When I was eight, a family friend asked me, half joking, if I was going to play football like my brothers. I looked him dead in the eye and said, "Yes. And I'm going to be better than all of them." I wasn't joking. I never did make it onto a football field, American or otherwise, but I held onto that sentence for the next thirty years without fully understanding why.
I grew up with four older brothers. Valedictorians. Football stars. Award-winning artists. The kind of brothers whose reputation walks into a room a full three seconds before they do, and yeah, that's a real thing that happens, I've timed it. I saw them as a blueprint and expected the world to react to me the way it reacted to them. Gave me confidence in some ways. Made everything more complicated in others. Turns out walking into someone else's reputation leaves you almost no control over your own, who knew.
Here's the narrative a lot of us grew up inside, whether or not anyone said it out loud: confidence belongs to certain people, and only confident people get to lead. People with titles. People with platforms. People who win things and run things and stand at the front of rooms. For a long time those people looked a lot more like my brothers than like me. So I did what a lot of women do. I got very good at pretending to be confident. Hi. Hello. It's me.
But pretend leadership is performative leadership, and the game of pretend always ends somewhere, usually somewhere exhausting. What I've come to believe, and honestly what the whole book is about, is that leadership was never really about what you did. It's about why you did it. I wish someone had just told me that at twenty-two and saved me a decade.
Picture three women. Same moment. Somebody has to say the hard thing in a meeting nobody else will touch. The first one says it and spends the rest of the day watching faces, replaying it, needing the room to confirm she got it right. The second says the exact same thing and would look at you like you'd asked if she'd been to Mars if you called it leadership. She's just being honest. Same as she's always been, at church, in the carpool line, at Thanksgiving. The third says it with total conviction and then spends Friday quietly needing someone to tell her it was okay that she said it.
All three of them are leading. That was never the question. The question is what each one is running on. And whether she knows it.
I spent a lot of years running on the first woman's fuel, and a good chunk of years on the third's, before I understood what the second woman already had without ever having a word for it. Real leadership isn't about taking control, which took me embarrassingly long to believe. It's about giving it back to God and trusting He has hold of the outcome whether or not it goes the way you'd have voted.
Here's the part I still find funny. I can stand in front of two hundred people and direct a show without blinking, and still not be able to tell my own husband what I need on a hard week. Both of those are true about the same woman. Neither one cancels out the other.
You are a leader because you are divine.
Not someday, once you've got the right title or the right platform or the right amount of confidence. Now. In your actual life, in the places nobody is applauding and the work nobody is measuring. You carry God's image. His nature. His capacity for love and wisdom and courage. And because that's who you are, you lead. You already have been, probably longer than you'd admit out loud.
This book is for the woman who's been doing that work her whole life and never once had a name for it, whether her version of it is a kitchen table, a carpool line, a job nobody thanks her for, or a community she's held together for years without a title. I wrote it because I was that woman, and some mornings I still am, not remotely put together. If any of this sounds like your own version of the meeting where somebody had to say the hard thing, I think you're going to want the rest of it.
There's a lot more where that came from: nine more chapters, plus this one, all in the book. Or just leave your email below and I'll tell you myself the moment it launches.