Watching Someone Become What You Saw in Them

Someone I barely know messaged me to ask if I was okay.

Not a friend. A work acquaintance. She'd been reading what I write, and something in it worried her.

I sat with that for a few days. Because she wasn't wrong to ask.

Look at what I've been publishing. Broken trust. Decisions that hurt no matter which way you go. The loneliness nobody warns you about. The moment you realize someone has been calling you "not ready" when you're out of the room.

All of it true. All of it worth saying out loud.

But I left something out.

I left out the best part.

Years ago, a man on my team told me he wanted to start journaling. Not a work thing. He was in the middle of a health journey and thought writing might help him get somewhere.

So we talked about it.

Not about productivity. Not about output. We talked about why people abandon the practices that would help them most. About how perfectionism kills consistency faster than laziness ever could. About how there is no wrong way to put a pen to paper.

One conversation.

Years later, he still tells me it changed how he thinks.

I want to be precise about what happened there, because it would be easy to make myself the hero of it. I didn't give him anything. I didn't have a framework. I wasn't managing him toward a metric. I listened to a man tell me what he was reaching for, and I said out loud that I thought he could get there.

That's it. That's the whole intervention.

And I have watched the same thing happen enough times now to stop calling it luck. Another person on my team once told me how much his need for approval was wrecking his confidence on sales calls. He only said it because I had already been honest about my own fear of being seen. Once it was out in the open, he could look at it. Once he could look at it, he could work on it.

The results were never the reward. The person was.

Here's what I actually believe, and it took me a long time to say it plainly.

People are good at their core. Almost all of them. What most of them have never been given is room — room to be wrong, room to be unfinished, room to try the thing they're not yet good at in front of someone who won't make them pay for it.

That's not a soft belief. It's the most practical one I hold.

Because when you lead from it, you stop looking for who's already excellent and start looking for who hasn't been given a shot. You stop treating potential as something people arrive with and start treating it as something conditions either permit or suffocate.

And then you get to watch.

You watch someone hear a piece of feedback in March and watch it show up in how they work in May. You watch a person who used to over-explain in meetings say let me get back to you with the real numbers and hold the room. You watch someone you bet on when it wasn't obvious become exactly what you thought they'd be — a little sooner, because someone believed it out loud.

The one thing I'm most proud of in my whole career isn't a number. It's hearing people who worked for me say how unusual it felt — and how valuable — to get to show up as their full selves.

That didn't happen by accident. It happened because I went first.

So here's my correction to the record.

Leadership is hard. Everything I've written about that is true, and I'm not taking any of it back.

But this is also true: you will get to be the person who sees someone before they see themselves. You will get to say it out loud. And then, if you're lucky and patient, you will get to watch them become it.

That's not the consolation prize for the hard parts.

That's the job.

Somebody did it for you once, by the way. Somebody saw something in you before you could see it in yourself, and that's why you have the title you have. You might not have thanked them. You might not even know who it was.

Go be that for someone this week. Say the thing out loud. Name the potential you see, specifically, to the person who has it.

Then get out of their way and watch.

If this is the kind of thing you want in your inbox instead of your feed, I send one of these a week — the honest version, not the highlight reel. And if you're leading people and doing it mostly alone, that's what I coach on. Come find me.