“I don’t care who gets the credit,” I said.

“Your team cares,” she said.

She was one of the best bosses I ever had, and she’d pulled me aside to say something I didn’t want to hear. I’d just moved into a great role, working for a leader I liked, and she was happy for me. It would be easy for me to stay behind the scenes, out of sight. She knew my default. I’ve always been reluctant to stand in the spotlight, even when the job puts me there.

So what? I don’t care who gets the credit.

That’s when she said it. Your team cares.

Years earlier, I’d worked for a boss who made all of this look easy. He asked about my family, my vacations, my life outside the building, the things most bosses never bother with. He was the first person who showed me that leadership starts with the people. He was also a student of savviness. He made the right connections, he had the right people speak for him when he wasn’t in the room, he was good at being seen.

I told myself that part was just politics. Good for him. Let him work the room. I’ll do the real work.

So that’s what I did. He was the front man. I was the one behind the curtain: the strategist, the closer, the one making it happen where nobody was looking. And here’s the thing. Back then it was just my own work I was hiding. No team behind me, just me and the results. Waving off my own credit cost no one but me, so who cared. I was the one doing the work.

Then I did it again with the next leader. Same setup, same story. Him out front, me in the wings. It felt like humility.

It wasn’t.

And it stopped being harmless the day I had a team.

That’s what I’d missed. My people were recognized. I told them when they did well, their reviews were strong, their raises fair, their work known to me. I thought that was the job. But being seen by me was never going to get them the next role, the stretch project, the promotion. For that, the people above me had to see them. And those people couldn’t, because I was still standing where I’d always stood, behind the curtain, with my whole team behind it too.

I want to tell you I’d made some principled choice to stay back there. I hadn’t. It was just easy. Quiet, heads-down, out of the spotlight, that’s the natural shape of me, and I’d let that shape settle into a habit and started calling the habit humility.

It was never that noble. It was just comfortable.

And the savviness I’d written off in that first boss, the connections, the right word in the right room, someone speaking for you when you’re not there? That’s not politics I get to be above. It’s a skill. My team needs it from me, and I’m not naturally good at it. So that’s the part I have to step up. Not for me. For them.

I’m still building it, because left to my defaults I’ll disappear again and take their visibility with me. So when we launch something, I put the person who led it in front of the senior team to walk it through in their own words, while I sit off to the side. Every month I send a note up the chain naming what we did and exactly who did it. I keep a running file of each person’s wins so nothing quietly disappears before review time. None of it comes naturally to me. I do it anyway.

So here’s what I had to sit with, and maybe you do too. The part of you that stays out of the spotlight, the part you’ve been calling humble. It might just be the easy way to be. And your team is the one paying for it.

If you won’t broadcast your team’s wins, who will?

We are not born for ourselves alone. — Cicero

It’s Monday afternoon at 5 pm and I’m feeling good. I just got a pedicure and both windows are down, because 72° and sunny doesn’t happen often in the PNW.

I’m driving home and trying to change lanes. I keep checking my blind spot but he won’t budge. Fine. I file him under jerk and move on.

We end up at a stoplight next to each other anyway, and I turn down my music to be polite, even though I’ve decided he doesn’t deserve that courtesy.

I glance over and see an older woman in the front passenger seat. It looks like she wants to say something.

Here it comes. He wouldn’t let me in and now she’s going to back him up.

My immediate thought, “Ugh... don’t talk to me.”

Then she says, with a contagious smile, “I like your car!”

“Me too, it’s fun to drive.”

And then she says, “You look good in it.”

I think about how long it took me to decide they were against me. Not long. A few seconds, over a lane change.

I interpreted the driver’s behavior as a message. I’m more important than you. I’m not making room for you. But if I take a couple of seconds, I realize he almost certainly never saw me. A blind spot, a song he liked, his mind down the road. Not malice. Just a guy driving his car, maybe driving his mother around.

There’s an old rule for exactly this.

Never attribute to malice what carelessness explains just as well.

It’s Hanlon’s Razor, and I broke it. It was faster and easier to assume he meant it than to wonder if he just wasn’t paying attention.

That’s the part that stayed with me. Not that I was in the wrong, but that I judged so fast and let it irritate me. I was feeling so good, and it almost cost me that.

How many strangers have I written off in the time it takes a light to change?

I’ll never know. That’s the trouble with a snap verdict. It feels like the truth, but it’s just the story I told myself because it was easier than withholding judgment.

Where are you doing this? It’s so automatic, it’s easy not to notice.

Here’s your challenge: Shift to neutral. Assume carelessness, not malice. And if you don’t know the person, be comfortable not having an opinion at all.

It is not things that disturb us, but our judgments about things. When we are hindered or disturbed or grieved, let us never blame others, but ourselves. – Epictetus

A week into a new job, I had an hour set aside to meet each of the people leaders in my org.

For forty-five minutes, he told me all about himself. How he liked taking unknowns and making them known, finding out right away whether he got it right. How he stacked up against his peers, and why he came out ahead. I gave him room to bring up his team. He didn’t, so I had to ask.

“Tell me about your team.”

“They have a lot to learn. I explain things as best I can, but one of them just isn’t good at math. The other one doesn’t try very hard.”

“So why did you want to be a leader?”

“Truthfully, I didn’t. I thought it was the only way to make more money.”

Finally, something that made sense.

Not everyone should be a leader.

Read that again. Not everyone should be a leader. I’m not saying they can’t. I’m saying they shouldn’t.

I have empathy for this man. I also see the harm he does to his team every day he sits in that seat. And it isn’t really his fault. The leader who put him there owed him the truth and a way forward, and gave him neither.

The kind, true, and necessary thing would have been to say it plainly. Leadership isn’t about you. It’s about the team, and building one that delivers what only they can. If this is only about money, it’s a heavy commitment for a small raise. A senior IC role, or a more technical one, might be the better path.

No one said that to him. So, he sits in a seat he isn’t suited for, underperforming, his team paying for it every day, and he can feel he’s falling short.

His boss thought he was being kind. He wasn’t. Letting someone sit in the wrong seat to avoid one uncomfortable conversation isn’t kindness. It’s the most expensive thing you can do to a person, to their team, to the business, and to yourself.

The hard thing is the kind thing.

That boss reported to me. It would have been easier to have the conversation for him, but that wouldn’t have been the necessary thing: coaching him through it himself. He needs to grow too. That’s the point.

Do you have someone like this reporting to you right now?

You probably already know who. The necessary conversation you keep putting off is the kindest thing you have to give them.

And there’s more at stake than one career. There’s a reason 57% of Gen Z professionals are steering clear of management, and 67% call it high stress and low reward (Robert Walters). They’ve been watching. Most of what passes for leadership is someone holding a seat for themselves, for the title, for the paycheck. That job is exhausting and thankless, and they’re right to refuse it.

But that was never leadership. Leading for the team is a different job and a better one. They don’t have the right role models to show them how impactful good leadership can be. Show them the real thing, and watch who steps forward.

What is not good for the swarm is not good for the bee. – Marcus Aurelius

Last week, I golfed 18 holes for the first time in fourteen years.

I’ve always enjoyed golf. I like being in nature. I like that you can play the game your entire life. I like that the more I let go, the better I play. I like that the only person who can beat me is myself. But over the last decade and a half, I just didn’t have time. I was working and living and raising a family.

So, it was interesting to me that I played better than I used to, and I started wondering, why is that? By all accounts I’m weaker, slower, and less fit.

I realized that life had changed me. Not muddling through, not white-knuckling through; but through the living, the feeling, and finding what it was trying to teach me.

I know myself better now. I like myself better now.

That’s how it works, I think.

Now my mental settings are different. My motivations are different. My care of what people think of me is different.

I didn’t know that time itself could remake my golf swing in the same way that it’s made me a different person.

You might be wondering what this has to do with my backswing.

Line up. Deep breath. Straight back. Eyes on the ball. Straight through. That’s it. That’s all I’m thinking about.

I’ve let go of the outcome, the people who may be watching; and most of all the last shot I made.

I’m choosing to be present.

And somehow, by letting go, I made my first par 3. That kind of presence, it lets you stop getting in the way of yourself.

What are you still holding onto 15 years later that make that last shot seem so important?

I’m taking in the smell of the greens, the kindness of strangers who get paired up with us, and the lessons from everyone who is playing.

I’m taking the joy from the moment and hoping to stretch out these sessions where my family, as it is now, is out together for a few hours in the beauty of nature.

These times, these days will not last forever, so I will savor them. I will care more about everyone being together and less about whether I hit the perfect tee shot.

No man walks in the same river twice. – Heraclitus

My boss hadn’t told anyone that she hired somebody. That somebody happened to be me. So, on the day I started, all of her direct reports were suddenly my direct reports. No explanation. No warning. No time to process. You have a new boss.

The team responded as you might expect. During a new leader acclimation process (30 days in), I got torn up.

“Has she ever led a program before?”

“She tries to manage me in a systematic way vs each individual”

“What is the point of her role?”

In the moment, I listened to the feedback, and thanked them for it.

On my drive home, that’s when the tears started. I had to stop at a walk-up hamburger stand for over an hour because I couldn’t see the road to drive.

My wonderful family met me there and I told them what happened. They listened. They asked questions. They didn’t judge. They sat with me and let me have my feelings.

When I awoke the next morning, I had a note on my bathroom sink from my husband. In it, he laid out all the reasons why this event didn’t matter. Why all those things that were said didn’t matter.

“Your role and the people you work with do not define you.

This doesn’t have anything to do with you but with others’ egos.

You have a family at home that loves you, even on your bad days.”

It also laid out what did matter.

My character. My family. My friends. That’s it.

“You’re not doing wrong, you’re working on doing right. Keep your head up.”

I wish I could tell you I quickly understood the universal truth of this and gave less thought to what others believed of me, but I hadn’t started my Stoic journey yet.

My husband’s note had separated who I was from how work was going. It was the first time I had the clarity to separate who I was from what people thought of me at work.

For the first time in my life, I realized I did not need any external validation.

All I needed was to live up to the person I wanted to be, and go home and love my family.

So, I persevered and kept those kind, necessary, and true words from my husband close to me. And over time, the people who were so critical, began to see what kind of leader and person I was.

They were sad when I left. Hell, my boss wept when I turned in my notice.

If someone at work is trying to make you feel like you’re the problem, don’t let them. Your character is not on their scorecard.

Don’t be afraid of verbal abuse or criticism. Let the quality of your deeds speak on your behalf. We can’t control the impressions others form about us, and the effort to do so only debases our character. – Epictetus

I woke up without needing my alarm, even though it was 6:30. I was up earlier than on weekdays because it was the day my son and I swim together. For the last few years, this has been one of my favorite moments each week. We get up early, we go to our local YMCA, and we swim.

Sometimes we do the lap pool, sometimes we do the recreation pool. There is not a hard schedule. What started as a weekly lesson to learn a critical life skill has become a weekly mom/son ritual. He passed his swim test in the first year, but we’ve kept going because we enjoy it. After we swim, we go to Chick-fil-A and enjoy an indulgent breakfast.

Needless to say, I was excited. I let out the dog and then woke my son. It was 6:52.

At 7:10, I checked in, “Hey bud, you getting ready?”

“Oh, I said I needed a few minutes.”

“Ok, it’s been twenty.”

7:15. 7:20. 7:25. 7:30.

“Hey bud, do you want to go?”

“Yes, I’ll be out in 5 minutes.”

7:35.

At this point, I’ve been waiting over 40 minutes. I swallowed my impatience. I told him I was leaving in five minutes. Not with anger, I just stated a fact.

And five minutes later, he was in the car, excited to go. And I was also ready to go...not frustrated, not annoyed, but excited.

We choose how to interpret the situation. I chose to take it by the smooth handle.

My son loves me, but he is a teenager. He is not acting this way to punish me. He stayed up too late and is slow to get started this morning. It has nothing to do with me. He wants to go swimming and we don’t need to get there early. We just have to get there before 8 am. So, what am I so mad about?

When I flipped my interpretation, I could move forward.

My son is soon to be in high school. I do not know how many more Saturdays I will get with him, swimming at the YMCA. I was annoyed, no doubt about it, but I took a deep breath and reminded myself to take this situation by the smooth handle.

How many times do you let the situation get the best of you?

Maybe you’re driving and it’s a lovely day out and then someone cuts you off... and you go from zero to sixty in an instant and it takes you another 30 minutes to calm down. Or maybe you’re at the airport, excited for the trip, and your flight gets delayed... and you’re so angry you forget you’re excited and it takes you an hour into your flight to finally let go of the knot in your stomach. Or maybe you’re at work and a customer decides to take his rough day and insult you... and you take it personally and feel angry until after dinner time.

When this happens, take a breath. Realize this thing that has happened is not some special punishment picked out for you. It likely has nothing to do with you.

Take it by the smooth handle. And take back your time, your energy, and your control.

Everything has two handles: one by which it may be carried, the other by which it can’t. If, for example, your brother treats you poorly, don’t grasp the situation by the handle of his injustice (or your hurt), for by that it cannot be carried. Instead, do the opposite. Grasp the situation by the handle of the fact that he is your brother, that you were brought up together, and thus you will lay hold of it by the handle that carries. -- Epictetus

What is the hardest interview question you’ve ever been asked? Some people might respond with cliché questions like, “where do you want to be in five years?” or “what is your greatest weakness?”

Not me. My toughest question was, “I’ve made 12 critical decisions in my life... what are yours? What are the values that drove those decisions?”

Can you repeat that, please? Critical decisions? Personal values? I thought we were talking about situation, behavior, action, results questions... you want to know about me as a person?

In the moment, it was difficult to pinpoint and respond... I felt woefully unprepared. While I was certain that the interview was an unrecoverable failure, as I waited at the airport and flew home, I couldn’t help but recognize these were excellent questions and that I should know myself better than I did.

Well, no time like the present. I took the entire 3-hour flight home to map out my critical decisions and to identify my personal values based on my life so far.

I also took the bold move of responding to that interviewer with my assessment. If a company asked these kinds of questions, perhaps I could grow exponentially there. What was the risk?

Years before my Stoicism journey began, I faced this interview question, and it started me on a path of self-awareness.

Self-awareness is a first, critical step in a leader’s journey.

Being the first doesn’t mean it’s easy. It requires a self-examination, a willingness to see yourself clearly, and to challenge yourself to do better.

So, how do you get to know yourself better? Examine your path and your decisions. What drives you? What is important to you?

That reflection on the plane became something I’ve recommended to leaders ever since. I like to call it Life Story.

First, you consider your life as a whole. Map out all your life’s critical points both from a professional and personal standpoint. What are the significant events in your life? What was hard? What things are you proud of? Where were key transitions? These are the triumphs and the heartaches.

Now, once that is done, pretend this timeline belongs to someone else. What do you think of them? What risks did they take? What values do you notice? What patterns do you see? These are the things that drive them.

The beauty of this exercise is that you don’t have to share it. It is for you. It is a way to examine your life and understand what drives you and your decisions.

It is a way to understand who you are and who you aspire to be.

It sounds simple but few people examine their lives like this. They live reactively, buffeted by circumstances, opinions, setbacks. They’ve never done the work to understand what they value and why. And therefore, they can never begin to make choices that are aligned with who they actually are.

This was one moment in my life when I decided to be courageous. What happened next mattered far less than the fact that I chose to act in alignment with who I wanted to be.

What would you do?

“First, say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.” Epictetus

I was standing on a bridge that I had completely forgotten was being built. It was cold and windy. A local business was handing out free clam chowder with crackers.

18 months ago, a bridge that had connected two communities for more than 80 years, and served as the primary route I drove into and out of my neighborhood for 12 years, was demolished. The bridge had served its purpose and needed to be replaced. What could we do? Nothing. All we could do was accept it. But we had a choice in how we accepted it. We could have complained. We could have protested. We could have sent letters to our elected officials. We could have submitted opinion pieces to the Herald.

We decided that this was an opportunity. We lived in between two communities and for 12 years had predominantly headed one direction. What if we explored the other direction? So, we did that instead.

We looked for different things to do, for different places to eat, for different routes to get to the same places we needed to go. We discovered there is a bustling city to the east that we were largely avoiding. Once we embraced it, we found a better sense of belonging with this community. We started volunteering at the library, at the police department, even on some councils. We found we belonged on the east side just as much as on the west side. And we found that it wasn’t too hard of a mental shift. It made the next 18 months go much faster, and eventually, we were surprised that we could go west again.

How we accept our fate is a choice we each make.

I attended a neighborhood meeting several weeks before the bridge re-opened. At that meeting, the city planning office was sharing the good news of the planned re-opening. Most people seemed relieved. One person wanted to know why it took so long. She wanted to know if the city had done all it could to go faster. She kept asking. I could see that she hadn’t accepted this bridge closure. She hadn’t thought this could be an opportunity. All she could see was that something was being done to her and she was pissed about it. And even now, on the precipice of getting back the very thing she wanted, she couldn’t move forward. She still wanted to know why it was done the way it was done.

But the fact is, for most things, you will never fully understand why it happened the way it did. I find it’s much more important to understand that you can’t control the things you can’t control. And that the past is most certainly something you can’t control.

Standing on that bridge, I was struck by the permanence of it (this bridge will last 100 years) and the impermanence of it. In 100 years, other families will go through this same ordeal again. Who would you rather be? The person who appreciates the beauty of it when you’re traversing it? The person who gets to remember all the new discoveries you made while it was built? Or the person who still gets bitter when you see it, wondering why it had to last so long? It is your choice, which of those people to be.

It is within your control how you accept your fate.

“The willing are led by fate, the reluctant are dragged.” Cleanthes

There wasn’t a specific event or confrontation. Just a building frustration that had been quietly accumulating for about two months. The sense that we aren’t making enough progress. And if I’m being honest with myself, a fear that my boss will be disappointed when she gets back from vacation because we have little to show for it.

So let me be really honest. What I was actually feeling was a belief that sometime in the future, someone will be disappointed in me.

That’s not a problem. That’s a story I was telling myself.

And once I recognized it as a story, the Stoic question became obvious. What is actually up to me here? My boss’s reaction isn’t up to me. The pace of progress isn’t entirely up to me. What other people think of me isn’t up to me. This isn’t some special circumstance picked out especially for me. It just is what it is.

So, what is up to me? How I show up today.

For decades I’ve used a method I call GREAT to make sure I do that. On the hard days especially.

Grateful. Wake up and remember this day is a gift. It was not a certainty that you would make it.

Reflect. Journal about the day ahead. Write about your fears, the decisions you’re sitting with, that feeling you can’t shake. Free write. This is for you, so do your worst. Clear out the residue.

Exercise. Don’t think about it, just show up. After the first set you’ll start to feel better and by the time breakfast rolls around you’ll be seeing in full color.

Action. What are the two or three most important things you’ll do today? Write them down. Those are your wins. Complete them and you did a good day’s work.

Time. Decide now when you will turn off work and transition back to your life. Write it down and stick to it. Do not lose track of time and miss out on the most important part of your day.

That’s it. How do you make sure you have a good day? Do good things. GREAT is how I remind myself to do that every morning — including the morning after my worst day in two years.

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Viktor Frankl

If you want to do the challenging work that doesn’t show up on LinkedIn or look good in a 2x2 matrix, keep reading.

I’ve been a leader for 25 years. Seven of them I’d actually be proud of.

It started with a podcast on Stoic philosophy. I knew right away these weren’t just wise words. This was the medicine I needed to actually live my life.

Stoicism asks one foundational question: what is up to me and what is not? My title isn’t up to me. The economy isn’t up to me. What people say about me isn’t up to me. But my thoughts, my choices, and my responses are up to me.

The questions Stoicism asks are uncomfortable. What story am I telling myself? Is that decision for my ego or for my team? Am I a good person? Am I helping others?

Those questions have no easy answers. That’s the point.

I’ve spent the better part of the last decade working through them. This is the next step along my path, to share it aloud. I’m not an expert, rather someone who found something useful and wants to pass it on. If something here is helpful, good. If it makes you think differently about something, even better.

“It is not the critic who counts... The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly... who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” — Theodore Roosevelt