The most intimidating audience of my career

Now…onto today’s programming…

Two Fridays ago, I faced one of the most high-pressure, nerve-wracking presentations of my career - and no, it wasn't addressing a room full of CEOs or delivering a TED talk. I presented to my daughter's Year 5 class.

It all started one afternoon during school pickup. Frankie excitedly took me to her classroom and showed me my name scrawled on a post-it note, nestled among other people like Taylor Swift and Obama. Her class had been doing a "unit of inquiry" into leadership.

Me: “That’s cool that parents are seen as leaders too”.

Franke: “No, you are the only parent on the list.”

Me (on the inside): OMG my daughter totally sees me as a leader.

Me (on the outside): That’s cool.

When Frankie's teacher invited me to speak to the girls about leadership the following week, I found myself standing before 60 bright-eyed 10- and 11-year-olds, each one radiating that uniquely pre-teen mix of curiosity and skepticism (part "wow, tell me everything" and part "prove you're not totally lame" - although using the word "lame" probably does me no favours in proving that I am not).

I decided to share with the group about my experience at school. I was: excruciatingly shy, couldn't catch a ball to save myself, and basically, the epitome of "dork".

Leadership? That was for the confident kids, the ones with effortless charisma, the natural speakers, the ones who actually wanted attention. I was the kid who would rather eat lunch in the library than face the social scene out in the playground.

But here's the thing - those 'awkward' traits, the ones I tried so hard to hide? They became my superpowers. My love of books fuelled my curiosity. That outsider perspective helped me think differently. Sometimes not fitting in is actually preparation for standing out.

Looking around that classroom, I saw younger versions of myself in several of the faces. The quiet ones, the quirky ones, the ones who might be thinking they're not "leadership material." And in that moment I realised: sometimes the best thing you can do as a leader isn't showing people how far you've come - it's showing them where you started.