Be honest. How many times have you scrolled past a senior leadership advert, thought “I could do that,” and then quietly closed the tab?
I asked that question on LinkedIn last month. No judgement, I said. I just want to know if it’s only me.
It isn’t only me.
Most people who answered told me the same thing, in different words. More times than they’d admit.
I’m not going to pretend a LinkedIn poll is proof of anything. It isn’t a study. It’s a small, self-selected group of people who happened to see the question and were honest enough to answer it, mostly women in FE, but not only. One regular reader who answered is a man, and the tab-closing habit apparently isn’t as gendered as I assumed it was. But here’s the thing about small honest samples: they don’t need to be big to tell you something true. They just need to be honest. And this one was.
So let me tell you about my tab.
I was Assistant Principal, four and a half years in, and I wanted more. Not vaguely, not “maybe one day.” I wanted it and I could feel myself wanting it, which if you know FE culture, is already a slightly uncomfortable thing to admit out loud.
Here’s what I actually had at that point. Four and a half years as AP for Teaching and Learning. Two years as an Ofsted Inspector, seeing inside other colleges, other leadership teams, other ways of doing things. I’d built a 14-16 full-time provision from nothing and made it work. On paper, I was exactly the kind of person who applies for the next thing.
Here’s what was actually happening in my head. I’m not ready. I don’t have the experience. Who am I to think I could step into that?
Both of those things were true at the same time. The achievements were real. The story was also real, in the sense that I believed it completely. It just wasn’t accurate.
I closed the tab. More than once.
What actually shifted wasn’t a sudden rush of confidence. It was one phone call.
I had a coaching session. A telephone one, nothing dramatic, and by the end of it I was clear. Not clear about what I wanted, oddly. Clear about what I didn’t want. I could see it plainly for the first time in years, and I put the phone down and wrote my resignation letter that same day.
I want to be careful about what I’m claiming here, because I don’t like a tidy story any more than you do. That call didn’t hand me the confidence to become a CEO. That came later, over two years of self-employment, interim work and more Ofsted inspections, seeing inside other colleges and slowly realising I’d been comparing myself to a standard nobody else was actually meeting. The distance did that part.
But the distance only happened because of the call. The call was what got me unstuck enough to move at all. And two years later, when I saw an advert for a Director/CEO role at an adult education charity in Leeds, I didn’t close the tab. I applied, and I got it, and I was back in the sector I’d convinced myself I had to leave, this time at the top of it.
So here’s what I make of my own story now. Readiness was never the thing standing in my way. I had the experience the whole time, sitting right there on my CV while I told myself I didn’t. What I didn’t have was clarity, and I couldn’t get to it on my own, going round the same loop at 3am. It took one conversation with someone whose only job was to help me see straight.
That’s the bit I’d want you to take from this. The tab isn’t closed because you’re not ready. It’s closed because nobody’s helped you get clear, and clarity is much harder to reach on your own than we like to admit.
So before you tell yourself you’re not ready for whatever role you’ve been circling, I’d rather you actually checked. I’ve put together a short quiz, “Are You Ready to Lead with Confidence”, that walks you through the question properly instead of leaving you to answer it at 3am. It takes a few minutes. You might be further along than the story in your head is letting you believe.
