Watching My Kids Figure It Out Reminded Me How Leaders Are Made.
- jahzeel47
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
On beginner's mind, asking for help, and what happens when you put down the phone and pay attention.
Today my husband and I took the kids to ride the city bus for the first time.
Not as tourists on a metro system with color-coded maps and multilingual signage. Not abroad, where public transit is so woven into daily life that even a newcomer can follow the rhythm of it. Here. In our own city. A mostly empty bus on a Friday, and four people who had no idea what they were doing.
I went in thinking I was the one showing them something. I came home having been shown something myself.
Watching someone encounter the unknown for the first time
There is something about watching your kids step into genuine uncertainty that you can't manufacture or script. They didn't know which stop to press for. They weren't sure when to move toward the door. They didn't know the unspoken rules of that space; where to look, how to signal, what was normal here.
We’ve travelled a lot, and they've navigated airports and foreign transit systems in places where none of us spoke the language fluently. In those contexts, not knowing feels expected. You're a visitor. Of course you're figuring it out. But riding the bus in your own city carries a different kind of vulnerability, the implied embarrassment of not knowing something that other people around you treat as completely ordinary.
What I watched my kids do in that discomfort is exactly what I spend a lot of my professional life talking about: They stayed present. They observed. They asked.
We had no apps running. No real-time tracker, no safety net of technology to consult quietly without anyone noticing. Just the bus, the driver, a handful of regular riders, and us. And without a screen to retreat into, something interesting happened, we actually had to pay attention to the humans around us.
There is something clarifying about not having a screen to hide behind. It forces you into the room — to read it, watch it, and talk to actual people.
My kids asked the driver which stop was ours. They watched the other passengers for cues. They pieced together the rhythm of the route in real time. And they got it right, not because they were prepared, but because they were paying attention.
Asking for help is not a confession of weakness
One of the most persistent myths in leadership culture is that asking questions, or asking for help signals incompetence. That a good leader should already know or at least appear to. That uncertainty is something to be managed privately, never displayed in front of the people around you.
My kids blew right past that. They asked the driver to confirm our stop without a second thought. They accepted an unsolicited tip from a regular rider about the return route with genuine gratitude. They had no ego invested in already knowing so they just asked, and the bus became a surprisingly generous space.
But here's the part that stayed with me: their openness changed the energy of the whole bus. When they admitted freely that they didn't know what they were doing, something softened in the people around them. The driver offered more than was asked. A fellow passenger who hadn't said a word leaned over with a smile and an unprompted suggestion. There was a small, quiet moment of shared humanity, the kind that doesn't happen when everyone is performing competence at each other. Their willingness to not know made it easier for everyone in that space to simply be present together.
Humility is contagious in the best possible way. When one person drops the performance, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.
That's what happens when you drop the performance of knowing. People meet you there. And the information you need shows up the moment you're willing to ask for it out loud.
I've watched this dynamic play out in boardrooms, in project kick-offs, in leadership transitions. The ask is almost never as costly as the silence. The moment you say, "I don't know, can you help me understand?" most people lean in. What keeps leaders from doing it isn't lack of skill. It's the story they've told themselves about what not-knowing says about them.
They led, because they knew we were right behind them
Something else happened on that bus that I didn't fully appreciate until we were on the walk home. My kids took the lead. They were the ones asking the driver questions, scanning the stops, deciding when it was time to move. They weren't waiting for us to navigate it for them.
But they could do that confidently, without freezing because they knew my husband and I were there. Not to take over, but to catch them if they needed it. The safety net wasn't removing the challenge. It was making the challenge feel worth attempting.
That's a dynamic I think about a lot in leadership development. People stretch furthest when they feel genuinely supported, not micromanaged, not left entirely alone, but backed. The best managers I've worked with and alongside operate exactly this way: they create the conditions for someone to take the lead, stay close enough to matter, and resist the urge to jump in before it's actually necessary. The goal isn't to protect people from uncertainty. It's to make uncertainty feel navigable.
My kids navigated it. Not because it was easy, but because they trusted the structure around them enough to try.
The ride back is always smoother
The return trip was a completely different experience. Same route, same bus, same city, but we'd done it once. We knew where to stand. We knew how early to move toward the door. We knew the driver would wait a bit before pulling away. The choreography that had felt foreign a few hours earlier was now, in the smallest but most real way, ours.
Watching my kids move through that second ride relaxed, oriented, even a little proud; I thought about how rarely we let people in organizations have that experience. We pull someone into a new role or a new environment and expect immediate fluency. We treat the first pass through something unfamiliar as a performance review rather than a learning lap.
Experience doesn't have to be long to be real. Sometimes one honest pass through something unknown is enough to change how you carry yourself through the next one.
This is what adaptability actually looks like; not a personality trait you either have or don't, but the decision to stay curious while you're uncomfortable. To absorb what's happening instead of retreating into certainty you don't yet have. To trust that the discomfort is temporary and the learning is real. My kids didn't need a debrief or a framework. They just needed to do it once, with enough presence to let it land.
Context is something you earn, not download
We've ridden transit in cities where it's a way of life, where the culture around it is thick with unspoken norms that locals carry effortlessly. Our city's bus on a quiet Friday morning is its own world. Fewer people, more space, a slower and more casual rhythm. Different rules about eye contact and conversation, a different relationship between strangers sharing a space than what you'd find on a crowded metro abroad.
None of that was available to us in advance. You absorb it by being there, by watching, by being willing to be a little wrong before you're right.
And there was something else we hadn't anticipated: seeing our own city differently. From the window of a bus, at street level, stopping at corners we'd only ever driven past, the city looked new. Neighborhoods we thought we knew revealed small details; a mural, a corner shop, the way a block changes character between one stop and the next, that you simply don't see from a car. My kids were quiet at the window in a way that felt like genuine discovery. They were looking at their own home with fresh eyes.
That, too, is a leadership skill. The ability to look at something familiar and find what you've been missing. To resist the comfort of assumed understanding and stay curious about what's actually there. The leaders who grow the most aren't always the ones entering brand new environments, sometimes they're the ones who've learned to look differently at the places they already know.
Leadership works exactly the same way when it comes to organizations. Every team, every culture has layers that live beneath the org chart; unwritten rules, informal power, the way things actually get decided versus how the process says they should. You cannot download that context. You have to earn it the same way my kids earned their bus knowledge: by showing up without pretending you already understand and paying close attention to what the environment is telling you.
The leaders who struggle most in new environments are often the ones who arrive with their expertise held out in front of them like a shield, so focused on demonstrating what they know that they miss what they need to learn. The ones who land well tend to board like beginners. They watch before they act. They ask before they assume. They let the place teach them something before they try to change it.
What I took home from the bus
We got where we were going. We got back. My kids thought it was an adventure and honestly, so did I.
But what stayed with me on the walk home wasn't the route or the logistics. It was watching my kids move through genuine uncertainty with curiosity instead of resistance. Watching them ask for help without shame. Watching the people around them respond with warmth, not judgment. Watching them take the lead, knowing we were behind them. Watching them look at their own city like they were seeing it for the first time.
Those aren't bus skills. Those are leadership skills. And watching them practice it unselfconsciously, without anyone framing it that way, was a good reminder that the best version of those qualities doesn't come from a course or a framework. It comes from being willing to not know, staying in it anyway, and paying attention to what the moment is offering you.
The bus was 90% empty. There was almost nobody there to watch us figure it out. That's not usually how it goes in leadership. But the practice is the same.
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