What Do You Become When You Outgrow the Thing That Saved You?

At a recent conference, I had set up a short coffee meetup with a fellow speaker.

She opened the conversation by telling me that the keynote I had just wrapped up had been very impactful for her. That she needed to hear this talk. And that during the keynote, her team had been looking at her the entire time — they knew how important this was for her, right now.

Then she told me why.

Twenty-five years ago, she had been in a terrible accident that left her unable to walk and living with chronic pain. After a long period of believing that her life was essentially over, she slowly learned to walk again with the use of a walking stick.

That walking stick became part of who she was.

It was her normal. Her stability. Her way of being okay in the world. She told me she even decorated it so that people would focus on its beauty rather than on her disability.

For a long time, there was no alternative. Surgery wasn’t an option. So she eventually accepted this new reality and leaned into it fully. Despite all the constraints of her disability, she built a life. She built a career. She even became a speaker in her area of expertise — always with the stick.

Then medical technology evolved.

At some point, she was pushed to go to a medical consult to understand what her options might be. At first, she didn’t want to explore them. The idea terrified her. But despite that fear, she eventually went.

And the doctor told her something she never thought she would hear: the surgery was possible. She could walk again on her own two feet.

When he explained the procedure, she asked him one question:

“What about my walking stick?”

He answered simply: “You won’t need it anymore.”

She looked at him with such anguish that he paused and said,

“I can operate to fix the physical part. But you’re going to need to work on the mental part.”

By the time we met, the surgery was already behind her. She was a few months into this new chapter — life without the stick. She had learned to walk again. She was experiencing life without chronic pain for the first time in twenty-five years.

And yet, she was struggling.

Letting go of the stick felt like losing a part of herself. It hadn’t just supported her physically; it had supported her identity. Without it, she felt strange. Vulnerable. Ill-equipped. At times, even ashamed — despite the fact that this change was objectively positive.

As she spoke, I found myself thinking about how often change works like this. Even when change is something we consciously choose, it can still be deeply destabilizing. Because we’re not just changing — we’re losing something. A tool. A system. A reference point. A version of ourselves that we’ve becomes used to.

She told me she was terrified because the next day she would have to go on stage for the first time and give a talk without her stick.

We reflected on that together. And I told her:

“I understand that the stick you’re letting go of is something you’ve lost. But I also see that you’ve gained so much. The strength that stick represented is now in your legs. Everything it gave you — support, stability, confidence — your legs hold now. You don’t need the external support anymore. It’s already in you.”

She smiled and told me that helped.

We talked about how this wasn’t just recovery. It was a real transition. A new beginning. And how it was completely valid that this felt hard. That struggling didn’t mean she had made the wrong decision or that she was handling this poorly. It meant she was in the middle of redefining herself.

She also told me she hadn’t shared this struggle with anyone else and that she now felt better equipped to get on stage the next day.

As I walked away from that conversation, one question stayed with me — and it’s one I want to pose to you:

What is your walking stick?

The tool, system, support, role, habit, or identity that once helped you/your team/your organization — but that you may no longer need.

Change always asks us to let go of what once held us up, sometimes so we can discover how to stand again on our own two feet.