I remember when I was contemplating university, my father told me he had read somewhere that students who leave home for post-secondary studies are found to have a higher likelihood of success—not because they are smarter or more capable, but because they are already learning how to engage with the unfamiliar. They are forced to navigate new environments, assumptions, and expectations. In other words, they are being shaped by disorientation.

That idea has stayed with me, particularly as I’ve reflected on my own leadership journey.

Warren Bennis writes, “By the time we reach puberty, the world has shaped us to a greater extent than we realize. Our family, our friends, and society in general have told us—by word and example—how to be. But people become leaders at that moment when they decide for themselves how to be.” Leadership begins not with position, but with the willingness to examine what has shaped us—and what still governs us.

There is nothing inherently wrong with familiarity. It provides stability, identity, and continuity. But familiarity carries an often unexamined risk: instead of speaking truth, we begin to speak consensus. We repeat inherited beliefs, habits, and assumptions and, over time, familiarity can quietly replace discernment.

The majority, after all, is not always right—and the “majority” is not always the majority. More often, it is simply the loudest voice within our immediate environment. When we remain enclosed within the familiar, other voices are neither heard nor considered. Certainty grows, but wisdom does not.

Scripture speaks directly into this danger. When God called Abraham, the call did not begin with promise—it began with rupture: “Leave your land, your birthplace, and your father’s house” (Genesis 12:1). Why? Because God knew that to begin something genuinely new, Abraham could not carry unexamined loyalties, assumptions, and identities from the old into the new. The familiar, left unchecked, would eventually corrupt the promise.

Jesus echoes this same principle when He warns against pouring new wine into old wineskins. This is not a call to novelty for novelty’s sake, but a recognition that new work requires new capacity. Old forms, old patterns, and old assumptions—however effective they once were—can no longer contain what God is doing next.

We often make the opposite mistake. We reach instinctively for what has worked before—past habits, familiar strategies, inherited ways of thinking—and attempt to use them to propel us into a new season. As Marshall Goldsmith famously put it, “What got you here won’t get you there.” When you sense you are being drawn into something new, a reflexive attachment to the familiar should give you pause.

This matters deeply for those who lead. If you sense God calling you into a new season—a new role, a new ministry expression, a new responsibility, a new idea that requires courage—you must be especially cautious. Honour past lessons, yes. But do not cling to familiar ways without first interrogating their assumptions. Ask the harder question: Is this actually true, or is it simply familiar?

Leadership that merely reproduces inherited thinking may feel safe, but it rarely creates space for faith. To lead well, one must first be willing to step outside the familiar—to experience disorientation, foreign thinking, and even the discomfort of having one’s assumptions overturned. Only then can a leader speak and act from a place of tested self-awareness rather than borrowed certainty.

The question before us is not whether the familiar feels comfortable—it almost always does. The question is whether it is quietly shaping us in ways that prevent us from seeing, hearing, and obeying what God is doing now.

And that is a question every leader must be willing to sit with.

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