What is the “liminal space” in leadership and nervous system regulation?
The liminal space is the threshold between a disruptive event (a medical result, a business crisis, a major decision) and its resolution: the old situation has ended, the new one hasn’t been revealed. The term comes from anthropology (Arnold van Gennep, later Victor Turner) and is now widely used in coaching and leadership. Holding the liminal space means staying present, un-numbed and able to make decisions while the outcome is still unknown. Research suggests uncertainty itself is a potent stressor: people can find not knowing whether something bad will happen more stressful than knowing that it will. Nervous system regulation under pressure isn’t about feeling calm. It’s about having a reliable route back to the present moment when your body says otherwise.
The PDF arrived on a quiet afternoon in September, which is when bad news prefers to arrive. Never during a crisis, when you’re braced. Always on a Monday, when you’re eating something over the sink.
It was a routine blood panel. I’d done the same one three years earlier and passed with the smug serenity of someone who reads their own LinkedIn bio too often. This time, two numbers sat well above my baseline: ESR and CA125.
In a vacuum, numbers on a page are just data. But none of us live in a vacuum. We live in families.
I am writing this ten days before my hospital consultation on October 23rd 2026. I don’t have an answer yet. That is the entire point of this article.
The Envelope on the Desk: When Numbers Arrive Before Meaning
When a lab result lands: the report gives you the number, and your body gives you the meaning. Instantly, and without consulting anyone.
Within about three seconds, my family tree lit up like a departures board. A close family member had been diagnosed with mid-stage ovarian cancer. Two of my paternal aunties have had breast cancer: one had passed on, the other is in radiotherapy treatment as I write this.
That was the Biological Fire Alarm. Loud, physical, and completely indifferent to my credentials.
What ESR and CA125 Actually Tell You (Not Much, Which Is the Point)
Let me be the responsible adult for a paragraph, because the internet will otherwise do it badly.
ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate) and CA125 are both non-specific markers. ESR flags that there’s inflammation somewhere in the body. CA125 can be raised by ovarian conditions, but also by endometriosis, fibroids, infections and a long list of entirely harmless causes. Neither is a diagnosis. A raised number is a question, not an answer.
I have data with no meaning attached, and a family history that is happy to volunteer some. If you’ve ever received an ambiguous result about anything (a health scan, a lost client, an “are you free for a quick chat?” from your biggest account) you know this room.
The Family Echo
Family history is not destiny, but it does something quieter and more annoying: it changes the weather inside your body before any facts arrive. I wasn’t reading a blood report. I was reading it with three other people’s stories laid over the top.
I’m telling you this because if you’re a healer, a practitioner or a coaching founder who’s spent years holding space for everyone else, your own alarm will probably go off in your own private language, and you will be tempted to treat it as an admin problem.
Busyness Is an Anesthetic (Which is Cheap, Legal and Socially Rewarded)
In the first hour, my mind did what every high-achieving mind does when frightened: it tried to leave the building via a side door marked Productivity.
We are extraordinarily good at this. We’ve spent decades refining it. When our internal weather gets too loud, we don’t sit with it. We open twenty browser tabs. We rewrite a sales page nobody asked us to rewrite. We book back-to-back calls. We answer emails at 11 PM and call it dedication.
Busyness is the only anesthetic that earns praise, gets you a badge on LinkedIn and is available without a prescription.
What It Looks Like in Your Business
- The Burned-Out Healer feels a low, churning dread before sessions with a boundary-crossing client and quietly extends their sessions, discounts their rate and takes on two more people instead of having one uncomfortable conversation.
- The Stuck Specialist knows she should raise her fees and launch her own offer. So she enrols in a fourth certification, because one more credential feels safer than one honest price.
- The Founder in Pieces feels the physical ache of chronic exhaustion and responds by launching another product line, because fixing the broken operating model would mean admitting it’s broken.
Different costumes, same move: we use productivity to avoid the truth. And the trouble with truth is that eventually it shows up in writing. Sometimes, in your bloodwork.
The Liminal Waiting Room: What Uncertainty Does to a Nervous System
Between the alarm and the answer is a place anthropologists call the liminal space, from the Latin limen, threshold. Arnold van Gennep coined the idea in his study of rites of passage, and Victor Turner later developed it: the old reality has ended, the new one hasn’t yet arrived, and you’re standing in the corridor. (The term has since been borrowed by coaching and leadership. I’m borrowing it too.)
The corridor is uncomfortable for a documented reason. Research on uncertainty and stress, including work by de Berker and colleagues (2016, Nature Communications), found that not knowing whether something bad will happen can be more stressful than knowing that it will. Grupe and Nitschke’s 2013 review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience describes how anticipating uncertain threat drives anxiety. Translation: your nervous system would rather have a catastrophe it can plan for than a maybe it can’t.
Catastrophizing vs. Grounded Presence
So your survival brain offers a helpful service. It whispers: Assume the worst. Draft the eulogy. Pre-grieve everything. At least then nothing can surprise you.
That feels like preparation. It isn’t. It’s a body-wide stress response, firing today for a pain that may never come, and it doesn’t come with a refund.
There is a second option, and it’s less dramatic, which is why nobody chooses it voluntarily: stay in the actual moment, where the facts are. Today’s facts are boring. I don’t have a result. I have a date. I have a body that’s breathing and a diary that is still full.
The Night the Anesthesia Won
I’d love to tell you I sat in serene stillness like a woman in a meditation advert. I did not.
I’d love to tell you I sat in serene stillness like a woman in a meditation advert. I did not. On the day I received the appointment schedule, I counted my open browser tabs and got to tab 12 before I stopped. Not one of them was urgent. I had reorganised my calendar for that week to fly back to Singapore, and I’d just agreed to a call I would normally have declined in one second flat. It only clicked when my husband asked how I was, and I answered with my to-do list. Yes, I coach this for a living. Thank you for noticing. I’m including it because if I only reported my best moments, I’d be selling you a brochure. And you don’t need another brochure. You need a person who has actually been in the room.
Nervous System Regulation Under Pressure: One Hand, One Question, One Breath
I’m trained as a Certified Clinical Trauma Specialist (CCTS-I) and an ICF MCC coach, and here is my professional confession: none of the fancy frameworks work if you can’t use them at 1 AM. So here’s the one that survives 1 AM.
Every time my mind starts scripting worst cases, I put a hand on my chest and ask:
“What is true right now, in this exact breath?”
Not what might be true. Not what my aunties’ medical histories imply. What is true now.
Right now, I’m breathing. Right now, I’m working. Right now, I don’t have an answer, and that’s allowed.
It won’t cure anything. It’s not meant to. It’s a way back to the present when your body is loudly insisting it lives in a future that hasn’t happened. A nervous system can be hijacked, and mine has been, more than once this month. What I’ve built over years isn’t immunity. It’s knowing the way back.
Operational Inflammation: Is Your Business Running a High ESR?
This whole episode has given me an unfairly useful lens on the businesses I audit.
A high ESR means the body is inflamed somewhere. Most helping-profession businesses I see are running a high operational ESR:
- Pricing inflamed with guilt.
- Calendars inflamed with boundary breaches.
- Client lists inflamed with over-delivery and resentment.
- The owner inflamed with everything, quietly, at 11 PM.
These businesses keep running until a crisis makes them stop: a breakdown, a health scare, a client blow-up. The business was never designed to survive the owner being human.
If your business collapses the moment, you need a doctor’s appointment, a sick day, or a week to care for someone you love, you haven’t built a business. You’ve built a job with better branding, and your nervous system is the unpaid intern holding it together.
If You’re in Your Own Waiting Room
Health question, revenue dip, a decision you keep circling but never commit to: we all end up in a corridor at some point.
I’m walking into my appointment on October 23rd without a guarantee and without a script. What I do have is a business built to hold my life instead of demanding I sacrifice it to keep the lights on. I’d like that for you too.
If you want to find out where your business depends on you never getting tired, ill or human, the Strategic Business Audit is a 1-on-1 structured review of your model, pricing, boundaries and capacity: rigorous, honest, and considerably more pleasant than a blood test.
It’ll be here whether or not you’re ready.
[Explore the Strategic Business Audit →] (link to booking page)
Your health is not a tax you pay for success. It’s the foundation the whole thing stands on.
I’m sharing personal experience, not medical advice. If you have a health concern, please talk to your doctor.