Twenty-four hours ago, I sat on a panel in front of a room full of aspiring senior leaders, and a woman near the front asked me a question that has been rattling around in my head ever since: "What do you wish you'd known when you first stepped into leadership?"

There is a particular kind of vertigo that comes from standing up in front of a Year 12 Music or Drama class at 8:40am, knowing that by 9:40 you will be sitting across from your Principal discussing a staffing restructure, and that somewhere between the two you are meant to have eaten breakfast…. I’ll be honest, I can’t remember the last time I ate breakfast.

There are very few things that can humble a leader quite like the flu.

I was about twelve minutes into a meeting about one of my daughters when I realised I was no longer listening as a mum. I was listening as a Deputy Principal.

One of the things I genuinely love about the school holidays is that life slows down just enough for me to remember who I am outside my calendar. There are still emails to answer, washing to fold and the daily challenge of deciding what's for dinner, but the pace changes. Space appears where there was none before. Space to think, to read and to rediscover the things that quietly disappear during the intensity of a school term.

There is a group of teenagers in my street who appear to have made it their life's mission to remind the rest of us that sleep is apparently optional.

There is a particular kind of person who, when things get busy at work, responds to that busyness by taking on something else entirely. Something completely unrelated. Something large and logistically complicated and, ideally, involving the word “settlement.” I am that person.

I'm not sure who first coined the phrase "juggling all the balls", but I suspect they never had children. Or if they did, their children certainly weren't involved in soccer, netball, gymnastics, choir, flute lessons, band, swimming, hip hop, jazz, ballet and whatever other activity gets added to the family calendar after you've confidently told yourself, "I think we're actually getting on top of things."

There I am. Sunday morning. Shifting my weight from foot to foot in the cold, coffee going cold in my hand, scarf pulled up against the wind. My youngest is out on the soccer field and I am, let’s be honest, absolutely losing my mind on the sidelines.

There is something both exhilarating and mildly terrifying about a really big idea. You know the kind. The sort that arrives quietly at first, perhaps in the middle of a meeting or halfway through a walk to class, and before long it has taken up permanent residence in your brain. It grows arms and legs. It begins to sound possible. Then, somewhere between excitement and implementation, you suddenly think: “Oh dear… what if I actually have to pull this off?”

There is something both exhilarating and mildly terrifying about a really big idea. You know the kind. The sort that arrives quietly at first, perhaps in the middle of a meeting or halfway through a walk to class, and before long it has taken up permanent residence in your brain. It grows arms and legs. It begins to sound possible. Then, somewhere between excitement and implementation, you suddenly think: “Oh dear… what if I actually have to pull this off?”

There are moments in leadership that no professional development session quite prepares you for. The days when you walk into work expected to be “on” - visible, positive, composed and steady, while internally, things feel anything but.

I have always been someone who finds comfort in structure. My mind instinctively organises, sequences, and clarifies. It looks for patterns, builds frameworks, and moves, often quickly, toward resolution. In many ways, this has served me well in leadership. It allows me to bring coherence to complexity and direction to ambiguity. But over time, I’ve come to realise that this same strength carries a quiet risk: a bias toward pace, toward answers, and toward order - sometimes at the expense of broader understanding.

Leadership, in its most authentic and enduring form, is not forged in boardrooms or policy documents alone; it is cultivated in the subtle, human spaces where perception, emotion, and behaviour intersect. My experience teaching elective senior Music and Drama, alongside directing large-scale school musical productions, has provided an unexpectedly profound laboratory for understanding leadership, not as authority, but as influence shaped through deep attentiveness to human complexity.

There’s a particular kind of confidence that early ambition requires - part courage, part useful delusion. The kind that allows you to walk into a room of highly capable strangers and think, yes, I belong here.

There’s something deeply humbling about birthdays in your forties. Not the loud, novelty-hat, “look at me” kind of celebration - but the quieter, more reflective realisation that time is doing exactly what it said it would do… and doing it rather efficiently.

There are moments in leadership that reveal far more about our processes than our intentions ever could. Often, they don’t arrive neatly packaged as case studies or strategic reviews, but as deeply human experiences that test our assumptions, our communication, and our capacity for empathy.

There is a moment, often inconvenient, often unwelcome, when your body steps in and says what your mind has refused to hear: enough.

If you had asked me at the beginning of this term what leadership lessons I expected to learn, I might have suggested something about strategic thinking, difficult conversations, or perhaps the art of smiling politely while opening the seventeenth email chain of the morning. What I did not expect was that my greatest leadership masterclass would come courtesy of roadworks, a gorge, and a ferry timetable.

Long before I ever sat at a leadership table in a school, I stood under very different lights.

There is a particular mythology that stalks school corridors more persistently than a Year 8 with a forgotten Chromebook. It whispers seductively from leadership podcasts and glossy wellbeing posters: seek balance. Work–life balance. Balanced leadership. A balanced calendar.

There are many things I love about leadership. The buzz of a corridor or playground before class. The quiet hum of a classroom deep in thought. The electric clarity of a strategic meeting when ideas collide and something better is born.

I have a confession. I cannot work in a messy room.

Leadership has a way of revealing itself when you stop paying attention.

I am not a “stop and smell the roses” person. I am a “roses are nice, but let’s get where we’re going” person. In leadership, in travel, and especially in road trips, my default posture is efficiency. Fewer stops. Tighter timelines. Maximum output. The reward, I tell myself, is waiting at the destination.

During the Christmas holidays, my daughters and I packed up the car and drove to the Gold Coast for a week of theme parks, sunshine, sugar highs, and the kind of fatigue only rollercoasters and overstimulation can produce. It was magical, loud, exhausting, and full of queues. So many queues.

As leaders, we often pride ourselves on being reflective, switched on, and in tune with the people we serve. We attend the courses, we read the books, we preach the importance of self-awareness and presence. But sometimes leadership gives you a moment so disarmingly simple and so brutally honest that it knocks the wind out of your certainty and shows you, quite clearly, what everyone else could see except you.

Leadership is often imagined as strategy, vision, direction, and decision-making. But in the day-to-day reality, especially in a school, it can also look like answering a phone call from a parent who sounds determined to tear you, your judgement, or the entire school apart. In my earlier leadership days, and admittedly even now depending on how much coffee or sleep I’ve managed, those calls could feel like personal attacks. They could tighten the chest, speed up the heart, and turn a routine conversation into an internal storm.

There are moments in a career that feel cinematic. Not because they’re glamorous, but because they are so profoundly unexpected that you can practically hear the dramatic soundtrack swelling behind you. I had one of those moments three years into my teaching career, still basically a baby teacher, still convinced that owning a sturdy lanyard made me look “established” - when leadership arrived long before I felt remotely prepared for it.

I grew up in an aviation family. My dad was a Qantas captain - ex-Air Force - and in the 80s and 90s, that meant one thing: access to the world. And not just any access - first-class, silver-spoon, hot-towel access. It was a golden era of flying, and we lived right in the middle of it.

On day one of the Italian Camino, I was ready. Superbly ready. My backpack was balanced, my socks were elite hiking stock, and my first-aid kit was so well equipped it could’ve supported a small field hospital. I’d prepared for everything - foot blisters, sore calves, aching knees, you name it. I’d even done the research on which brand of blister plasters European hikers swear by.

Day two on the Italian Camino had already proven challenging. The morning sun was gentle, the path winding, and my legs reminded me that yes, yesterday’s 19kms were very real. I was plodding steadily up yet another hill when, suddenly, a blur of energy shot past me. I blinked. And blinked again.

Day after day, as my boots crunched along the winding dirt paths of the Italian Camino, I found myself in the company of some of the most unexpected mentors: wild horses and cats. At first, I thought of them merely as passing scenery, creatures going about their lives in open fields, seemingly indifferent to my presence. But as the kilometres unfolded, I began to notice the subtle, unspoken lessons each one carried about leadership, diversity, and the art of moving forward together.

Sometimes, the Camino doesn’t gift you with the golden-hued hills, medieval villages, or unexpected glimpses of papal splendor. Sometimes, it just gives you… roads. Long, dusty, unremarkable roads that seem to stretch infinitely ahead, testing your patience more than your legs. I found myself walking two days in a row where each spanned 28kms, yet each felt like 50. The monotony was profound. Every step echoed the one before it. The horizon barely moved. Time stretched. Minutes became hours. And for the first time in the journey, I understood just how much the mundane can weigh on both body and spirit.

There’s something both poetic and ridiculous about trudging into one of the world’s most historic cities covered in mud. On my final day walking the Italian Camino, from Campagnano di Roma into Rome, I found myself facing two long, open paddocks that looked deceptively innocent from afar. But the closer I got, the clearer it became that there was no avoiding what lay ahead: puddles. Not the polite kind that invite you to skip through them, but deep, swampy, boot-swallowing puddles that stretched across the entire path like nature’s own obstacle course.

Throughout my entire 141-kilometre journey from Montefiascone to Rome, I was repeatedly ambushed by beauty. The Italian Camino, the ancient Via Francigena, has a way of catching you off guard. One moment you’re calculating the exact percentage of your body currently comprised of blisters, and the next, you crest a hill to find a papal town unfurling in the distance, its church spires piercing the sky as if placed there by divine intervention.

Somewhere between Viterbo and Vetralla, on the Italian Camino, I hit a fork in the road - literally and metaphorically

Somewhere along the dusty road of the Italian Camino, about 10 kilometres past “my feet hurt” and just before “I’m questioning all my life choices”, I startled a cluster of wild cats. There were so many of them, darting in every direction, that I barely caught a flash of fur before they disappeared into the hazelnut groves like ghosts.