Recently, I often find myself drifting back in time.
I drive with my ‘80s playlist blasting. I can remember every lyric, even when I can’t find my car keys. My social media algorithms feed me memories from that era. AI videos of latchkey kids on BMX bikes racing home as the streetlights come on. Images of WWF wrestlers I idolized (like Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake or “Ravishing” Rick Rude). Clips from my favorite sitcoms (from ALF to The A-Team). And sports highlights from the 1990s, when my beloved Manchester United were worth watching.
I’ve been wondering why. And why now?
Nearly a year ago, I left Washington, DC, and a 20-year career in federal service, for a new life in Malta. This month I missed election night in DC for the first time in 25 years. So some of this is surely homesickness for the career, colleagues, and community I left behind.
Maybe it also involves some desire to feel settled and secure, personally and professionally, especially with all the changes happening in the world. From geopolitics to fast-paced advancements in technology, including AI.
But I don't think it's only me. I hear and sense the same thing in my coaching and consulting conversations with senior leaders across countries and sectors, in the U.S., UK, and Europe. Executives leave, teams are restructured, budgets are cut (so you should “do more with less”), layoffs or buyouts are coming, missions are rewritten, offices close, people doubt they’re ready for their promotion, and new tools keep changing how we do things – and who does what.
People are being asked to move forward – especially with AI adoption – while something in them is still looking back.
Whatever change looks like, people seem to agree on one thing: the future is uncertain. And the path there is complex, complicated, and often confusing.
The Welsh have a word for what might be happening here.
Photograph by Brian Sano
Hiraeth
During the COVID-19 pandemic, while serving in a senior leadership role in the U.S. Department of State, I came across the Welsh word hiraeth (roughly HEER-eyeth).
I don't speak Welsh, and hiraeth is famously hard to translate. Broken down, hir means long, and aeth is often described as sorrow or grief. Some compare it to the Portuguese saudade or the German Sehnsucht, but neither is an exact match.
Writing for the BBC, Lily Crossley-Baxter described it as a mix of homesickness, nostalgia, and longing: a pull on the heart for something that cannot be recovered. Marian Brosschot, a Welsh language officer working in Patagonia, thought of it as a longing for a person, place, or time you can't get back to.
As I understand it, hiraeth is a deep longing for a home, place, culture, person, or a time that you can never return to – and that may never have truly existed, beyond the stories we create or carry in our own hearts and minds. It can be personal, too: missing another version of yourself, or a time in your life that has passed. It’s gone.
The grief without a home
Hiraeth invites a unique kind of grief. In fact, the grief goes in two directions. We grieve the past we lost and can't return to. And we also grieve the future we expected to have there.
In the 1970s, Dr. Pauline Boss coined the term ambiguous loss to describe a sadness or loss without clarity or closure, where something is gone and not gone at the same time. There’s no death of a person. No clear moment or thing to mourn. No closure. It’s unresolved grief. Perhaps invisible. But we can feel it – even if others can’t see it.
Similarly, grief researcher Kenneth Doka developed the idea of disenfranchised grief for losses that aren’t openly acknowledged, socially supported, or publicly mourned. Often they’re judged – and we’re judged for grieving what others don’t see or understand. When a loss doesn’t fit what a culture recognizes as a real, legitimate loss, the person grieving is left without a witness. And often without permission to grieve.
In fact, the writer Jamie Anderson described grief as love with no place to go. Psychologist and author Susan David added to that: “Grief is love, looking for its home.”
Unacknowledged grief doesn’t disappear – it haunts us. It goes and grows in the shadows.
Photograph by Brian Sano
What leadership can learn from movies of the 1980s
So how might we work with hiraeth and the unacknowledged grief that change can bring?
Perhaps we can go back in time, learning from the movies of the 1980s.
Longing and loss run through many of the movies I grew up with and loved as a kid. Back then, I saw them as adventures. Watching them now – after being trained in leadership development and grief education – I see stories about loss and longing. I see hiraeth.
Take E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. I’m sure every American Gen X kid can still recall his mission: to phone home. The story is literally about a stranded visitor’s homesickness. But there’s more. The quieter, unspoken grief belongs to Elliott, a boy whose father has left and whose family is still finding its way forward. E.T. gets to go home to the life and world he knew. Elliott doesn’t. Their homesickness bonds them, emotionally and physically.
The Goonies begins with a loss many in Malta might recognize. The kids’ neighborhood is about to be bulldozed for a developer’s country club. Their hunt for One-Eyed Willie’s treasure is really a search for what was and what is ending. A last weekend together before their homes and friendships are gone.
Stand By Me also involves a group of boyhood friends, but is told by a grown man looking back on the summer when he was twelve. Their adventure involves finding the body of a missing boy, Ray Brower. But they are each also working through their own losses and longing. Especially Gordie, who is grieving his older brother’s death, while his parents are so lost in their own grief that he becomes invisible at home. No one names his losses. And the story carries a second grief. Despite their shared past, the future the boys imagined together never turned out as they had hoped.
Photograph by Brian Sano
The real resistance to change is grieving alone
These films show us something we tend to miss while trying to exercise leadership. The people who have the least power or authority to create or stop a change are often the ones who feel it most – whether those feelings and losses are seen or not.
In my last article, I shared how I learned from Ron Heifetz that people don’t resist change, they resist loss. And that resistance might come from the feelings related to losing many things: their identity, competence, confidence, loyalty to ancestors, managers, or mentors – to the people, ways, and worlds that came before them.
That insight shaped how I exercised leadership as a senior executive in the U.S. federal government, especially during the global financial crisis, the pandemic, and historic transitions between administrations.
But there’s more. Hiraeth shows us what's missing.
First, some part of what people feel they are losing or longing for never existed. They’re not only defending the past. They’re grieving a future they created and had already started living in. You can’t convince someone to overcome that with a new strategy, revised key performance indicators (KPIs), or by pointing to your purpose. And then imagine that’s scaled across dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, each experiencing the change differently.
Second, I’ve come to believe that the losses people experience are not the problem to solve. Change happens – that’s just the way things are. And yet, our bodies, hearts, and minds can take a lot. Besides, we’re changing all the time, moment-by-moment.
What we really resist is grieving alone.
As I’ve also learned from David Kessler, grief needs to be witnessed. Perhaps even more so when it can’t be seen.
Photograph by Brian Sano
Leadership involves seeing what cannot be seen
This offers another reason why I think leadership is an art of seeing. It also involves seeing what cannot be seen – but what needs witnessing. Hiraeth. Ambiguous loss. Disenfranchised grief.
The work of leadership isn’t only about helping people face loss. It’s making sure no one has to face it alone, unseen. That involves seeing the grief people carry for an internal or external world that no longer exists, or perhaps never did.
Hiraeth helps us see clearly while we’re holding people through change.
The practice of leadership requires more than vision or strategy. It goes beyond “getting the right people on the bus.” It’s more than “mourn and move on.” And no performance improvement plan (PIP) or probationary period can solve the problems hiraeth invites us to see.
And yet, seeing someone’s hiraeth doesn’t necessarily mean agreeing that the past or future they envisioned was better. Besides, we can’t bring it back. And we can’t recreate what never was.
Hiraeth isn’t a problem to solve. Leadership doesn’t require fixing anything – or anyone. It doesn’t mean promising a way back. It means recognizing that something or someone was lost, and letting the person or people know you see it. That you see them.
Photograph by Brian Sano
Seeing clearly
Here are a few opportunities for reflection or practice, to see how and where hiraeth might be preventing progress in yourself, your team, or your organization, and how we might learn from it.
Look for the loss or longing. When you, your team, or your organization face change, or resistance to it – whether you initiated it or not – consider how and where hiraeth might hold you back. What “homes” might be lost in the change? Whether they existed or not. Whether you find them in the past or the future.
Ask about the “home.” Have a kind and curious coaching conversation to test your hypotheses. Explore what that home felt like, without judgment or jumping to conclusions. For example, “What did that team or project give you that you miss?” is a different question from “How are you adjusting?”
Notice the themes or patterns. Listen for common or repeated phrases that might suggest hiraeth is haunting people. Some familiar ones: “That’s the way we’ve always done things here…” or “We tried that [weeks/months/years] ago.”
Make room for endings. Grief needs to be witnessed. Co-creating rituals with others helps. Clearly designed and communicated boundaries also help contain the losses and longings people might experience.
Consider the “homes” you can’t see. People carry a country, culture, language, family, history, or former self into every role, task, or conversation. Even if their loss or longing is never named, it’s still there.
Coming home, and belonging
Maybe that’s what my ‘80s playlist and the algorithm’s videos are really about. Not a wish to go back in time, but a way to contain and process my own loss and longing – for a career, a community, and a version of myself I can’t return to – mixed with uncertainty about a future no one can see.
We can’t give anyone their old home back. Even if you find Ray Brower, create a way to phone home, or make it farther than Chester Copperpot.
But we can help make the new workplace, community, relationship, or identity one where loss and longing are allowed. Where we can learn from them, together. Maybe hiraeth is the first brick in building belonging again.
You can start by asking yourself: are you longing for something that was – or for something that might never be? And what might you learn from that?
References
Anderson, J. (2014, March 25). As the lights wink out… All My Loose Ends. http://allmylooseends.com/2014/03/lights-wink
Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous loss: Learning to live with unresolved grief. Harvard University Press.
Crossley-Baxter, L. (2021, February 14). The Welsh word you can’t translate. BBC Travel. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210214-the-welsh-word-you-cant-translate
David, S. [@susandavid_phd]. (2021, November 24). Grief is love, looking for its home [Instagram post]. Instagram.
Doka, K. J. (Ed.). (1989). Disenfranchised grief: Recognizing hidden sorrow. Lexington Books.
Heifetz, R. A. (1994). Leadership without easy answers. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Heifetz, R. A., & Linsky, M. (2017). Leadership on the line: Staying alive through the dangers of change (Rev. ed.). Harvard Business Review Press.
Kessler, D. (2019). Finding meaning: The sixth stage of grief. Scribner.