Sometimes it's just a different seat - leadership lessons from a caravan.

On stepping out of the middle of it - without going very far at all

I stepped out of my makeshift caravan office and took in the view. I'd just finished the eighth of nine chapters I'd come here to write. As I looked at the Ochil Hills - so familiar, yet so different from this angle - I realised what I'd done.

I'd taken a different seat.

The book I am writing is a companion for people who carry too much at work. Leaders who have a team around them but still feel like they're the only ones doing the heavy lifting. Who are central to everything their team is trying to achieve and can't seem to get themselves untangled from the middle of it all.

And there I was, having quietly solved that problem for myself.

I hadn't gone far. I'd moved our caravan two miles from home and stayed for three nights with the intention of writing all nine key chapters. Stepping out of the centre of my life, but close enough to still get an ice cream with the kids after school in between chapters. That was the whole plan. Nothing radical.

Last year I went on a writing retreat in Spain specifically to write. Others there did exactly that. I came back with something different - I had started to find out who Valerie the writer actually is. In some ways, if I hadn't gone, I'd never have found myself in a caravan two miles from home with nine post-its in a pot and a clear enough head to use them. This time I didn't need Spain. I needed something simpler, smaller, closer to home. When we're stuck in the centre of something - a team, a project, a role - we're often too close to see it clearly. We become part of the dynamic. We're caught in cycles we can't name because we're living inside them. The instinct is to push harder, stay longer, hold more tightly. Or to think that what's needed is something dramatic - a significant intervention, a big restructure, a complete overhaul.

But sometimes what's needed is just a different seat. A slightly shifted angle on a familiar view. Enough distance to see the shape of things without losing sight of what matters.

The Ochil Hills looked the same as they always do from my office window. From two miles further away, they were completely different. More expansive. More sky. I felt that particular kind of smallness that isn't deflating - the kind that reminds you that you're not the centre of everything, and that's actually fine.

That feeling is what I want the leaders I work with to find. It doesn't often need a dramatic intervention, just a different seat. A different seat won't give you all the answers. It will just keep showing you new ones.

That's what I'm writing the book for. And that's what the Ochil Hills did for me while I was writing it.

Where could you sit to see your world differently?

Valerie McLean is a consultant, facilitator and team coach. She works with values-driven organisations where leaders are carrying too much and teams have more potential than they're currently reaching.