What a Five-Day Hike in Lofoten Taught Me About Change
20. Juli 2026
The photos are lying.
Last week I hiked through Lofoten, Norway, beyond the Arctic Circle, with my dearest friend Irina Radzikhovskaya
Five days. 65 kilometres. 3,358 metres of climbing. 22 hours on our feet.
The photos show the few minutes when the cloud lifted, my fingers got dry and I could finally take out my phone.
The rest was rain. Steady, all day rain that gets into everything you have.
And the ground below it so wet and spongy that every step sank and had to be pulled back out. You do that for six hours and you stop thinking about the view. You think about your feet.
There were two scary moments all week.
→ One was a pass with 65 km/h gusts pushing us sideways. Do you wait it out behind a rock or start the descent and hope the wind eases?
→ The other was a beach crossing at high tide, jumping across slippery rocks with waves at my boots, holding chains that looked Viking-era, a 10 kg pack on my back. I have never felt so exposed.
Both were over in under an hour.
The swamp was not over in under an hour. The swamp was the week.
At one point we lost the path completely. It just stopped. We stood in the rain turning in circles looking for where it picked up again.
Nobody photographs that moment. No picture of hour four in the bog. So the album looks like a week of ridgelines and light.
But you cannot skip the bog to get to the view.
We found the path again. We always did. Not because we had a map that worked or weather that cooperated. Just because we kept moving.
Which part are you in right now?
The bog is the part of change nobody puts on LinkedIn
I tell this story because it maps almost exactly onto what change actually looks like, at work or anywhere else. We see other people’s ridgelines. Their promotion, their new role, their business launch, their pivot that worked. We almost never see their bog: the four hours of not knowing if the path still exists, done with wet feet and no view.
This is one of the six levers in my C-H-A-N-G-E framework, the one about staying in motion when the outcome is not yet visible.
→ The leaders I coach who handle uncertainty well are not the ones with a better map. They are the ones who keep moving through the part with no map at all, the same way we did in that swamp, one step at a time, adjusting as the ground gave way.
→ The ones who struggle most are usually waiting for the fog to lift before they take the next step. Sometimes it does not lift until you have already found the path again.
Sustained effort without a visible endpoint is one of the hardest things to hold, psychologically, and it is exactly where most people quit a change they actually wanted. Naming that the bog is normal, not a sign something has gone wrong, is often the most useful thing a coach can offer someone stuck in the middle of a hard transition.
Whichever part of the swamp you are in right now, the honest answer is usually the same one we used on that trail. You do not need the whole path to appear. You just need to take the next step, and trust that you will find the way again, the way you have before.