Cover photo by Raychan| Unsplash
What soulful leadership asks of us when promises are delayed, identity feels fractured, and transformation still calls.
Introduction
When the path feels uncertain and the weight of survival threatens to eclipse your sense of purpose, soulful leadership calls for something deeper.
This is the first in a two-part essay exploring the inner work of leading with integrity and presence—especially when life stretches you beyond your strategies. Rooted in Scripture and lived experience, it reflects on the story of Jacob as a mirror for our own leadership wrestles: with identity, ambition, fear, and transformation.
At the end of this post, you’ll find a free reflection guide to help you pause and explore these themes in your own life and leadership. Part 2 continues the journey, turning toward rest, resilience, and embodied integration.
REST IN THE WRESTLE
“Sometimes stillness is where the wrestle begins.”
Photo by Marcos Paulo Prado on Unsplash
For years, I’ve wrestled with this question: How do we lead with wholeness when life pulls us into survival mode?
When spiritual hunger is met with financial or relational strain; when the desire to grow is eclipsed by burnout or illness; when even our sense of purpose feels compromised by the basic need to simply endure the daily grind.
While this reflection is grounded in my own spiritual worldview—drawing deeply from Scripture, soul care, and the Christian tradition—I invite you to stay with the wisdom here and receive what resonates. Whether your anchor is faith or intuition, or something still unnamed, may you find yourself somewhere in the wrestle—and the rest.
At its heart, this piece explores a paradox: that soulful leadership requires learning to rest in the wrestle—especially when the pressures of survival threaten to override our deeper call to alignment, purpose, and peace. Real growth, I’ve found, is rarely sequential or predictable. It is nonlinear, holy, and deeply human. And the work of leading with soul often begins when we are forced to confront what our strategies can no longer solve.
JACOB: THE ORIGINAL WRESTLER
“Transformation rarely comes without tension.”
Painting: “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” by Eugène Delacroix, c. 1861. Musée Saint-Denis, France.
Jacob’s wrestling encounter in Genesis 32 offers a compelling image of what it means to integrate the whole self—mind, body, and spirit—while facing profound vulnerability. But Jacob didn’t arrive at that night of reckoning by accident. He was a master wrestler long before he encountered God in the dark.
From the womb, Jacob was grasping for advantage—clutching his brother’s heel at birth, outwitting him for a birthright with a perfectly timed bowl of soup, and later, deceiving their father to steal the blessing. He was a strategist, a survivor, always calculating his next move.
He meets his match in his uncle Laban—a man who tricks Jacob into years of unpaid labour in exchange for marriage to his daughters. Yet Jacob again wrestles his way to success, aided by divine insight. A timely, disruptive innovation involving livestock multiplies his wealth until even Laban is left behind.
But somewhere in this pattern of achievement laced with anxiety, Jacob sees the truth: he is prospering in environments steeped in distrust and psychological distress. The gains are not enough. This time, the next journey isn’t just about escaping a toxic system—it’s about returning to the brother he wronged, and to the past he has evaded.
To make that journey, he must first undertake another—an interior one. In the place of isolation, depletion, and vulnerability, he wrestles not with a brother or a boss—but with God. And there, Jacob reaches his turning point.
THE COST OF NOT RESTING IN THE WRESTLE
“Even in the dark, we are held.”
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Jacob’s life shows us what it costs when we refuse to learn from our struggles. He spent years striving, manipulating, and surviving by his own wits—blessed outwardly, but exhausted inwardly. His relationships were fraught, his peace elusive. And only when he allowed himself to be pinned by God—when he stopped running and started wrestling in surrender to his Source—did transformation finally come.
This is the cost of not resting in the wrestle:
• In leadership, it manifests as settling for comfort over conviction, diluting excellence for the sake of safety.
• Personally, it can look like slipping back into the quick wins of your shadow self—the parts of you you’ve worked so hard to outgrow.
• Relationally, it can mean staying in toxic dynamics because they temporarily meet a need you didn’t have the courage to trust God—or your growth process—to meet differently.
By the time you awaken to the reality of your compromise, there’s often a trail of destruction left behind—beginning with self-betrayal and rippling out to those in your care.
THE MYTH OF SEQUENTIAL GROWTH
This brings us to a myth in personal development: the belief that spiritual depth and leadership integrity can only emerge once our material world is in order. That we must first “sort out” our finances, stabilise our relationships, secure our careers—then turn our attention to the soul.
But real integration doesn’t wait for outward stability. It begins right in the thick of unmet need.
“Some wrestles require strength. Others, surrender.”
Photo by Angela Balashev on Unsplash
CLOSING: THE WRESTLE AS BEGINNING, NOT DELAY
This article includes a free reflection guide to help you reflect more deeply and personally on the themes explored here.
Send download link to:
The Wrestle & The Way
A Reflection Journal for Soulful Leadership
To receive Part 2—where I explore how soulful leadership is shaped through spiritual wisdom, neuroscience, and the grace of leading with a limp—subscribe to The Soulful Ascent on Substack.
Let this be your invitation to pause, wrestle, and begin again—with intention and grace.