I’ve been watching The Diplomat, ok fine, watching & mostly yelling at Hal Wyler and wondering why on earth Kate keeps putting up with him, when it hit me. Something about Kate’s story feels strangely familiar.
Not the international crises. Not the fancy dinners. Definitely not the British estate. Not the sassy PM.
The job. The one she took versus the one that she thought she was getting ready for.
Kate Wyler takes a job she’s not convinced she wants, and honestly not entirely convinced she’s built for. And then… she gets really good at it.
I’ve been thinking about how often that happens in leadership, and how rarely we talk about it. (Amanda Lancinek mentioned something about this on her FB education rants, and that made me double down on this post idea!)
Years ago, I stepped into a role that felt bigger than what I actually knew how to do. I had experience. I had leadership skills. I knew people, and culture, and schools inside and out. But there were parts of that job where I did not walk in thinking yep, expert, got this. Not even close.
Soooooo…I learned it. I asked questions I probably should’ve already known the answers to. I found people who knew more than I did and I leaned on them, hard. I made mistakes , plenty of them. I figured things out as I went, built a team I trusted, and somewhere in there discovered that half the things I’d always written off as my “soft skills” were actually the most important skills the job required.
And… somewhere along the way, the job I wasn’t sure I could do turned into a job I knew how to do very well.
That’s the part of these leadership transitions we don’t talk about enough. We talk plenty about landing the opportunity. We talk about the imposter syndrome that shows up the second you walk in the door. We talk about proving yourself once you’re there.
What we don’t talk about nearly as much is what happens on the other end … when a role becomes part of who you are, and then, eventually, it just isn’t yours anymore. Maybe you chose to leave. Maybe the organization shifted underneath you. Maybe someone else made that call for you. Or maybe life just quietly let you know a season was over before you felt anywhere close to finished with it.
And here’s the strange part of that whole transition: losing the role doesn’t mean you lose what the role built in you.
You still know what you know. You still built what you built. You’re still the leader that job turned you into — the title was temporary, but none of that growth was. Maybe that’s what I keep noticing in Kate Wyler. She keeps getting handed versions of a future she never planned for, and every single time, she has to decide whether she’s qualified based on who she used to be …or who she’s actually become by now.
I think a lot of us do exactly that. We look at the next opportunity and measure it against an outdated version of ourselves, while the last five or ten years have been quietly building the exact skills we’re convinced we don’t have. So maybe the better question isn’t “am I qualified for what’s next.” Maybe it’s: what did the last season prepare me to do that I couldn’t have done before it?
I don’t know exactly what my next season looks like yet. But I do know I’m not walking into it as the same person who nervously walked into the last one.
That might just be enough.
High five and netflix binging,
Amber