After years of leading teams and teaching future leaders, here’s what I’ve noticed:

Leadership done well is largely invisible labour. Most of it happens beneath the surface.

Study any great leader and you’ll see; it’s far more than strategy, performance, or influence… It lives in their ability to hold space for diversity, differences of opinion, and the expectations people bring into the room.

I get it.
It can sound too simple when someone tells you that to be a great leader you need to understand and know how to “hold space”, but it’s actually one of the most powerful and hardest thing to do. It takes training, discernment, and focused energy to create containers like that.

Whether you lead teams, run a business, support clients, or carry influence in other ways, you’ll know that working with people means navigating many levels of complexity and dynamics. 

And in that complexity is often where the personal challenge lives.

If left unchecked, it’s easy to start absorbing others’ emotions and mistake them as our own, or to end up carrying and taking on more responsibility than we should. And sure, that might feel fine for a while, even gratifying, but over time that extra labour will begin to show up emotionally, mentally, and sometimes even physically.

So how do we learn to hold ourselves, others, and our vision all at the same time?