What a personal crisis taught me about leading with vulnerability

Personal crisis rarely announces itself as a crisis. For me, it was a convergence of pressure: professional demands, family responsibilities and an overreliance on appearing composed. I had become good at delivering certainty while privately running on fear and fatigue. The experience forced a question I had avoided: if leadership depends on trust, what happens when the leader no longer trusts their own account of what they can manage?

I did not want to turn private pain into a performance, yet silence had its own cost. People around me filled the gaps with assumptions, while I carried work, home and decisions that needed clearer ownership. The shift began when I stopped treating vulnerability as confessing everything and started treating it as supplying accurate information: here is the pressure, here is the limit, here is the support I need.

That lesson travels well beyond my own experience as a broadcaster and author. In Australia, leaders can be managing a crisis while commuting through Sydney, joining a call from a Melbourne kitchen, supporting colleagues in Perth or navigating the country’s competitive speaking and wellbeing market. The setting may change; the demand to appear invulnerable does not. A healthier model of leadership starts by making truth, limits and support visible enough for others to act.

Crisis changes the kind of strength leaders need

The crisis showed me that resilience is not the same as endurance without support. Control can be useful during a live emergency, but it becomes brittle when used as a permanent identity. A leader who never admits strain teaches the organisation that asking for help is a weakness and that warning signs should remain hidden until performance collapses.

Moving from performance to candour changes the work itself. Colleagues can respond to a real constraint, share information they have been protecting, or spot a decision that has quietly become too large for one person. It also changes the leader’s role: from being the person who absorbs every shock to being the person who builds a structure where shocks can be handled honestly.

Vulnerability still needs judgement. Some facts are private, some conversations need consent, and disclosure should never be used to load a team with unnecessary emotional labour. The aim is not exposure for its own sake. It is enough truth, offered at the right moment, to support better decisions and safer work.

When control stopped being useful

I had built my professional identity around being the dependable one. That identity created competence and credibility, but it also meant that slowing down felt like risking value. When the crisis arrived, I tried familiar solutions: work longer, answer faster, disclose less. These actions looked decisive from the outside while increasing the very strain that needed attention.

The ordinary rhythms of Australian life made that pattern easier to see. A delayed train through Melbourne, a school pickup in Sydney or a late gym session squeezed between meetings can become part of a leader’s coping routine. Normalising constant motion can disguise depletion, especially when colleagues are also balancing rent, mortgage repayments, care duties and long travel between home and work.

Recognising the pattern did not solve the crisis, but it changed my response. I stopped asking only, “How can I push through?” and started asking, “What must be protected, and what can I stop pretending I can hold?” That question created room for honest choices rather than heroic delay. It also made it possible for me to receive support without presenting that support as a favour or a failure.

Vulnerability is useful information

Vulnerability, as I understand it now, is disciplined candour. It means naming the reality closely enough for someone else to act, without handing them every private detail. A useful disclosure might be: I can lead this launch until Friday, but I cannot also own the client review; or, my capacity is reduced this week, so we need to move one decision. Both statements replace vague reassurance with actionable truth.

I have written about professional uncertainty in navigating a career break, including how to explain a pause without making it sound like incompetence. For a leader, that distinction is crucial: a truthful account of constraints earns more trust than a polished story with no cracks, especially when the team needs to plan around real capacity.

Boundaries are what make candour safe. I learned to ask who genuinely needs to know, what information they need, and how they should handle it. That prevents vulnerability from becoming either compulsory confession or a demand for reassurance. It also allows leaders to be warm without making every conversation about their own emotions, a pattern that can quietly centre the leader rather than the work.

Honest dialogue in Australian workplaces

Australian workplaces often reward composure, initiative and a preference for getting on with things. In cities such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, hybrid teams may span time zones, industries and levels of experience, making invisible pressure easier to carry. Vulnerable leadership can feel countercultural here because it replaces self-sufficiency with explicit coordination. That is precisely its value: it gives busy people information they can use.

Clear policies make this conversation more than a personality exercise. Under Victoria’s Family and Domestic Violence Leave Act 2002, eligible employees and their relatives can access up to 10 days of paid leave in a 12-month period to deal with, or assist with, family and domestic violence. Entitlements vary across states and agreements, so Australian leaders should check the relevant rules or consult the Fair Work Ombudsman rather than improvise around a crisis.

The local market reinforces the need for substance. Australian organisations in financial services, education, healthcare, resources and technology regularly seek speakers on resilience, mental health and inclusive leadership, while the wellbeing space is crowded with quick fixes. Credible leadership means separating lived experience from a sales promise, acknowledging uncertainty and offering practices people can sustain beyond a conference room.

Small practices for a steadier response

None of this requires a leader to become unusually dramatic. A practical response begins with a private check-in that separates facts from the story attached to them. A few clear questions can stop panic from making every decision for you.

Questions to name privately

• What has actually changed, and which facts are confirmed?
• Which part of the load is mine to hold?
• Who needs information now, and who does not?
• What would meaningful support look like this week?

The aim is not perfect clarity; it is enough clarity to choose the next safe step. Once the facts are visible, action becomes easier to divide and less likely to collapse under one person’s pressure. Small, specific moves also make support easier for colleagues to offer.

Practical moves for the next day

• Delay the biggest irreversible decision, but set a time to revisit it.
• Tell one trusted person or adviser what is really happening.
• Record what happened, what helped and what made things harder.
• Contact a qualified professional; in immediate distress in Australia, call 000 or Lifeline on 13 11 14.

Recovery needs a different kind of plan

Recovery is often where leaders reveal what they truly believe. If rest only enters the plan after every deliverable is complete, it will remain optional. Modelling a measured return, saying when capacity is limited and asking others to do the same turns self-care from a private reservation into a shared operating principle.

Leadership transitions also need language. People need to know what is changing, what is staying stable, where decisions will be made and how uncertainty will be communicated. I have brought together a wider set of practical articles for people thinking about reinvention, confidence and professional renewal, because a return is rarely a straight line back to an earlier version of work.

Careful planning protects a recovery from becoming another performance. Keep essential priorities, share ownership and allow some work to remain unfinished. A crisis may change the work; it does not automatically define the person. The strongest plan is one that restores enough capacity to make sound choices, not one that demands immediate proof that everything is fine.

Leading from what survived

The transformation was not from weakness to invulnerability. It was from pretending that invulnerability was the only respectable form of leadership to accepting that honest limits can create safety. When leaders name strain, uncertainty and support early, teams learn that problems are part of the work rather than evidence of personal weakness.

That principle sits at the heart of the work I care about through This Girl Is On Fire: helping women speak with authority, protect their wellbeing and lead without being diminished by the pressure to prove themselves. Personal growth is strongest when it includes responsibility to others, not withdrawal from them. The same courage needed to admit a crisis can become the courage to support someone else through theirs.

I no longer believe that vulnerability means handing over control. It means giving people enough truth to participate, enough boundaries to feel safe and enough courage to keep the conversation moving. The leaders who survive hard periods are not those who pretend nothing hurts; they are those who remain present enough to notice, speak clearly enough to be trusted and adapt without surrendering their humanity.