THE LEAP METHOD: L IS FOR LEVERAGE
You Have More Than You Think
The most underutilized resource any leader has isn’t a budget line or a headcount. It’s their own history.
I say this to clients all the time, and I watch the same reaction cross their faces: a flicker of relief, followed by a flicker of doubt. Relief, because it sounds true. Doubt, because most of us have been trained to treat our past as background noise — the thing we mention briefly in a bio, then rush past to get to the vision, the plan, the next move. We treat reflection and looking backward as a detour from the real work of moving forward.
It isn’t. It’s the first phase of it.
If you’re standing at the edge of a leap right now (a career change, a new venture, a bet on an idea nobody’s validated yet) you might feel like you’re starting from zero, but you’re not. Every skill you’ve built, every mistake you’ve survived, every relationship you’ve quietly maintained and every hard-won piece of wisdom is already in the room with you. You just haven’t turned around to look at it yet.
That’s what Leverage is for. It’s the first phase of the LEAP framework, and before we dream (Envision), sharpen our thinking (Ask), or build anything (Prototype), we have take inventory of what we’re already carrying
What Leveraging Actually Means
I like to call this practice back-casting. Most of us are fluent in forecasting — projecting forward, imagining scenarios and planning for what’s next. Back-casting is its complement: the deliberate, strategic practice of looking backward and taking stock in order to move forward with greater clarity and confidence.
Leveraging is not nostalgia. Nostalgia is sentimental but leveraging is clear-eyed and useful. It’s the excavation of your skills, your experiences, your relationships, and the wisdom you paid for the hard way.
Here’s a phrase I come back to often: our pains plus our gains equal our assets. Not one or the other. Both. The project that flopped taught you something the project that succeeded never could. The relationship that ended badly showed you exactly what you need in the next one. Leaders tend to file failures under “regret” and wins under “resume,” when both belong in the same column- because they’re evidence of what you’re capable of.
Most leaders skip this step because they’re so relentlessly future-focused. But innovation without roots is just guessing. You need both back-casting alongside forecasting because that encompasses the entire discipline.
The Inventory of Courage
Now for the emotional core of the Leverage phase. It’s worth embracing.
An Inventory of Courage is a personal accounting of every time you faced something hard, made a mistake, revised your approach, or iterated your way through a failure toward something better. It’s not a highlight reel. It’s not about celebrating your wins. It’s about recognizing that your capacity for courage has been building, quietly and incrementally, your entire life.
Mine started in a schoolyard. I was six years old, and I stood up to a bully. That was the first entry in my Inventory of Courage, though I wouldn’t have called it that then. But it helped me with the next challenge – the next school; the chocolate chip cookie business I started in high school; Nat’s Hats, the hat design business I developed while teaching middle school English full time. And then of course leaving academia entirely to build Figure 8 Thinking. Every leap after that first one drew on the same account. The courage was accumulated.
That’s the part people forget. When you feel like you don’t have the courage to make your next leap, you’re not actually lacking courage. You’re forgetting to consult your own evidence.
Try this: Write down five to seven moments in your life when you did something hard and survived it — or thrived because of it. Don’t overthink which moments qualify. Then look for the pattern. What does it tell you about what you’re capable of right now?
Skills, Relationships, and Assets You’ve Been Overlooking
Once you’ve traced your Inventory of Courage, widen the lens. This is a full leverage audit, not just an emotional one.
Start with your skills. The things you’ve dismissed as “just what I do” — the way you translate technical jargon for a room, the instinct for when a project is about to go sideways, the calm you bring to other people’s chaos — these are often your most differentiated assets precisely because they feel unremarkable to you.
Then focus on your relationships: the former colleague you haven’t spoken to in three years; or the mentor who offered to stay in touch and meant it; or the unexpected ally from a completely different industry. These relationships are sitting dormant, waiting for you to activate them.
And then consider your detours: the role that felt like a failure; or the pivot that felt like a step backward. These often contain the most useful intelligence you have for the leap ahead, because they taught you something you couldn’t have learned by succeeding on the first try.
The goal of the Leverage phase isn’t sentimental reflection, it’s insight. You want to arrive at your leap well-resourced, not empty-handed, hoping that courage will show up on its own.
The Bridge to Envision
Leveraging is grounding work. It’s necessary, but it isn’t sufficient on its own. Once you know what skills and relationships you’re carrying, then you’re ready to leverage your Inventory of Courage to dream about where you’re actually going.
You can’t leap well from an empty runway. Leverage is how you build one.
That’s where we’re headed next: Envision, the phase where disciplined imagination takes over and you give yourself permission to want something bigger than feels reasonable.
“Your Inventory of Courage likely started earlier than you think. The question isn’t whether you have courage — it’s whether you’re consulting your own evidence.”
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About Natalie
Dr. Natalie Nixon is the creativity whisperer to the C-suite, helping leaders make better business decisions through wonder and rigor. At Figure 8 Thinking, she’s a creativity strategist, global keynote speaker and author of the award winning The Creativity Leap and the upcoming book Move. Think. Rest.: Redefining Productivity & Our Relationship with Time.
Real Leaders named Natalie one of the Top 50 keynote speakers of 2022 and she’s been featured in Forbes and Fast Company. She received her BA from Vassar College, and her PhD from the University of Westminster. These days you can find her on the ballroom floor fine-tuning her cha-cha and foxtrot.
Follow Natalie on Instagram: @natwnixon.