I know the fixer reflex because I’ve lived inside it my whole life.
So when my client told me what happened, I recognized the look on her face before she finished the story. One of her team members, usually the most buttoned-up presenter she had, showed up late to a product launch meeting with an important client and stumbled through it. Unprepared. Off his game in a way she’d never seen from him. The client noticed. She could feel the relationship wobbling in real time.
She’d already built the plan by the time she sat down with me. She was going to reach out to the client herself, smooth things over, and quietly start looping in a more seasoned team member for anything client-facing going forward. Efficient. Protective. The kind of move that saved her more than once before.
“What would happen if you let him find his own way through this?”
She looked at me like I’d asked her to do something reckless.
She sat with that question longer than usual. I watched her turn it over, resisting the pull to answer it the way she answered everything: quickly, competently, with a plan already halfway built. For a few seconds, she didn’t fix anything. She just sat in not knowing what the right move actually was, which, for someone who’d built a career on always knowing, was its own kind of hard.
“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I’ve never let someone sit in a mess like this before.”
I wasn’t there to give her the answer either. My job was mostly to keep asking the next honest question, so she had somewhere to put the discomfort besides a fast solution.
That not-knowing was the beginning of something, even though it didn’t feel like progress. It rarely does, in the moment.
What Came Next
Over the following weeks, she didn’t disappear into fixing, and she didn’t leave her team member to flounder either. She asked him what was going on, and learned about the situation at home that had thrown him off. She asked him what he thought he needed, rather than telling him what she’d decided he needed. It was slower than her instinct wanted, and required her to tolerate a version of “in progress” that had no guaranteed ending.
He asked for two things: a little grace on deadlines for a few weeks, and a chance to rebuild the client relationship himself rather than have it quietly taken from him. Neither was a guarantee. She could have overridden both requests in an afternoon and probably felt more in control doing it.
She didn’t. She gave him the grace and stayed close without stepping in, checking in without checking up. Three weeks later, he asked for a second meeting with the client himself, prepared this time, present in a way he hadn’t been the first time around. The client agreed. The account held because she’d let him fix it.
What Staying in the Mess Actually Cost Her
I don’t think people would have called what she did brave if they’d been watching. There was no dramatic conversation or visible risk. From the outside, it probably looked like she simply did less than usual.
But I know what it cost her because I know the feeling from the inside. Every instinct she had was built for speed and certainty, and she spent three weeks doing the opposite: staying slow, staying uncertain, resisting a fix she could have executed in an afternoon. That kind of restraint doesn’t get applause. Nobody sends a note praising the crisis that didn’t happen because you let someone else grow into solving it.
This is where I think the Inner Wave of a transition often hides in plain sight. It happened in a pause like hers: sitting with a discomfort long enough to actually notice it, instead of moving past it toward the fastest available relief.
What I Tell Myself When the Reflex Kicks In
I still feel that fixer pull constantly, in my own life and with clients. It hasn’t gone away. What’s changed is my relationship to it. I’ve learned to notice the reflex arriving, the same fast, competent certainty my client felt, and to ask myself a version of the same question I asked her: is this actually mine to fix?
Sometimes the answer is yes, and I move. Often, especially with the people I love most, the answer is no, and the harder, quieter work is staying with them.
Where in your life is the reflex to fix asking you to move faster than the situation needs?
If something in this article struck a chord and you know someone who might benefit, please share it.
María Tomás-Keegan is a career and leadership coach, award-winning author, and trusted guide for women moving through meaningful change in work and life. Through her coaching, writing, and speaking, she helps women reconnect with who they are now, trust the wisdom they’ve earned, and lead forward with clarity, courage, and alignment. She created The Ripple Journey™, a framework for work and life transformation. She writes about the quiet, unglamorous work of becoming who you’re meant to be next.
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