14/08/2026
The hardest years of my life at home.
I spent a lot of energy hiding it at work (because I thought if the people above knew, it would affect my progress).
And I pushed myself even harder to make up for the mental weight I was carrying.
Later I realised two things.
The first was that the actual challenge was to protect the quality of my judgement while my mind was carrying a lot.
When your mind is clouded, your judgement suffers. And when your judgement suffers, the wrong decisions follow. Bad decisions at senior level compound quickly.
I became more deliberate about creating time to think.
I protected time in my calendar before important decisions instead of filling every hour because I felt guilty for slowing down elsewhere.
If I needed time to think, I took it before I walked into the room, not while I was sitting in it.
I built in moments of doing nothing, with no input, no screens, no stimulation. Just my mind, resting and catching up.
Every one of those decisions was about protecting the quality of my judgement.
The second realisation was that the people above me were also carrying burdens I could not see (just as I was carrying burdens they could not see).
Nobody was expecting life to stop happening. What they needed from me was what I needed from them. Clear thinking. Sound judgement. Fewer areas to worry about.
The way through my difficult seasons was to stop trying to prove I was unaffected. And to protect the moments where my thinking mattered most.
10/08/2026
Grief. Separation. Illness.
Life keeps happening at the top.
I was leading teams at work while going through the hardest times of my life at home.
What I learned is that leadership done well is inherently selfless. It asks you to put yourself in someone else's shoes. It asks you to put the team ahead of yourself. It leaves very little room for overthinking.
When I caught myself stuck in my own head, I tried not to stay there. I found someone on the team who needed something:
A mentoring session.
A career conversation.
A moment of deep listening.
Anything that redirected the energy outward.
For me, it is not about pushing feelings down at work when things are hard at home. It is about pouring them somewhere they do something useful
The counterintuitive part is that making leadership personal is what calms the personal noise. The more you serve, the quieter the noise gets.
You cannot fixate on your own problems while you are genuinely present for someone else's.
There is no leader that will not go through hard times personally. What sets the best apart is how they show up and serve through it.
30/07/2026
I have had several big promotions in my career.
I asked for none of them.
A promotion is rarely a decision made on a specific day. It is usually a conversation that has been happening for months, sometimes years, between two people who are working towards something together.
There is no defined date.
There is a direction, and there is a set of criteria that both people agree on and refine over time. Eventually, the promotion stops being a question of if and becomes a question of when.
Asking for a promotion is not wrong. The mistake is thinking that a promotion is a decision waiting to be triggered in one conversation.
Asking for one directly can put the person you need most in a difficult position. The timing may be wrong. The budget may not be there. The role may not exist yet. You are asking them to make a decision before the circumstances are ready.
So when people ask me how to convince their leader to promote them, I tell them to stop asking and start walking:
Make the circumstances ready.
Bring your leader into what you are building.
Let them help define the criteria.
Let them become part of the journey instead of being the person who decides whether you are ready.
Asking puts them in a corner, waiting for a yes when the timing may be wrong.
Walking puts them beside you until the timing is right.
