The Unwitnessed Crossing: Why Witness May Be the Most Overlooked Capacity in Leadership

On the recoveries no one sees, and why witness may be the most overlooked human capacity in leadership.

An Unwitnessed Crossing

What is the hardest thing you have ever gotten through that no one around you ever knew about?

I sold the machine for five dollars.

It was the cold therapy machine I used after every surgery during a three year reconstruction of my jaw and my smile. Not the kind that makes ice for drinks. A post-operative unit that circulates cold water to manage swelling and help the body recover after surgery. I priced it at five dollars on purpose. Free, or donated in a box with other things, it would have been overlooked, lost, mishandled. Five dollars meant only someone who actually needed recovery help would reach for it. The price was a filter. A woman picked it up. She needed it. She thanked me.

She had no idea what that machine had been through with me. And that is exactly where this story starts.

The Recovery No One Saw

In 2007 I was badly hurt and nearly died from sepsis. My jaw was broken. I lost teeth. I survived it, and like a lot of us do with the things that frighten us most, I carried it quietly and kept moving.

What I have been asking myself, only recently, is why. Why shame, for something that happened to me. I did not choose what I lost. And yet shame is the word for what I carried, and it shaped years of silence. I think much of it had to do with the expectations around me, and how little room there was for the version of me that needed help instead of giving it. Shame, I am learning, is rarely about the event itself. It is about the meaning we are handed in the aftermath, often by people and systems that needed us to keep moving. I am still finding the language for all of it. But I have stopped pretending the shame was nothing, or that it ever truly belonged to me.

Years later, it came back for me. In 2023 the old injury resurfaced through the same front teeth. What followed was three years of reconstruction: surgery after surgery, bone grafts, soft tissue grafts, long stretches living without my four front teeth while my body slowly rebuilt what had been lost. It was physical, and it was a return to the original fear, my body remembering what it had already been through once.

I retreated. I had to. My face changed. My speech changed. I learned how to talk while hiding my front teeth, shaping words around what was missing. I rarely smiled in photos. When I did share an image, I almost always ran it through a filter first. There were stretches when I could not say certain words clearly, when meeting someone new meant calculating whether I could get through the conversation. So I went into hiding. I stopped showing up in places I used to show up. I declined invitations. I kept video off. I told no one the real reason, because the real reason was a body in the middle of rebuilding itself, and I did not know how to hand someone that information without handing them the whole story underneath it.

The toll was not only physical. Hiding has a cost on the inside. My confidence shrank in ways I had never experienced. My capacity narrowed. The version of me that walked into rooms easily, that spoke without thinking about how the words would form, that trusted her own face to do what faces do, went quiet. I was still doing the work, but I was doing it from a smaller place. The mental and emotional weight of carrying this privately, while continuing to function publicly, was its own long surgery, the one no instrument could touch.

I held what I could. I showed up where I had to. I did the work that could not wait. And almost no one knew any of it was happening.

Today I have a smile built on implants and a bridge. People see it and think nothing of it, which is exactly the point. The restoration is so complete that the journey behind it disappears. No one looking at me would know there was ever a break, a loss, three years of rebuilding, or the quiet endurance underneath.

The Unwitnessed Crossing

This is the strange grief of the hardest things we go through. The result is visible. The passage is not. We arrive on the other side genuinely changed, and the becoming itself, the part that actually transformed us, happened where no one could see it.

We were not witnessed in our becoming. We were only met at the finish line, where it can look like nothing happened at all.

I see this everywhere in my work, and I suspect you see it too. The colleague who returns from leave composed and capable, carrying a loss no one acknowledges. The employee navigating a divorce, an illness, a caregiving crisis, who still delivers, so we assume there was nothing to navigate. The leader who rebuilt themselves through a hard season and met us only with the finished smile. We meet the outcome and miss the crossing entirely.

Witness as a Human Capacity

In the HumanWorks™ Model, I name witness as a distinct human capacity, and as part of the architecture that change and transformation actually require. Most change models skip it. They focus on the transition itself, the before and the after, the stages and the curve. They rarely ask the most human question of all: who saw you while you crossed.

Witness is not advice. It is not fixing. It is not problem solving. It is the act of letting another person be fully seen in what they are going through, without rushing them to the other side. It sounds simple. In practice it is one of the rarest things we offer each other, especially at work, where we are trained to meet outcomes and skip the passage.

Here is what I have learned, living it from the inside. Witness does not erase what happened, and it does not undo the fear. It makes the experience survivable in a different way. It moves the weight from something carried alone in the dark to something that can exist in daylight, as part of a person's story rather than a secret underneath it.

Why I Am Telling This Now

For most of this, I believed holding it privately was strength. Get through it, do not make it anyone's burden, present the finished smile. There is a real strength in that. But there is also a cost. Concealment is not the same as healing. A thing kept in the dark stays heavier than it needs to be.

I sold that cold therapy machine for five dollars because I wanted the recovery help to reach someone who needed it. That instinct, to make a hard passage mean something for the next person, is the whole reason I do this work. And it is why I am letting my own crossing be witnessed here, in service of a concept I believe leaders and humans both need: that being seen in the middle of the hard thing, not just congratulated at the end of it, is what makes the hard thing survivable.

Courage comes first. Clarity arrives on its own. I did not wait until I fully understood what this experience meant before deciding to share it. Some of the meaning has only become clear in the choosing to speak. What I had to find first was the courage to stop hiding.

If you are carrying your own invisible crossing, the smile that hides the rebuilding, the calm that hides the cost, I want you to know the choice to be seen is yours, in your own time, at whatever size you choose. You do not need a spotlight. You need one true witness, and the courage to let them see you.

Understanding Witness

Am I Witnessed?

A reflection. Read slowly. There is no score.

These questions are not a test. They are a way of finding out whether you have been seen, where, and by whom. Take them one at a time. Let each one settle before moving to the next. The point is not the answer. The point is the noticing.

In your hardest passage so far, who knew you were in it?

Who in your life sees you the way you actually are, rather than the way they need you to be?

Whose witness do you still wish you had had, and have never received?

If you are leading or carrying others, who is carrying you?

Sit with whatever rose up. If a name came, hold it. If no name came, hold that too. Both are information.

How to Witness

Five practices. None of them require credentials. All of them require presence.

These are postures, not methods. They are how to be with another person who is in a transition you cannot yet see the shape of. They take time to learn and almost nothing to begin. The first time you practice any of them, you will likely do it badly. That is the practice.

Set your own frame down before you walk in. Before you sit with someone in transition, notice the story you are already carrying about where they are, what they should do, who they are becoming. That story is your lens, not theirs. You do not have to abandon it. You have to set it down for the length of the conversation, so the person in front of you has room to be who they actually are, not who you have already cast them as. Most failures of witness happen before anyone speaks.

Ask what they are actually carrying. Resist the urge to assess, advise, or interpret. Ask the simple, undefended question: what is this actually like, right now? Then make room for the answer that does not fit your assumptions. The person in transition often does not have words for what they are carrying yet. You sitting with the not-yet-having-words is itself the work.

Do not project who they will become. You will be great. You will land on your feet. You will find better. These sound like support and land as pressure. Projecting a future ending, even a kind one, rushes the person past the undefined middle, which is exactly where they need to be seen. Stay with where they actually are, not where you would be more comfortable for them to arrive.

Treat the falling as part of the walking. When the person you are witnessing stumbles, the bad day, the setback, the anger that arrives without warning, do not read it as failure or evidence the comeback is not working. Read it as the process. Most of what looks like a person breaking down in transition is a person learning to move under new conditions. Your job is to know that, so they can begin to know it too.

Stay. More than any technique, witness is the practice of not leaving. Not leaving the room, the friendship, the team, the conversation, when it becomes unclear, slow, or uncomfortable. Most people fade from a person in transition without meaning to, because there is no obvious next thing to say and the work is uncertain. The witness stays anyway. That, more than anything else, is what changes the outcome.

The Work of HumanWorks™

Where the practice becomes a capacity, and the capacity becomes a culture.

This piece names what most change models forget. The work that builds it, deeper, durable, at the scale of teams, organizations, families, and lives, is the work of HumanWorks™.

HumanWorks™ is the consultancy and body of work behind this piece. It serves veterans and the people who lead and love them, military and former military spouses, leaders, founders, organizations in transformation, and anyone responsible for guiding people through change. It does the architectural work this piece points at: building witness, integration, and Transition Agility™, the core human capacity for crossing between systems intact, into the people, teams, and cultures that need them.

The Transition Agility™ Self-Assessment, the deeper instrument behind the reflection above, measures the capacities a person carries into a transition and what is loading on them. It is used in coaching and in organizations to make the invisible work of crossing visible and actionable.

If something in these pages named what you have lived, the work is where to bring it next. For yourself, for the people you carry, for the organization you lead.

We build the architecture for what most change models skip: the human. Because transitions are what make us all human.

Sara B. McNamara, MSOD Founder, HumanWorks™ Solutions