For Years I thought I couldn’t Lead. Turns Out I just Couldn’t Do Empathy.

"You need to work on your empathy." I didn't hear that from a boss. I heard it from myself, on a loop, for years. It was a fight I was having with myself my entire leadership career.

Empathy in leadership was everywhere. And I don't disagree that a change was needed in how leaders responded to what their teammates were facing. I grew my career in sales organisations. I've sat across from a lot of different faces of leadership, and it's still striking how many people rise into the role with almost no training in how to actually lead a person. Nobody teaches you how to lead. They promote you for hitting a number and hand you a team.

What I wasn't ready for was my own inability to connect with my teammates when they needed me most, when they were struggling.

I'm wired for grit and action, not for sitting in a feeling. My whole career, the answer to a problem was to work harder, push through, and get to the other side of it. That served me well in almost every part of the job.

When a teammate was struggling, my gut instinct said get on with it. That was shortsighted and cold if I'm being honest. That's the school of hard knocks talking. So, instead, I would check the boxes I knew I was supposed to check to show I was helping. It always felt structured, textbook, and honestly fake. If that's how it felt to me, imagine how it felt to them. My teams got quiet and concerns stopped showing up in one-on-ones. I didn't just fail to help. I taught them not to bring me the real thing next time.

"I need to try harder".

Get on with it, I told myself. The same thing I'd been telling everyone else. I leaned in more. Books, webinars, workshops, scripted language, all of it. But nothing was working for me. Empathy asks you to understand what someone is feeling, to put yourself in their shoes. I struggled to do that. My instinct has always been to move toward the fix, not sit with the feeling behind it. Everyone has problems. The job, as I saw it, was to push through them. Sharing someone else's emotional state has always been difficult for me, no matter how hard I tried to do so.

So for a long time I figured I wasn't going to make it as a leader. I knew it was that big of a problem. I was planning my exit more than once, not out loud, just running the numbers on when I'd leave.

The shift ran alongside a bigger one happening in my personal life. I was in the middle of a real transformation, and the discomfort of staying how I was finally outweighed the fear of changing. Same as always, I went looking for answers in research and books. That's when I came across compassion. I didn't know yet what to do with it, but I couldn't stop reading about it. I felt that this was something I could work with.

Compassion is an intentional choice to help. It's noticing someone is struggling, knowing that everyone struggles, and being moved to do something about it. The part that changed everything for me: I didn't need to feel someone's struggle to help them with it. I didn't need to understand why they were struggling. I only needed to care that they were.

That took the pressure off completely. Once I didn't have to climb into someone else's shoes, I found I was actually able to show up for them. Compassion was reachable for me in a way empathy never was, in every circumstance, with every person. That's the whole thing: you can choose to care about someone regardless of whether you can feel what they feel. Through it, I listen longer, I'm more patient, and I give people a lot more grace.

Compassion is how I connect with my team now, and it feels like mine instead of borrowed. Those relationships have never been stronger. We talk regularly about what they're actually up against, and I can show up for those conversations for real.

I'm not knocking empathy. It's a genuinely powerful skill, and plenty of leaders run on it well. Leadership needs people who can care, not necessarily people who can feel it alongside someone. What I've learned is that it was never the right tool for every leader. I'm one of them, and spending years trying to force myself into it cost me more than admitting that ever would have. If it's never come easily to you either, ask yourself what changes the moment you stop trying to feel it with them, and just focus on caring that they're going through it at all.