Across ages and titles, Nicole Willis keeps hearing the same questions. Where do I fit? How do I matter? Do I matter? How do I make a difference?
She hears them from sixteen-year-olds and from people in their seventies. From students, faculty, and leaders who look finished from the outside. Connecting on a personal level, she says, has “so much weight and so much value.”
Everybody wants to know that somebody sees them, and that it matters if they’re not there. With thirty people around you, you can’t build a close one-on-one with every one of them. More meetings won’t fix that. The question is how you show up anyway.
Show up as a safe space
“How do I show up as grounded and authentic and as real as I can in any situation, and allow the connections to form with the people that they’re going to form with and not force the others… but just be a safe space.”
A safe space here is a person someone can approach without managing the leader first. Not the leader’s mood. Not the leader’s ego. Not the leader’s need to be needed.
With more than thirty high school students around her, this looked ordinary enough to miss. Someone needed a bandage. Someone needed help with a speech. They came, got what they needed, and went off to do their thing.
Other connections went deeper. Those didn’t start on a forced one-on-one schedule. They started because she was already showing up as herself.
That matters most when people are learning. In a vulnerable place, it’s easy to forget what you bring to the table. A leader who stays available helps people remember that they are enough.
“[Being enough] is not about half-assing it. It’s more about trusting — which is really hard — that who you are, at the heart of you, that’s enough. That deserves love and care. And everybody has that. But not everybody trusts that.”
Being that kind of presence for other people only works if someone can also be that for you.
You won’t always be the safe one
Travel can strain even a well-built routine. When plans changed during a trip to California, Nicole was able to help someone else through it. Less than a day later, after too little sleep, she needed help herself.
“Not everybody is grounded at the same time.”
That is why finding your people matters. If you have good people around you, a hard day is easier to absorb because the group can still function. It can even support more than one person at once.
That support is built in ordinary time. The routines help you show up for people, and showing up builds the trust that lets them help when you need it. “The things that you do consistently matter,” she said. “When something goes a little sideways, you have all of that to sort of fall back on.”
Build your own practice
Most people wait for that kind of steadiness to arrive finished — especially systems-minded people who want interpersonal skill to show up as a kit. “They think that it just needs to come in a package, like here’s your package, go be well,” Nicole said. “It really is kind of a trial and error — and more error.”
People get stuck because they’re scared to do anything. Scared of making a mistake. Take the first step in some direction and let the flow start. “Sometimes it spits and sputters, but you’ve kind of got to go through that to figure out how to make it work.”
“You create a system for yourself,” she said. “It looks different for each of us.” For Nicole, the throughline has been journaling for more than thirty years. Part of that morning practice is getting the squirrels in her brain focused on the same thing. Sleep is another one she protects at all costs, because she knows what happens when she doesn’t get enough. A paper calendar still works when she uses it. She has gifted journals to people who need a way into their own version — words, sketches, doodles, whatever holds. “As long as it works for you, that’s what matters.”
The point of a practice is not a perfect streak. It gives you something steady to return to when the rest of the week will not stay still. “The only thing that is a constant is me,” she said. “And so that’s why my systems matter to me.”
Nicole can look back through more than thirty years of journals and see where difficult periods appear in the record: the entries stop.
“I stop writing when things go bad,” she said. “The bad stuff still happens even if I stop writing.” Noticing the break gives her choices. She can correct it, decide she no longer needs that piece, return to an older practice, or ask a therapist or friend to help her restart.
“If you have enough systems in place, something will hold.”
A hard week will disrupt some practices. Conflict will push others aside. If a few remain, you have a better chance of noticing what dropped and deciding what to do next. What holds varies from person to person.
That raises a harder question once the practice starts working. “What do you do when you get what you wanted?”
After you get the title
“They get the big promotion, they get the fancy title, and they’re like, ‘Woohoo! I got everything that I wanted.’ Then they stop doing anything that they were doing to get them to that place.” The title starts to feel like arrival. The habits that got them there fall away, and the people around them stop looking like a responsibility.
“I’ve seen a couple different flavors of that. Maybe they don’t stop doing the work-work, but they stop doing the work on themselves. They stop taking care of themselves. Or they overrotate and take care only of themselves. They don’t take care of the work or the people they’re now responsible for. Both of those are bad. You have to have that balance.”
Nicole approached her own promotion differently. She knew it was coming, and the expanded role was something she had asked for. She also knew it would be hard. Before the title changed, she was already looking for ways to keep learning and growing.
“You’ve hit the valley and it’s a gorgeous view, but you still have a ton of work to do.” Getting what she wanted did not remove the need for a practice. It made the consequences of neglecting it larger, for herself and for everyone she led.
That balance is not only about rest and growth. It also shapes how a leader handles the work itself: what they take on, what they refuse, and how much explanation they owe.
Boundaries without the speech
A colleague about to start a new role got a work question before the start date. The answer was short. They didn’t start until a set day. At that point they would be happy to respond. Until then, it wasn’t their job. That was all they said.
“It was just a matter of stating facts.”
No speech. No over-explaining. No performance of how thoughtful or flexible they were being. They didn’t need to defend the boundary. The start date made the answer clear.
People will bring anxiety, detail, urgency, and half-formed asks. You do not have to absorb all of it and answer from your first reaction. Pause long enough to make sense of what you’re feeling, find the fact or policy that applies, and answer only what needs answering.
That story reminded Nicole of a skill she has had to learn in her own leadership. She used to “spout off” before she had made sense of what she wanted to say. “It works better when you make sense of it and then you let it out.” Now she pauses, works through her first reaction privately, and gives the other person a clear answer.
Bigger than being the boss
Pausing before you answer is one piece of leadership practice. The larger problem, Nicole said, is that this kind of development can be hard to find and is often presented as something for people who already have the title. “It’s not obvious,” Nicole said. “It’s not easily accessible.”
She rejects that narrow frame. “Being a leader or working on your leadership development isn’t about being the boss. It’s bigger than that. And the good ones know that. It’s not about the title. It’s about the people and it’s about you.”
The work on yourself shapes the experience other people have with you. It affects whether you can listen when plans change, notice when your routines have slipped, keep learning after a promotion, and give a clear answer without handing someone your first reaction. A title increases the number of people affected by those choices. It does not create the responsibility.