The Slide That Stayed With Me for Twenty Years

Nearly twenty years ago, as a graduate at Barclays Capital, an HR manager showed our cohort a slide. It was a simple S-shaped curve — and she told us this would be our journey. Not in a week or a month, but over time. And it would look different for each of us.

The curve started with a steady climb — the excitement of something new, the sense of making progress, learning fast. Then it peaked. A brief moment of feeling on top of the world, capable, confident.

And then it dropped.

Sharply.

Into a valley where you question everything. Why you're there. What you're doing. Whether you were ever as capable as you thought. Whether someone made a mistake. Whether you belong here at all. Whether the people who believed in you were simply wrong.

I've never forgotten that slide. And I've lived that valley more than once since.

What I didn't know then was that this curve has a name. Charles Handy wrote about it — the Sigmoid curve — as a way of understanding the natural arc of growth and change. There's something oddly reassuring about knowing the research exists. Less reassuring to be living it.

The valley is the part nobody warns you about clearly enough. You can know intellectually that it's part of the process and still find it disorienting to be inside it. The self-doubt feels real. The slowness feels real. The gap between where you are and where you thought you'd be by now feels very real.

Persistence helps. Strategy helps. But there comes a point where neither is quite enough. You've done what you can do. You've applied what you know. And still the results feel slow, or absent, or unclear. At that point, something else is required.

For me, that something is trust. Not a passive, hands-off trust that everything will magically resolve. But a more active, intentional kind — a choice to keep moving forward without the certainty of knowing where it leads. A trust in the process. A trust in your own capacity to find your way through. And sometimes, a trust in something bigger than the immediate moment — a sense that things are unfolding as they should, even when you can't yet see how.

I want to be honest about what trust is and isn't. It isn't a guarantee. The curve doesn't always continue upward — and trust alone won't change that. What trust does is change how you move through the uncertainty. It keeps you steadier. It stops you spending energy fighting what you can't control. It allows you to stay present to what's actually happening rather than being consumed by what might not.

Trust isn't optimism. It isn't denial. It's a choice to remain open — to yourself, to the process, to the possibility that something is being built even when you can't yet see its shape.

The valley is not the end of the story. But whether it becomes the middle depends on more than persistence or strategy. It depends on your willingness to stay on the curve — and to trust, as much as you can, that the staying is worth it.