“I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all, and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Meeting I Could Not Accept"
“I sat across from my CEO last Tuesday, and the words landed like stones in water. "We are restructuring your division. Your role will change significantly." I nodded. I smiled. I said all the right things. But inside, every cell in my body screamed: this is not how it was supposed to go. I had worked for three years to build something meaningful. I deserved stability, recognition, the natural progression I had mapped out so carefully in my mind. And now, in one conversation, the narrative I had written for myself was being erased by someone else's pen. That night, I could not sleep. The resistance in my chest felt like a fist, clenched and unwilling to open. What I did not yet understand was that my suffering was not born from the restructuring itself. It was born from my refusal to meet it."
While listening to my client share this story
I realized how much I struggle from time to time with accepting what is. There is something deeply human about our resistance to unwanted change, about the way we grip tightly to the narratives we have written for ourselves. When reality refuses to cooperate with our carefully drawn maps, we suffer. Not because of what happens, but because of our relationship to what happens.
What keeps bringing me comfort
are the different learnings from philosophers way before my time, who shared their wisdom. They understood something essential about the human condition, something that feels both ancient and urgently relevant in our modern corporate lives.
Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, offered us this
"Do not seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything happens as it actually will, then your life will flow well." When I first encountered these words years ago, I dismissed them as passive resignation. But sitting with leaders like my client, watching them exhaust themselves in battles with reality, I have come to see something else entirely. Epictetus was not asking us to become indifferent or to surrender our agency. He was inviting us into a different relationship with life itself.
The corporate world teaches us to control
To strategize, to force outcomes into being. We learn to treat life like a negotiation, where success means bending circumstances to our will. But what happens when life refuses to cooperate? What happens when the universe presents us with something we never asked for and certainly do not want? We have two choices. We can wage war against what is, exhausting ourselves in an endless battle with reality. Or we can begin the sacred, difficult work of acceptance.
Carl Jung spoke of synchronicity
Describing it as "the coming together of inner and outer events in a way that cannot be explained by cause and effect and that is meaningful to the observer." This teaching has always stirred something in me. What if the unwanted changes we face, the disruptions we never invited, are not random chaos but rather a kind of mirror? What if external disruption reflects something within us that needs attention, recognition, integration?
To practice what Nietzsche called “amor fati”
To love one's fate, means recognizing that what manifests in our external world is often constellated by the inner workings of our psyche. What we are unable to acknowledge or permit within ourselves is then, by necessity, projected outward onto our surroundings. Our lives become like movie reels, full of omens and signs and coincidences that command our conscious awareness, asking for synthesis and understanding.
How else can we evolve?
There are lessons for all of us, lying in wait, asking that we live them into some distant answer. The pattern of one person is a single tile in the mosaic of us all.
When my client resisted the restructuring
In our work together my client soon realized that by resisting the restructuring, he was resisting more than an organizational change. He was resisting a confrontation with parts of himself he had kept hidden. His need for control. His fear of uncertainty. His deep, unspoken belief that his worth was tied to titles and trajectories. The external disruption was inviting him to meet these inner truths, to stop running from them.
The rejection of amor fati
I have notice that the rejection of "Amor Fati" often looks like this: we question and doubt everything. We become certain there has been some enormous mistake. I was not meant to be here. This cannot be right. Instead of condemnation, amor fati asks that we honor our particular pattern. What if we could regard the hard-to-love pieces of ourselves with non-judgmental curiosity, even wonder? What made you this way? What lessons do you hold for me?
Jung's warning
Jung already told us: "By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent. Then it enters the kingdom of the non-existent, which swells up and takes on enormous proportions."
Amor fati asks that we honor it all
Both the shadow and the light. That we greet both the angels and demons of our lives with a wide-open embrace.
Nietzsche wrote
"I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth. I do not want to wage war against what is ugly."
Jung offered us another essential truth
"We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses."
When my client stopped resisting
When my client began to ask what this moment was teaching him, something shifted. He found freedom not in controlling the outcome but in meeting it with open hands.
As we are starting 2026, I would like to invite you to reflect on this question:
What part of your life are you still holding in tension, and what might become possible if you softened your stance and simply said yes?
The way you meet this question might set the tone for this entire year?
Frequently asked questions
Amor Fati is a Latin phrase meaning "love of one's fate," a concept from Stoic philosophy (popularized by Nietzsche) that encourages not just accepting, but actively embracing everything that happens in life, joy, suffering, loss, and setbacks, as necessary and good, wanting nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. It's about transforming pain into strength and finding meaning in all experiences, rejecting self-pity and regret.
Amor Fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.
- Practice gratitude
- Embrace the present moment
- Reframe challenges as opportunities
- Focus on what is within your control
- Develop inner peace
- Find meaning in suffering
- Practice forgiveness
- Cultivate self-compassion
Moving forward together
If you are ready to create more acceptance in your life, I would be honored to walk alongside you as your thinking partner. As someone who has learned to notice when old patterns quietly dictate new choices, and as a Master Certified Coach with the International Coaching Federation, I have witnessed how the gentle return of curiosity and authentic presence can transform not just how we show up, but also how we experience our own lives. The path from recognizing these old scripts to rewriting them is rarely one we navigate alone, and sometimes we need a trusted companion to help us redirect our attention toward what still holds light and to hold space for the gradual dawn of renewed vitality that emerges when we remember why we chose to lead in the first place.
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