What Is the Near Enemies Framework?

There is a version of strength that most leaders are proud of. It holds steady when things are uncertain, absorbs difficulty without being destroyed by it, and creates enough safety for the people around it that they can do their own work.

And there is another version that can look almost identical from the outside but feels very different from the inside. It holds steady by never admitting it is not. It creates safety for everyone else by making sure they never have to worry about you. It does not absorb difficulty so much as refuse to show it.

The first is strength. The second is armor. What makes the distinction hard is that both can feel like doing the responsible thing.

That is the kind of pattern I started calling a Near Enemy.

The term comes from Buddhist philosophy: the near enemy of a virtue is not its obvious opposite, but something that looks enough like the virtue to be mistaken for it. The opposite is usually easy to spot. The near enemy is harder because it often feels familiar, competent, and even admirable while you are inside it.

That mapped almost perfectly onto something I kept seeing in leaders, organizations, and, frankly, in myself. The patterns that get capable people stuck are rarely obvious failures. More often, they are distorted versions of things that genuinely work.

Strength becomes armor. Preparation becomes postponement. Loyalty becomes silence. Reflection becomes rumination. Accountability becomes self-blame. Competence becomes the version of excellence that only works if you are the one doing everything.

The original strength is real. That is exactly why the distortion is hard to see.

As I have worked on Near Enemies, I have changed my mind a little. Or maybe I have just gotten more precise about what actually causes the shift.

At first, I thought the mechanism was mostly volume: a strength works, so we use more of it, and eventually too much of a good thing stops being good. That absolutely happens. High performers tend to trust what has worked before, and it is very easy to keep turning up the same dial.

But sometimes the volume is not the problem.

Sometimes the context changed and the behavior did not. Something that served you beautifully in one role, relationship, or season keeps running after the conditions that made it useful have changed.

And increasingly, I am interested in a third possibility: jurisdiction. We ask a perfectly legitimate strength to do a job that does not belong to it.

Empathy is a strength, but empathy does not get to decide what boundary you set. Loyalty is a strength, but loyalty should not answer a question that really belongs to judgment. Competence can tell you, "I can handle this," without answering the much more important question, "Is this actually mine to handle?"

Those are different questions, and I have found that distinction surprisingly useful.

This is why I do not think of Near Enemies as a framework for doing less, setting more boundaries, or replacing one behavior with another. It is diagnostic. The first question is not, "What should I do differently?" It is, "What is actually happening here?"

What strength am I using? What is the situation asking for? Am I using the thing I know best because it is familiar, or because it is actually what this moment requires? And am I operating inside my actual jurisdiction?

Once you can name the pattern precisely, you have a much better chance of making a useful choice.

That is also why my teaching and my work through Residy have always felt more connected than they probably look from the outside. In a classroom, I spend a lot of time stripping away jargon until the concept underneath becomes visible and usable. In an advisory engagement, I do essentially the same thing with a problem: keep asking questions until we can see what is actually operating underneath the version everyone already knows how to describe.

Near Enemies is that same move applied to leadership patterns.

The framework is useful to me not because it gives us more labels, but because it makes distinctions visible that were hard to see before. And once you can see the distinction, you have choices you did not have when everything looked like the same thing.

The question I keep coming back to is no longer only, "What is the near enemy?" It is also: What does this situation actually require of me, and is it mine to carry?

That is where the work starts.