Some things reveal their best features in the dark.

I got a new car recently: a stunning Renault Duster. And yes, I love it. The interior is brilliant, the exterior looks great, and it drives beautifully… all the things you notice when you're excited about a new car.

But then I drove it at night and suddenly saw the car differently. With the lights on, it's like the interior changed. Little details that I had barely noticed during the day suddenly became part of the experience. The exterior looked different too. Same car. Same design. Same features. Different environment and light.

And it made me think about life. Some things only reveal their best features and themselves in the dark.

We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid dark seasons. We associate darkness with things going wrong: uncertainty, disappointment, rejection, failure, loneliness, waiting, losing something, and not knowing what comes next.

But perhaps darkness isn't always there to take something away from us. Sometimes it reveals what was already there. Because here's what struck me: nothing new was added to my car when the sun went down. The lights were already there. The technology was already there. The design was already there.

Darkness simply created the conditions for me to see them.

And perhaps some of the things you've discovered about yourself in difficult seasons were always there too.

• The resilience.

• The courage.

• The ability to make a plan when Plan A falls apart.

• The capacity to lead when nobody has the answers.

• The discipline to keep going when motivation disappears.

• The faith to move when you cannot see the entire road ahead.

You didn't necessarily acquire all of those things in the darkness. Some of them were already built into you. You just hadn't needed to switch them on yet.

I think the same applies to entrepreneurship.

When business is good, customers are buying, cash flow is healthy, and opportunities are coming in, there are parts of your leadership that may never be tested. Then the environment changes.

• A major client leaves.

• Cash flow gets tight.

• A proposal you were counting on doesn't come through.

• Your team changes.

• The market shifts.

Suddenly, you have to think differently. Negotiate differently. Sell differently. Lead differently. And somewhere in that darkness, you meet another version of yourself. Not because the darkness magically made you better, but because it demanded that you access capabilities you could previously afford not to use.

Of course, I am not suggesting that we romanticise difficult seasons. Some seasons are genuinely hard, painful and exhausting. Darkness is not automatically beautiful simply because we can eventually learn something from it or see stars clearly in the dark.

But I do think we sometimes judge a season too quickly because of how it feels while we're inside it. Maybe instead of only asking: “How quickly can I get out of this?” We should occasionally ask: “What is becoming visible here that I couldn't see before?”

• What strength?

• What weakness?

• What relationship?

• What opportunity?

• What truth?

• What capability?

• What version of me?

Because sometimes you need the daylight to see where you're going. And sometimes you need the darkness to see what you're carrying. My Renault Duster didn't become more impressive at night. I simply discovered features that daylight didn't give me the opportunity to appreciate.

Maybe there are parts of you like that too. So if you happen to be walking through a darker season right now, don't only look at what you cannot see. Pay attention to what is beginning to light up. You might just discover something about yourself that has been there all along.

Yours in switching on the lights,

The Business Doctor Keitumetse Lekaba