changes, I’ll finally be at peace.” “I’ve lost something I need in order to feel whole.”
These stories are not personal failures. They are very human attempts to create certainty in an uncertain world, but they can also keep us one step removed from what we already know. This is where a practice I call truth over comfort becomes powerful.
Truth over comfort does not mean deliberately choosing what is difficult. It means becoming willing to notice when comfort is quietly preventing us from acknowledging what is already true.
I know this role is no longer aligned with me, but staying feels safer. I know what I actually want to say in this meeting, but keeping everyone comfortable feels easier. I know this strategy has stopped working, but abandoning it feels like admitting defeat. I know I am chasing this next achievement partly because I believe it will finally make me feel complete.
Psychological flexibility becomes particularly relevant here. It does not require us to eliminate uncomfortable thoughts or emotions before acting. Instead, it asks whether we can make room for discomfort while still choosing an action aligned with what genuinely matters. That is very different from waiting until everything feels comfortable.
Leadership practice: Ask yourself one question: “What is true underneath what I want to be true?” Then be quiet long enough to hear the answer.
4. Stop forcing the river
One of the Taoist concepts I return to again and again is wu wei. It is sometimes translated as “nonaction” or “effortless action,” although neither translation captures its full richness. Wu wei is not passivity. It is not sitting on the sofa waiting for the universe to update your business plan.
It points instead toward action that is less forced, less coercive, and more aligned with the conditions that are actually present.
This can feel counterintuitive in leadership cultures that reward pushing, controlling, and relentlessly driving outcomes. Yet sometimes more force creates more resistance.
We see it in organizations when leaders try to preserve a strategy whose time has passed. We see it in teams when control replaces trust. We see it in ourselves when we keep pushing through exhaustion because stopping feels like weakness.
The river doesn’t stop moving when it encounters a rock. But neither does it spend the rest of its existence arguing with the rock. It adapts. It finds another path.
Leadership practice: When you notice yourself forcing an outcome, ask, “Does this situation need more effort, or does it need a different relationship with effort?”
Sometimes the wisest action is still decisive action. Wu wei simply reminds us that decisive does not have to mean forceful.
5. Don’t build your identity around your latest success
There is another reason the butterfly metaphor matters so much for high performers. Success is intoxicating. The promotion, the launch, the recognition, the financial milestone, or the breakthrough can create a wonderful surge of satisfaction. There is nothing wrong with enjoying any of it.
But psychology also recognizes hedonic adaptation: our tendency, to varying degrees, to adapt to changed circumstances. Research has found that some of the happiness associated with positive life changes can diminish over time as the extraordinary gradually becomes normal and our aspirations begin moving toward the next thing.
This may explain something many successful people eventually discover: the destination they were certain would make them feel complete somehow becomes another starting line. The problem isn’t success. The problem is asking success to tell us who we are.
When our identity becomes attached to being the successful leader, the indispensable expert, the growing company, or the person who always knows what to do, change becomes threatening not only to our circumstances but also to our sense of self.
Taoist wisdom repeatedly brings us back from accumulation toward simplicity. Perhaps the deeper question is not, “What have I achieved?” It is, “Who am I when the achievement is no longer there to introduce me?”
Leadership practice: Celebrate what you have created. Then notice whether you can appreciate the achievement without needing it to define you.
6. Return to what doesn’t move before you react
This leads to perhaps the deepest question in the entire practice: What is it within me that doesn’t change?
Our thoughts change. Emotions change. Circumstances, relationships, roles, beliefs, and identities evolve throughout a lifetime. Yet we can become aware of all of these changes.
Taoist Inner Alchemy invites us away from constant identification with the surface movements of life and toward a deeper inner awareness.
This is not something I believe we need to intellectualize. It can be experienced much more simply through the body and breath.
Before an important meeting, between calls, or after receiving difficult news, take sixty seconds. Feel your feet. Soften the body. Allow the breath to slow naturally. Notice what is happening inside you before deciding what to do about it.
There is scientific support for the physiological value of this kind of pause. A large systematic review and meta-analysis of voluntary slow breathing, drawing on more than 200 studies, found increases in measures of vagally mediated heart rate variability during and after slow breathing practices. These measures are associated with parasympathetic regulation and the body’s capacity to adapt to changing demands.
Ancient traditions did not speak in the language of heart rate variability or autonomic regulation. They simply understood the value of returning to centre.
Leadership practice: Before responding to something emotionally charged, give yourself one minute in which nothing needs to be solved. Feel first. Breathe. Then respond. That minute can change the quality of everything that follows.
7. Lead with an open hand
Eventually, the butterfly teaching moves beyond our relationship with ourselves. It changes the way we lead other people.
An open-handed leader can care deeply without controlling everything. They can build an extraordinary team without treating talented people as possessions. They can mentor someone knowing that one day that person may outgrow the role. They can create a vision passionately while remaining willing to change the route when reality provides new information.
This is not detached leadership. It may actually be a more loving form of leadership because it allows people, ideas, and organizations to evolve.
Control asks, “How can I keep this exactly as it is?” Leadership asks, “What does this need in order to become what it is capable of becoming?” Those are very different questions.
Perhaps this is one of the great paradoxes of leadership: when we loosen our grip, we do not necessarily become less committed. We become more available, more responsive, more curious, and more able to meet what is actually happening instead of constantly comparing it with what we hoped would happen.
Leadership practice: Look at one person, project, or outcome you are holding particularly tightly. Imagine opening your hand around it, not abandoning it, simply releasing the demand that it unfold exactly as you planned. Notice what becomes possible.
What remains when everything else changes?
Perhaps this is the question beneath all seven lessons. What remains when the title changes? When the company changes? When the relationship changes? When the body changes? When the thing we worked so hard to create becomes something different from what we imagined?
We spend enormous amounts of energy trying to create certainty around circumstances that were never designed to remain still.
But what if genuine stability isn’t created by finally arranging the outside world perfectly? What if it comes from developing such a deep relationship with ourselves that we can remain present even while the outside world rearranges itself?
That, to me, is where ancient wisdom and modern leadership begin to meet.
Psychological flexibility teaches us that we can experience discomfort without becoming controlled by it. Research into savoring reminds us that we can fully appreciate positive experiences rather than rushing past them toward the next achievement. The physiology of breath reminds us that the body itself can become part of how we meet pressure and change. Taoist wisdom adds something quieter: Don’t close your hand.
Coming full circle
The deeper we go in exploring what remains constant beneath the noise of changing circumstances, the more this work seems to bring us not further away from ourselves, but back home.
Steadier. Freer. Less at the mercy of the next good or bad thing that happens. Perhaps, paradoxically, more able to love what is here.
The butterfly is still welcome to land. We can admire its colors, feel the delicate touch of its feet against our skin, and allow ourselves to be completely enchanted by its presence. We just don’t need to close our hand around it anymore.
Ready to lead from the inside out?
This understanding sits at the heart of the work I share with people who are ready to move beyond managing life exclusively from the thinking mind.
Through Taoist Inner Alchemy, Qigong, Chi Nei Tsang, breathwork, and energetic practices, I help people reconnect with the deeper intelligence of the body, heart, and inner self, creating greater space for clarity, vitality, and conscious choice.
Because true steadiness does not come from creating a life in which nothing changes. It comes from discovering the place within you that can remain present while everything does.
If you feel called to explore this work more deeply, I invite you to discover my sessions and programs.
Read more from Ann Smets
Ann Smets, Human Potential and Soul Integration Facilitator
Ann Smets is a Human Potential & Soul Integration Facilitator and founder of Soulestara, working at the intersection of physical health, nervous system regulation, and energy alignment. With a background in Taoist healing practices and body-based therapies, she bridges ancient wisdom with modern life. Her approach focuses on creating lasting transformation by working through the body, the subconscious, and the energetic system. Her mission is to guide people into a more conscious way of being, where clarity, energy, health, and fulfilment naturally emerge.
