They're Watching How You Carry It

Nobody told me that when I got my cancer diagnosis, I was also getting a leadership test.

I found out on a Thursday. By Friday morning I was back at my desk, fielding calls, running a meeting, making decisions for an organization that serves tens of thousands of people. Not because I was fine. I wasn’t fine. But because I was the CEO, and I had spent thirty years believing — without ever examining the belief — that my job was to project stability regardless of what was happening underneath it.

What I didn’t fully understand then, and what I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about since, is this: the people around you are not fooled by the performance. They’re reading something else entirely. They’re watching how you carry it.

This is true whether you run a $28 million nonprofit, lead a team of five, coach a youth triathlon team, or raise children. Your response to adversity doesn’t stay contained within you. It radiates. The people in your orbit — your staff, your athletes, your kids, your patients — are taking cues from you constantly, often without knowing they’re doing it.

Not from what you say. From what you do when things get hard.

The research on this is substantial. Social learning theory has documented for decades that humans — especially those in dependent or hierarchical relationships — regulate their own emotional responses in part by observing the people they trust and follow. Children learn how to handle fear by watching how their parents handle it. Employees learn what a crisis actually means by watching how their leaders carry it. Athletes learn what hard looks like by watching how their coaches respond to setbacks.

You are, whether you intend to be or not, a live demonstration of how to navigate difficulty. The question isn’t whether you’re teaching that lesson. It’s what the lesson is.

I’ve watched leaders handle pressure in ways that made their organizations stronger — not because they performed invulnerability, but because they modeled something more useful: the ability to hold difficulty without being consumed by it. To name what was hard without catastrophizing it. To stay functional without pretending everything was fine.

I’ve also watched leaders — good people, capable people — respond to uncertainty with the kind of thin, performative composure that fools no one and quietly terrifies everyone. The forced confidence that doesn’t match the facts. The relentless optimism that has no room for reality. The tight jaw and short answers that tell people there’s something wrong but nobody is allowed to say so.

Both of those are contagious. One of them is useful.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe after three decades of leading through crises — funding shortfalls, public health emergencies, my own illness, organizational upheaval — and after completing more than a hundred races that have taught me more about pressure than any leadership seminar ever did:

Resilience is not the absence of struggle. It’s the visible, honest navigation of it.

When I kept training through chemotherapy — on the days my body allowed it, which wasn’t always — I wasn’t trying to prove anything. I was trying to maintain the one structure that made me feel like myself when everything else felt uncertain. But what I didn’t fully see at the time was what it was showing the people around me. Not that I was tough. That forward motion - however small - was still possible. That you could be genuinely struggling and still take the next step.

That’s the thing people need to see from you. Not that it doesn’t hurt.

That it doesn’t stop you.