“So, are you going to play football like your brothers?”
A well-meaning but obviously joking family friend asked me that at one of the many games our family attended. As the only girl and the youngest, it was fair to wonder where I fit. At only 8 years old, I knew what they were asking. Could I live up to my brothers’ reputation? I looked this person straight in the eyes and said: “Yes. And I’m going to be better than all of them.”
I wasn’t joking.
I didn’t end up proving myself on the football field. Well, at least not American football. But I held onto that idea. Just because a man did it first doesn’t mean a woman can’t do it just as well. Perhaps even better.
I grew up with four older brothers. Valedictorians. Football stars. Award-winning artists. The kind of brothers whose reputation precedes them. It certainly preceded me. I saw my brothers as a blueprint and expected the world to react to me the way it reacted to them. That gave me confidence in some ways. It also made life more complicated than my brothers made it look. Walking into someone else’s reputation leaves you very little control of your own. I was learning early that what life handed me and what God created me for were often two different things.
Life was not easy for my brothers either. They had their own challenges, their own trauma. They were just different, different in the ways men and women are different, different in talents and goals, but mostly different because the life God had in mind for me is not the life He had in store for them. Growing up in a talented family let me explore the world in a unique way: it taught me I didn’t need permission to take up room, that it shouldn’t matter whether I was a woman or a man or anything in between, that God’s purpose and plan for me as a child of God was enough to carry the confidence of 8-year-old me into the face of doubters.
What I couldn’t have guessed was how long the world would spend trying to convince me otherwise.
Here is a narrative many of us grew up inside, whether anyone ever said it out loud: confidence belongs to certain people. And only confident people are leaders.
People who already have the answers. People who know things. People with titles. People with platforms. People who win things and run things and stand at the front of rooms. People with reputations and influence. And for a long time, those people looked a lot more like my brothers than like me. Older. Louder. Definitely more mature and usually with better hair.
We learned to translate ourselves. To succeed on terms that weren’t ours. To prove, constantly, that we belonged there too. The phrase “fake it till you make it” comes to mind.
And some of us got very good at pretending to be confident. (Hi. Hello. It’s me.) If I wanted to be like my brothers, I needed to show I could hang with the cool kids.
But the game of pretend always comes to an end. When reality hits, what are you actually accomplishing? Where is that pretend confidence getting you? All I got was more insecurity, because I was measuring my worth against my brothers’ success. We often treat confidence (pretend or otherwise) as the precursor to leadership. Pretend leadership is performative leadership. Real leadership starts at the core of who you are. Where your confidence comes from.
Leadership is not what happens when you finally get your chance at the spotlight, when you score the goal, when it’s suddenly handed to you because someone forced you to take charge of a project. It is what you have been doing all along, in the places nobody was measuring, in the relationships nobody was watching, in the daily, ordinary, invisible work of showing up for the people in your path. It is what happens in a conversation that changes someone’s direction. In a decision made at a kitchen table that holds a family together. In a room where someone needed courage and you were the one who had it. In the thousand small moments that never made it onto a resume but shaped something real in someone else’s life.
You have been leading this whole time. Nobody bothered to tell you.
This is where performative and real leadership get interesting. Most of you have probably never thought there was a difference. How can you have been leading the whole time and also be pretending to lead? Here’s the answer: it was never about what you did. It’s about why you did it.
Take three women. Same moment. Somebody has to say the hard thing in a meeting nobody else will touch.
The first one says it, then spends the rest of the day watching faces, replaying it, needing to know it landed. She led. She’s also leading for a verdict.
The second one says the exact same thing and never once calls it leading. Ask her and she’ll look at you like you asked if she’s been to Mars. She’s been doing this her whole life: church, carpool line, Thanksgiving, whoever has to say the thing nobody else will. Nobody ever gave her the word for it. She’s leading from something true, but she calls it being honest.
The third says it with conviction, clear and settled and with all the right intentions. By Friday her anxiety is stopping by for someone to tell her it was okay that she said it. Same woman. Same week. Two different sources depending on the day.
All three are leading. That was never the question. The question is what each one is running on, and whether she knows it. The first needs to stop chasing the verdict. The second needs the word for what she’s already doing. The third needs to remember that leading can be divinely intentional.
For most of my life I thought leadership meant taking control. Proving I belonged (see a theme?). Earning my place at the table. And then God had other plans. He replaced all of that with something that took me a minute to settle into. Real leadership isn’t about taking control at all. It’s about giving it back to Him. It’s not placing your confidence in yourself, it’s placing it in Him. That He has control of the situation. That the outcome will go wherever it needs to go. That’s where real leadership finds its influence.
And that shift starts with knowing who you actually are.
I am divine. Made by God. Carrying His nature. Built for exactly this.
And so are you.
That is not a motivational poster. That is not a churchy platitude you say to someone who needs cheering up. That is the most foundational, load-bearing truth of your entire life.
You are a daughter of God.
Not metaphorically. Not as a nice way of saying you’re special. Literally. You carry His image, His nature, His capacity for love and wisdom and courage and influence. That is who you are. And because that is who you are, you lead. Not someday when you have 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 recognizing.
Or maybe they are recognizing it, but here’s the problem. The world has made leadership into a performance. And social media just turns up the volume. Scroll long enough and you’ll find at least two versions of women on offer. The first has it all together: the clean house, the thriving kids, the side hustle, the glowing skin, the dinner on the table, the quiet time logged before 6am. She is aspirational and exhausting. The second has decided to own the chaos: the laundry mountain, the forgotten permission slips, that third Diet Coke for an energy boost, the “I have no idea what I’m doing and neither do you.” She is relatable, for sure. But also exhausting. Both of them are performing. Both are pulling confidence from circumstances. Neither of them is talking about who they actually are and what they have been called for.
Because who you actually are has nothing to do with whether your house is clean or your kids are thriving or your life looks like something worth posting. It has nothing to do with whether you have it together or are proudly falling apart. Those are costumes made for a performance. The real thing, the thing that was in you before the algorithm existed and will be in you long after the phone dies, is divine. It is the nature God placed in you when He made you. It is not earned by performance and it cannot be revoked by failure. It is simply who you are.
I know that might be hard to believe on a Tuesday when you’ve mediated three arguments before 8am and can’t remember the last time you showered for the joy of it. I know it’s hard to believe when you’re the one everyone calls but nobody checks on. When you feel like you’re failing at the thing that matters most, when the voices around you are full of suggestions that land like accusations, when you’re holding it all together and wondering if any of it counts.
Guess what? It counts. All of it. Not because you’re doing it perfectly. Because of who you are.
I think of a woman I know who apologizes just for existing when she walks into a room, yet leads an entire production with quiet, unmovable authority. Ask her if she’s a leader and she’ll laugh and tell you she’s just helping out.
I think of another woman who has never married, never had children, and has poured herself into her community, her friendships, her work with a faithfulness that has quietly changed dozens of lives. Ask her if she’s a leader and she’ll tell you she’s just doing what anyone would do.
I think of the woman in the middle of her career who knows exactly what needs to happen in the room and says nothing, because she’s still waiting for someone to confirm that her voice belongs there.
None of them are missing skills. None of them are missing capability. What they haven’t yet grabbed onto is the truth of who they actually are. They are divine. Built by God. Leading because of that, whether they know it or not.
That gap, between who God made you and who you believe you are, is why I wrote this book.
You are not just a mom. You are not just a volunteer. You are not just getting through. You are not a supporting character in someone else’s story. You are not waiting in the wings until real leadership begins.
You are a leader because you are divine.