Fiji Reflections Part 1

Fifty Feet Up, No Rope to Hold

Picture a pole fifty feet in the air, splintery, narrow, with only small pegs to climb on, tied together with a few others at the top. The rope and harness offer safety, but not assistance, climbing means finding your own balance the entire way up, then somehow standing upright on the very top before leaping out toward a trapeze and finally being lowered down.

It looks manageable from the ground. It is genuinely terrifying in practice, and that gap between how something looks from a distance and how it actually feels up close turned out to be the first lesson worth carrying home.

The Real Pain: Assuming People Aren’t Trying Hard Enough

The real pain is a familiar, almost automatic assumption: when someone is struggling or underperforming, the instinct is often to assume they simply are not trying hard enough. That assumption feels reasonable in the moment. It is very often wrong, and it quietly shifts a leader’s posture from support into judgment.

Everyone, genuinely, is climbing their own version of that pole. Assuming that people are doing their best, even when the result falls short, changes everything about how a struggle actually gets responded to.

The Failure Pattern: Judgment Instead of Support

The failure pattern is treating a struggling team member’s performance as a will problem, a lack of effort or motivation, when it is far more often a skill problem, a genuine gap in ability, experience, or circumstance that effort alone cannot close. That distinction matters enormously, because the right response to each one looks completely different.

Judgment and criticism might feel like accountability in the moment. Correctly diagnosing whether someone is missing the skill, not the will, is what actually determines whether the right kind of help ever gets offered.

This Isn’t About Excusing Poor Performance, It’s About Getting the Diagnosis Right

None of this means lowering standards or accepting poor outcomes without addressing them. It means getting the diagnosis right before deciding how to respond. A struggling performer who is genuinely doing their best needs real support and skill-building. A struggling performer who is not trying at all needs a very different, more direct conversation. Treating both the same way, with blanket criticism or blanket excuse-making, fails whichever one actually needed the other response.

The Instructor Who Removed the Pegs

Here is the moment that made this distinction concrete. One participant froze partway up the pole, just past the safety point known as the red line, the height above which a fall could be safely managed by the rope system rather than resulting in hitting the ground. She could not physically climb back down the way she came. The only real options left were up, or off.

One of the instructors climbed up and began removing the lower pegs entirely. At first, that looked almost cruel, forcing her forward with no way back. In reality, he was doing something quietly brilliant: clearing away the pegs so that if she did fall, she would not strike them on the way down and get injured. He was not pulling her up, and he was not just cheering from below. He was making her potential fall safer, in case it happened.

Why It Matters: Three Ways to Support Someone Past Their Red Line

This matters because it reveals three genuinely different forms of support, and knowing which one someone actually needs changes everything. Sometimes support means lifting someone directly, actively helping them move forward. Sometimes it means encouragement from below, cheering someone on as they find their own way through something hard. And sometimes, the most important form of support is simply making the environment safer, so that if someone does struggle or fail, the consequences are not devastating.

Think about the people in your own life climbing something difficult right now: starting a business, beginning a new job, entering a marriage, taking on a hard project, facing a difficult season. Each one may need a different kind of support at different moments, and assuming only one type of help is available often means missing what they actually need.

A few practical ways to offer real support show up directly in this story, and they are worth naming clearly:

• Lifting someone directly, offering hands-on help or guidance when they are capable of moving forward with real assistance.
• Encouraging from the ground, offering genuine belief and cheering someone through a struggle they need to work through themselves.
• Making the environment safer, removing unnecessary risk or harsh consequences so that a setback becomes a lesson rather than a lasting injury.

Teach the Framework: You Don’t Know It Until You Do It

A separate, equally important lesson came from watching people dismiss activities like this entirely: climbing a pole, walking on hot coals, breaking a board, scaling a wall as a team. It’s easy to say “I already know that” or “that’s a waste of time” about something never actually attempted. But exposure to an idea and genuine mastery of it are two completely different things.

Real capability comes from actually doing something difficult, repeatedly, until it becomes real, embodied skill rather than just familiar information. Someone who says they already know how to run a great project, lead through pre-construction, or manage their own personal organization, but is not actually doing those things consistently, does not yet actually know them. The same logic applies to hard leadership moments: a difficult conversation, letting someone go, stepping into a role that feels far outside a comfort zone. Practicing discomfort deliberately, before it is actually required, builds the muscle memory that makes those moments survivable when they genuinely matter.

Turning This Into Daily Practice

One especially direct challenge worth carrying forward: notice whether you are someone who claps, cheers, and pays attention when others need support, or someone who stays quietly focused on your own concerns instead. That pattern rarely stays contained to one setting. Someone who will not offer genuine attention and encouragement in a room full of people is very likely carrying that same disengagement into work, family, and everyday relationships.

A few small, concrete actions build this habit directly: checking in with a colleague or family member and genuinely asking if they need help, noticing and naming someone’s effort out loud, and simply paying attention to the people around you instead of staying heads-down in your own tasks.

One More Step

The closing lesson from that pole is worth carrying into nearly any difficult situation. As each person climbed, the group below chanted one simple phrase over and over: one more step, one more step, one more step. Not worry about the whole climb, not the leap at the top, not whether it would work out. Just the next single step. That is a genuinely useful mantra for anything overwhelming, a hard project, a hard season, a hard conversation. The whole journey does not need to be figured out at once. Just the next step does.

Connecting It Back to Building People, Not Just Projects

None of this happens without leaders willing to correctly diagnose what kind of support someone actually needs, rather than defaulting to judgment or a single fixed response. Building that kind of genuine, attentive support into daily leadership is exactly what turns a group of individuals into a real team.

If your project needs superintendent coaching, project support, or leadership development, Elevate Construction can help your field teams build the kind of culture where people are genuinely supported through hard moments, not just judged by the outcome.

The Challenge

So here is the challenge worth carrying into your next difficult moment, whether it is your own or someone else’s: figure out what kind of support is actually needed right now, lifting up, cheering on, or making the fall safer, and then just focus on the next step. As the group chanted at the base of that pole, “One more step.” On we go.

FAQ

What does it mean that a struggling performer might have a “skill problem, not a will problem”?

It means the person may genuinely be trying their best but lacks the specific ability, experience, or resources needed to succeed, rather than lacking motivation or effort. Correctly identifying which one is actually happening determines whether criticism or real support is the right response.

Why did the instructor remove the pegs instead of just encouraging the person to keep climbing?

Once someone was past the point where a fall could be safely managed, but unable to climb back down, the instructor made the potential fall itself safer by clearing away pegs she could have struck on the way down. It was a third form of support, distinct from lifting someone up or cheering them on, focused on reducing the harm of a possible setback.

What are the three different ways to support someone, according to this reflection?

Lifting someone directly with hands-on help, encouraging them from the sidelines as they work through something themselves, and making the environment safer so a potential failure causes less harm. Different situations call for different combinations of these three approaches.

Why does “you don’t know it until you do it” matter for leadership skills?

Being exposed to an idea or concept is not the same as genuinely mastering it, which only comes from actually practicing the hard, uncomfortable action repeatedly. Leaders who claim to already know something but are not consistently practicing it have not actually built the real capability yet.

How can the “one more step” mantra help with something overwhelming?

It shifts focus away from the entire scope of a difficult situation, which can feel paralyzing, and toward the next single, manageable action. Concentrating on just the next step, rather than the whole journey, makes it possible to keep moving forward even when the full picture feels overwhelming.