Where do I start?
Twenty-five years ago, I went through something no one should ever have to experience. A nightmare, yes – but not the kind you wake up from. The kind that reshapes your reality forever.
Someone took their own life. Another person tried to. Both were connected to a traumatic event we lived through at work – six armed hold-ups in our business, one after the other. And I was the manager.
The loss, the grief, the guilt – they don’t leave you. Not really. They sit somewhere in your chest, waiting for moments of quiet to come flooding back in.
In the aftermath, I did what many leaders do when they carry too much – I looked inward. I asked myself how I could have done better, what I missed, what responsibility I carried. And then I got to work on fixing myself.
Every course. Every leadership program. Every uncomfortable truth about my own blind spots, my coping mechanisms, my boundaries, my empathy, my reactivity, all of it got unpacked and examined.
For 25 years, I worked on me. Because I believed that was the way to make sure I could help others. That if I was whole, I could make the world better. That if I understood how people fall apart, I could hold them together.
But here’s the part no one warns you about.
If you go far enough down the self-awareness road, you start seeing things other people can’t. You recognise the manipulators. The charmers who know how to perform compassion but have none. The ones who break others to build themselves.
You learn to spot the sociopaths.
And then you spend your time trying to protect others from them, especially the good people, the generous people, the ones who think being kind will be enough. It won’t be. Not with those types.
So you speak up. You raise questions. You call out patterns. And suddenly, you’re the problem. You’re the ‘difficult’ one. You’re the one being told to tone it down, or worse, that you’re imagining things.
But you’re not. You see clearly. And that’s the burden.
I still believe in leadership. But real leadership is messy. It takes guts. It takes sleepless nights. It takes accountability, even when no one else is taking it.
I don’t have a neat ending to this story.
All I know is I didn’t break. I bent, I cracked, but I didn’t break. And I’m still here, trying to hold the line. Trying to make sure the next person doesn’t have to go through what I did.
That has to count for something.
#leadership, #selfawareness, #grief, #healing, #mentalhealth, #resilience
