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The freedom I wish for you
“I always sleep well, no matter what happens.”
I hear people say it often. Especially those in leadership roles. And honestly? I don’t quite believe it.
I’ve been leading organizations for quite some time now—ranging from a hundred to well over a thousand people, across different roles and sectors. I know what it is to lie awake at three in the morning. With questions that felt manageable during the day, but suddenly grow in the dark. With decisions you have to make tomorrow, while not fully seeing their consequences.
In every role within an organization, worries affect you. But for a leader, the impact is greater. Because your unrest seeps through. Into your team, your conversations, the choices you make. People sense it, even if you don’t say it out loud.
And worries are always there. Setbacks in the business. Lower revenue. Clients who are no longer satisfied. Projects falling away for reasons beyond your control. Doubts about whether you are still relevant in a market that is changing faster than ever. Or concerns about people on your team who are struggling privately—problems you cannot solve as a leader, no matter how much you want to.
In my view, no one has captured this more powerfully than Corrie ten Boom.
She was a watchmaker from Haarlem—incidentally the first licensed female watchmaker in the Netherlands—who, together with her father and sister, hid Jewish people in their home during the war. In their house on the Barteljorisstraat, the resistance built a secret room. Hundreds found refuge there. Until the family was betrayed in 1944. Her father died in prison in Scheveningen. Her sister Betsie died in the Ravensbrück concentration camp. Corrie survived—later it turned out due to an administrative error—and spent more than thirty years traveling the world, speaking about hope, forgiveness, and inner peace.
It was someone who quite literally lost her freedom who wrote:
“Worrying does not take away tomorrow's troubles. It takes away today's peace.”
That sentence carries a different weight when you know the life it came from. It is something someone paid for with everything a human being can lose.
Over the years, I have learned in my own way how to deal with worry. Not by pushing it away—that doesn’t work. But by accepting that it is there, without giving it control. And by trusting in something greater than myself—a trust that has carried me throughout my life and that I return to in difficult moments.
Because this is what I have come to know: my greatest wealth is a calm state of mind. Nothing compares to it. Not money, not recognition, not success.
And for a leader, that calm is not a luxury. It is your most important tool. From a place of calm, you can lead, truly listen, and make the right decisions. From worry and unrest, you cannot—or at least not nearly as well. The worries don’t disappear when you reach a certain position. What changes is how you learn to deal with them.
Worries will keep coming. There will always be something for the mind to dwell on. The art is not to eliminate that. The art is to remain free within it.
In a few days, it will be May 5 - Liberation Day in the Netherlands. We then celebrate a freedom that should never be taken for granted and that was hard fought. By people like Corrie and her family. By many who did not survive.
But there is another kind of freedom I wish for you today. Inner freedom. The freedom to be honest about what is heavy. The freedom not to try to solve everything. The freedom to choose calm, even when circumstances don’t ask for it.
That freedom matters every day. And especially when you lead others.
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Ineke Kooistra Blog & Articles
