"I never thought I'd be a leader."

It was the same for me. I was good at the job, someone noticed, and I said yes, mostly because it felt good to be asked. I think I was more worried about missing out than I was about whether I was actually ready.

Nobody warns you how different it is. It's not just harder. It's a completely different skill set to the one that got you there. There's no easy way in. One day you're just in it, with people looking to you for answers. Having the tricky conversations with the people who used to be your peers.

And then there's the isolation. People come to you wanting to know you've got it together. So you stop saying when you haven't.

Showing the struggle, the not-knowing, might actually be the more useful thing to model. But it feels like a risk most leaders aren't willing to take.

And suddenly there are things you can't say to anyone in the building.

The 2am spiral. The replaying of conversations. That voice telling you everyone around you seems to have it together, the leaders you looked up to, the ones you're now sitting alongside. And you must be the only one who hasn't.

Those voices are loud when you're new to this.

Looking back at my first leadership role, I should have got out from behind my desk sooner. I was busy and it did feel new, but I think I was hiding. I could have found people outside the organisation. There were people inside too, but at the time it felt like they were more experienced and weren't finding it nearly as hard as I was. It took time to reestablish those relationships. To work out who I could actually talk to.

And underneath all of it, the same fear. Of being found out.

I know that feeling of being caught out. Of not having the answer when someone's looking at you for one. It made me feel like I just wasn't good enough.

But I was just new.

And the thing is, most of us are.

What tends to help isn't another course. It's having somewhere you can say the things you can't say to anyone else. Maybe the things you aren't even saying to yourself yet.

Because coaching gives you something you can't always get anywhere else. Someone completely neutral, completely focused on you. A space to say the scary things without being judged, to order your thinking, to be pushed further than you'd go on your own.

It's where you realise things you were missing. Where the voice in your head actually gets challenged rather than just lived with.

Mentoring has its place, especially when you're new and just need to know how things work. But coaching is different. It's not about borrowing someone else's experience. It's about building confidence in your own thinking, and developing that internal voice you can take into the next difficult situation, and the one after that.

A 2023 peer-reviewed meta-analysis confirmed that coaching is a consistently effective intervention for leaders, improving confidence, self-awareness and performance. The earlier you get that support, the less time you spend just surviving it. (Cannon-Bowers et al., 2023)

If you're in that place right now, capable, committed, and quietly wondering when it starts to feel less like you're making it up as you go - you're not alone in it.

It's just really hard to say that out loud when everyone's looking to you for answers.