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.
“Move to space!” “You had her! You HAD her!” “Don’t stand there - MOVE!”
I don’t even realise I’m doing it at first. It starts as enthusiastic encouragement, truly. I genuinely believe I’m being helpful. Then somewhere between the second half and a contested ball, I become a full-volume, arm-waving, direction-barking sideline commentator who is absolutely convinced she is helping the coach, the referee and anyone else willing to care about the results of the game.
And standing right beside me, taking it all in, is my eldest daughter.
She said nothing at the time. Just watched. Filed it away. Because my eldest is, it turns out, know how to play a long game.
A year later, with her own netball season about to start, she sat me down and calmly and deliberately walked me through exactly how she needed me to behave at her games. She outlined what she wanted to hear from the sideline and what she didn’t and she told me how she needed me to show up for her, as opposed to how I’d been showing up at her sister’s games for the past twelve months.
She wasn’t aggressive or emotional – she was just clear. She set the expectations and boundaries, and it was, if I’m being completely honest, one of the more professionally executed conversations I’ve been on the receiving end of in recent memory. And I’ve sat across the table from some fairly seasoned executives.
She is eleven years old.
I remember sitting there thinking two things simultaneously.
Firstly: I have raised someone extraordinary. Go me!
Second: What does it say about me that my child felt she needed to prepare me like a stakeholder before her first game?
I mostly sat with the second one.
Here’s where it gets uncomfortable in a way that extended well beyond sport, because I didn’t see a stranger when I caught myself mid-yell. I saw someone I recognised… a version of me I’d worked incredibly hard to leave behind.
Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, that was me in the meeting room. So invested in the outcome, so certain of the right answer, that I couldn’t stop myself from filling every silence, correcting every imperfect attempt, redirecting every decision that wasn’t going the way I’d have made it. I was passionate, driven, had high standards but underneath it, if I’m being honest, I had a complete inability to let someone else find their own way to the result. Likely fear driven.
I’ve done the work on that deliberately, over years. I’ve learned to hold the line without holding the reins. I’ve learned to care about outcomes without controlling every step toward them. I thought I’d genuinely put that version of myself to rest.
What I hadn’t counted on was how the personal would quietly become the place it crept back in. I had no performance reviews here and no 360 feedback, and I certainly had no professional development framework nudging me toward better behaviour. Just me, the cold, two kids on two different fields, and apparently, all that old wiring still sitting just below the surface, waiting for something it cared about enough to switch back on.
My daughter doesn’t need me to run her game. She needs me in her corner. There is an enormous difference between those two things, and I had collapsed it entirely.
The best leaders I’ve worked for didn’t bark instructions from the boundary. They created the conditions for their people to play well, trusted the preparation they’d invested in, and then, the hard part, let it happen. They knew when to speak and, more critically, when their silence was the most powerful thing they could offer. That is not passive leadership. That is the most disciplined kind.
My daughter, at eleven, did something I didn’t have the language or the confidence to do at thirty. She identified a problem, thought through its impact, prepared her case, and had the conversation directly with the person who needed to hear it. No triangulating. No hoping things would change. No quietly resenting the situation for another season. She managed up. Fearlessly. At eleven.
I think about the younger leaders in my world who are watching behaviour that doesn’t serve them and saying nothing, because they haven’t yet found that voice, or don’t believe the conversation is theirs to have. And I want to tell them: it is absolutely yours to have. The clearest, most useful feedback I received this year came from someone who hasn’t hit high school yet.
So now I stand on that sideline, still dancing foot to foot in the cold, still very invested, but learning, genuinely learning, to let my presence speak instead of my mouth.
When the yell builds – and I can assure you it still builds, let me not romanticise this, I simply take a breath, sip the cold coffee, and remember the conversation my daughter had the courage to start.
She trained me. And I was coachable enough to listen. That’s the whole lesson, right there.
Add comment
Comments