The Day I Started Becoming the Leader I Didn’t Know I Was Yet

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership styles—how personal they are, how often they evolve without us noticing, and how they’re rarely shaped by formal training alone.

When I look back at my own leadership journey, I can clearly see that so much of who I am as a leader wasn’t built in meetings or manuals. It was built in moments:
moments where I was pushed, stretched, humbled, or unexpectedly called forward.

The truth is, my leadership style emerged long before I felt ready for anything that resembled leadership.

In fact, when I stepped into that first leadership role, I was barely convinced I had fully mastered being a case manager.
There were days I still questioned myself.

There were times I felt like I was barely keeping up.
And honestly?
Sometimes I wondered if I had made a stupid decision jumping into leadership before I had fully found my footing.

But somebody—somewhere—saw something in me.
Something I didn’t see in myself yet.
And that push, that belief, that nudge into the unknown became the foundation of everything that came next.

One of the earliest moments that shaped my leadership happened not long after I took the role, at a time when I still felt like I was walking around in shoes a size too big.

A Visit I Still Remember

In those early days, I was still carrying a small caseload. I wasn’t ready to let go of fieldwork, and honestly, fieldwork wasn’t ready to let go of me.

One patient in particular—a young person not much older than me—had become a quiet anchor in my week. Their family was kind, emotionally open, and deeply trusting. I wanted to do right by them in every way.

But that morning, I knew something had changed the moment I entered the home.
The decline was sudden.
The air was heavy.
The family was holding themselves together with thin thread.

I did everything I could clinically and emotionally.
I explained.
I supported.
I tried to stay steady.

But somewhere in the middle of that visit, the human part of the work hit harder than the clinical part. And I felt myself break open.

I cried.

It was the first time I ever cried in front of a family, and that moment felt both terrifying and honest.
They didn’t question my professionalism.
They thanked me for caring.

Their compassion in that moment said more about this field—and the weight of it—than any textbook ever could.

I left that home drained, with a lump in my throat and the kind of emotional exhaustion that sits in your bones.

And that’s when my phone started buzzing.

From One Emotional Storm Straight Into Another

Before I could process the visit, I was pulled back into the reality of leadership.

Multiple messages.
Multiple problems.
A team unraveling.

We were short-staffed for the day.
A new clinician was overwhelmed after making a documentation mistake.
Two team members were frustrated with each other.
A family was upset and asking for a supervisor.
And the schedule was already a logistical disaster.

I was barely hanging on emotionally myself, and now I was being looked at as the person who was supposed to hold everything and everyone else together.

I walked into the office to a room full of tension—people frustrated, venting, spiraling.
People I had worked beside for years were now turning toward me with expectation.

Inside, I was thinking,
I’m not ready for this. I barely know how to do my own job some days. Why did I think I could lead anyone?

But here’s the thing about leadership:
It doesn’t wait for your confidence to catch up.
It demands that you step in before you feel prepared.

Choosing Calm When I Didn’t Feel It

I felt raw from the morning visit.
I felt inadequate stepping into this role.
And yet, the room needed something—something steady.

So I took a breath and said,
“Everyone, let’s pause for a minute.”

It wasn’t commanding.
It wasn’t forceful.
It was grounding.

The room quieted.

And that moment taught me one of the most important lessons of my career:
Leadership begins the second you regulate the room, not the second you solve the problem.

We slowed down enough to think:

✔ Who had the emotional bandwidth for which visits?
✔ Who needed a moment to step back?
✔ How could we divide the work realistically—not perfectly?
✔ What could wait until tomorrow?
✔ What needed compassion, not correction?

I took visits myself.
I called families.
I filled in gaps.
And I helped my team stabilize piece by piece.

By the afternoon, things were still busy—but the panic had eased.
People were breathing again.
People were focused.
People felt supported.

One of the nurses said quietly,
“I don’t know how you stayed calm.”

If only she had known how unsteady I actually felt inside.

The Turning Point I Didn’t See Coming

I stayed after everyone left, sitting in the quiet office, realizing that something important had happened.

Not only had I made it through the day—
I had led through it.

Me.
The person who still doubted whether she’d mastered being a case manager.
The person who sometimes questioned whether she’d jumped too soon.
The person who had cried in her car just hours earlier.

And yet, somebody had once seen something in me.
And here, in this moment, I finally began to understand what they saw.

Leadership isn’t about being fully ready.
It’s about being willing.
It’s about stepping into the role when the room needs you—even when you doubt yourself the most.

And while this was one of those moments that shaped me in a powerful way, I’ve had just as many moments that shaped me through failure.
Moments where my response was not what it should have been.
Moments where I didn’t regulate the room, didn’t ground myself first, didn’t rise in the way I hoped I would.

Those stories matter too.
They are just harder to tell.
But they are just as powerful—because they shaped the same leader, just through a different doorway.
And I’ll tell those stories too.
Because growth doesn’t only come from the moments we got right.
Often, it comes from the moments we didn’t.

Looking back now, I can see that this day—along with the failures that followed—shaped the leader I am today.

Not from confidence, but from humanity.
Not from certainty, but from showing up anyway.
Not from perfection, but from presence.

These moments—the emotional, messy, unexpected ones—refined me.
They made me the kind of leader who can anchor a storm, even when I still feel the waves inside.