The Speeding Train and the Cruise Ship: Navigating Frustration When Others Move Differently
You're sitting in a meeting that feels like it's moving in circles. People are talking at length without landing on a decision. Meanwhile, your mental to-do list is growing, timelines are tightening, and a familiar wave of irritation rises in your chest.
If you're a caring, high-achieving leader stepping into bigger responsibilities, frustration with inefficiency and other people's behaviour can feel like a daily tax on your energy.
You care deeply about getting things right. You want momentum, clarity, and progress. So when colleagues seem to drag their feet, miss the point, or operate in ways that feel completely foreign to you, it's easy to feel justified in your annoyance.
I still bump up against this feeling myself.
The Speeding Train vs. The Cruise Ship
One of my core strengths is being quick to act. When a problem lands on my desk, my instinct is to assess it, make a call, and move forward. For a long time, I equated speed and efficiency with quality and care. In my mind, if we were moving fast, we were delivering value.
The catch is that an overdone strength quickly becomes a liability. When I lean too hard into speed, I become rash. I barrel ahead with tunnel vision, miss critical nuance, and overlook perspectives that would've made the outcome far stronger.
I don't have this completely figured out, and I still catch myself getting impatient when discussion drags on without action. However, I'm learning to lean into the discomfort of slowing down.
I often picture the difference between riding on a speeding train and standing on the deck of a slow-moving cruise ship. On a speeding train, you cover ground quickly, yet everything outside the window blurs past. On a cruise ship, the pace feels almost unsettling at first, yet you see the entire coastline, the shifting weather, and the wider horizon.
Slowing down doesn't mean lowering your standards. It means widening your field of vision.
What Sits Beneath Workplace Frustration
When leaders bring their frustration with teammates or slow processes into coaching, we rarely stay at the surface for long. Usually, that irritation is a signal pointing to something deeper underneath:
A perceived lack of control: When you're navigating uncharted territory or unwritten rules in a new role, holding tightly to your own way of working feels like the safest way to stay afloat.
Fear of failing or being wrong: High-achieving professionals carry immense internal pressure. When others move slowly or take a different path, it can trigger an underlying fear that the project will fail on your watch.
A clash of core motives: What looks like "talking endlessly" to someone driven by quick results might actually be someone else's genuine care for getting the details right, building consensus, or protecting the team from unseen risks.
When we don't pause to examine what's driving our reaction, we end up burning energy fighting reality instead of leading through it.
The Hidden Cost of Jumping Into Other Swim Lanes
Because caring leaders want to protect their teams and deliver strong results, their default response to inefficiency is often to jump in and fix it.
You veer into a colleague's swim lane to tidy up their work, take over a stalled conversation, or push the project back onto your preferred track. From your perspective, you're being helpful, decisive, and responsible.
From the other person's perspective, however, that behaviour often lands very differently. It can feel smothering, overbearing, or even aggressive. Over time, constantly rescuing or overriding others creates a reputation for not being a true team player, which can quietly limit your progression into more senior leadership roles.
Shifting From Venting to Curiosity
The next time you feel that familiar spike of irritation at someone else's pace or approach, pause and ask yourself a candid question: How's this frustration actually helping my situation?
Venting to a trusted friend might release a little steam in the moment, yet it doesn't solve the problem at work. It keeps you locked in your own viewpoint and drains the energy you need to lead effectively.
In my own development, my coach regularly challenges me to look for the learning in how other people approach problems differently. One of the most grounding practices I rely on is choosing to assume good intent.
It's an ongoing practice, especially when emotions run high. Yet when you start from the premise that the other person isn't out to get you and isn't trying to sabotage the work, space opens up. You begin to realize they simply hold different core motives and are standing at a different vantage point.
Instead of asking "Why won't they just do this properly?", curiosity invites you to ask:
What might they be seeing from their standpoint that I can't see from mine?
What's there for me to learn in how they're approaching this?
How does getting curious change how I feel in my body right now?
One Grounded Question for Today
You don't need to overhaul your personality or pretend that inefficiency never bothers you. Your drive, care, and bias for action are genuine assets.
The invitation is just to notice when your strengths are running on overdrive, take a breath, and step onto the deck of the cruise ship for a moment.
Before you fire off that terse email or step into someone else's lane today, ask yourself one simple question:
What can I do today that brings me closer to more understanding and farther away from frustration?
Often, the answer is as small as asking one genuine question, listening without planning your rebuttal, or giving someone else the space to solve a problem in their own way.
Stepping into a bigger leadership role and learning how to trade over-functioning for grounded confidence? Book a free Chemistry Session below to explore how Cusp of Change Coaching can support your next chapter.
