The Toe, the Ankle, and Other Small Things That Don't Stay Small

A few weeks ago I noticed pain in my foot in a dance class.

It wasn't a dramatic injury. It was the kind of pain you shake off, adjust your steps around, and mostly forget about within the hour. It's just a toe. It's tiny. I mean, how bad could it be?

Except I didn't fully adjust. I just changed how I was landing and moving, slightly, to avoid the sore spot.

A few weeks later, while on my regular Sunday walk, my ankle joint started complaining about the arrangement and I ended up hobbling for about 4kms and wishing I was being pushed in the pram instead of Logan.

It was fine the next day, so I ignored that too. I had no grand philosophy, it was just the ordinary human habit of assuming a small problem will politely stay small if you don't look directly at it.

It did not stay small.

Two weeks later, I was dealing with full-on shin splints, weeks of actual pain, and a level of self-directed muttering that no toe injury has any business earning. If I'd just dealt with the initial pain, none of the rest would have happened. I know this now. I did not know it back then.

Apparently, I am occasionally a slow learner.

I bring this up because I've spent a lot of years watching the exact same mechanism play out at work, minus the dance class and with considerably higher stakes.

Years ago, I negotiated a role before I'd even returned from a sabbatical. I was specific about what I needed it to look like, because I already knew what would happen if I wasn't. We agreed on it. I came back ready to start it.

It wasn't there.

The role had stalled, so I was asked to cover some things in the interim, while it got sorted. I said yes. Reasonable request, reasonable framing, and I was, conveniently, the person who could do it without much of a ramp-up.

A few months later, I found out the role I'd negotiated wasn't happening at all. It had become obsolete somewhere in the global machine without anybody telling me. So I agreed to keep covering, again, while something else got worked out for me.

You can probably see where this is going...

A year later, I was still doing the "interim" job. It had grown well past what I'd agreed to at the start - picking up gaps, absorbing pieces of work that weren't technically mine to solve, at some point apparently annexing a small neighbouring country of responsibilities I hadn't noticed crossing into. By the time a genuinely new role finally got proposed, I was too frustrated and depleted to want it. Not long after, I left.

What I find fascinating about my own psyche in all of this is that I knew it was happening the whole way through. I raised it. More than once. Nobody was ignoring me out of malice - the concerns just weren't resolved, and each time, I kept going anyway. Partly out of responsibility to the project.

Partly because I was capable of executing something that not many other people in that moment could have executed, and some part of me trusted that capability more than I trusted my own terms.

Much like the toe, it wasn't the scope creep itself that finally got my attention. It was my body. Palpitations that had no business showing up in an otherwise ordinary week. Turns out my ankle joint and my nervous system were reading from the same script the whole time: small thing ignored, recruits reinforcements without asking, eventually sends an escalation you can't schedule around.

Small things don't stay small.

Not in a toe, and not in a grey job description or a loose agreement.

It's a pattern I recognise in coaching conversations too (and not just from people who've hurt a random body part or negotiated a corporate role). Capable people rarely fail to notice when a boundary is being renegotiated without their consent. Most notice immediately. What doesn't always follow is treating the noticing as reason enough to act on it again, and again, until the thing actually holds.

I used to think a boundary was something you stated. You had the conversation, named the terms, and from there it existed (a fact about the working relationship that other people were now responsible for respecting).

What that year taught me, somewhat more expensively than the shin splints, is that a boundary isn't a sentence you say once. It's a line you re-draw every time it gets tested (which, if you're any good at your job, will be often).

Because the system will always find it easier to lean on the person who can hold the weight than to solve the actual structural problem.

I could have pushed harder. More often. Louder. Past the point where I'd already technically raised it a few times and told myself that counted. I didn't, because pushing harder meant risking looking less capable, less committed, less like the person the project could rely on.

It took a physical toll, in both stories, for that trade to stop feeling worth it.

If there's a leadership version of this worth carrying forward, it's not "set better boundaries." Most of us already know where ours are. It's this: deciding where the line sits is the easy part. Holding it again and again (in the moments it's actually being tested, not just in the version of the conversation you had with them weeks ago and in your head last night) is the part that determines whether it was ever a boundary at all, or just something you said once and hoped would hold on its own.

Sidebar: I've never been to see a podiatrist in my life, but this led to my first experience with one. She was lovely, she found me hilarious and she reinforced just how many people discount the small injuries. I took comfort in the fact that she said most people wait longer than I did to see her.

For what it's worth, the toe, ankle and shin have all recovered.

And there are now preventative mechanisms in place to prevent a recurrence. I'm less of a slow learner than I used to be (thank goodness).