The Only One Standing Still

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I can still feel the heat behind my eyes from that moment, decades later. Not because anyone said anything cruel to me directly. Because the difference itself was the exposure. There was nowhere to hide it, and no one had to say a word for me to understand exactly how visible I was. I remember scanning the audience afterward, half expecting to find my mother's face somewhere in the crowd, wanting reassurance I did not know how to ask for out loud.

I do not remember exactly what I felt walking off that stage, only that it stayed with me far longer than a single awkward moment should have. I carried it quietly for years afterward, a small, specific ache that resurfaced anytime I found myself the only one in a room dressed, believing, or choosing differently than everyone around me.

At that age, I learned two things that have shaped nearly every leadership decision I have made since. There are some things I will simply not do, regardless of the room I am standing in. And the cost of that decision is that the difference cannot be hidden. It shows. It always shows, whether the room is a fourth grade stage or a boardroom decades later.

It has taken me most of my adult life to actually be at peace with the fact that God did not call me to fit in. Every time I let myself get distracted comparing my path to someone else's, measuring my calling against their visible momentum, I start to feel unworthy, unproductive, unqualified, the exact feelings I felt standing on that stage as a nine-year-old, the pose already struck around me, my own stillness the only thing anyone could see.

God did not call me to blend in. He called me to be different, in my ministry, my career, and my business, and blending in was never actually available to me, no matter how badly I sometimes wanted it to be.

I think about how many decisions, across the years since, have quietly echoed that same stage. Moments where fitting in would have been easier, faster, less exposed, and I chose the denim skirt anyway, so to speak, because some things simply are not available to negotiate away for the sake of blending in. Each time, some smaller version of that nine-year-old flinch rises first, the anticipation of being visibly separate, before the steadier conviction underneath it takes over and holds.

Here is what I want to say to the leader who has always felt one half-step out of formation with everyone around her. The visibility of your difference is not a flaw in your leadership. It may be the very thing marking you as someone who was never meant to lead by matching the room. Standing out costs something before it produces anything. It costs you comfort, sometimes belonging, sometimes the easy relief of blending in. But it is very often the same quality that eventually lets you lead somewhere no one else was positioned to go, precisely because they were all still posing together, and you were the one already standing somewhere else.

I did not choose that particular difference at nine years old. It was chosen for me, by a household, a faith tradition, a set of convictions I did not fully understand yet but was already expected to represent, standing on a stage, in front of a room, without the vocabulary to explain why I looked different from everyone around me. I think that is true of most early differences that later become leadership strengths. We rarely choose them consciously the first time. We are simply asked to stand inside them long before we understand what they are building in us.

I have made peace, mostly, with the fact that some rooms will always require an explanation I did not ask to owe anyone. What has changed is how much power I let that requirement hold over me. At nine, the heat behind my eyes felt like evidence something was wrong with me. Now, decades later, I recognize that same heat as a familiar, almost reliable signal that I am standing exactly where I was meant to stand, however uncomfortable the standing still is.

I think about that stage sometimes when I am the only one in a boardroom holding a position no one else in the room shares, the only one asking a question everyone else seems to have silently agreed not to ask. The particular loneliness of that moment has not fully disappeared with age or experience. What has changed is my relationship to it. I no longer read it as proof I do not belong in the room. I have learned, slowly, to read it as the same signal it always was, evidence that I am standing somewhere worth standing, even when, especially when, no one else is standing there with me.

I do not know what became of the red polo shirts, whether any of my classmates from that stage remember the day at all, or whether it lives only in my memory, magnified by decades of quiet significance no one else assigned to it. I suspect that is true of most formative moments. They rarely look significant to anyone standing outside them. They simply become the quiet architecture underneath everything a person builds afterward, invisible to everyone except the one who was actually standing there.

-- Dr. Rhonda

The Next Step: If you have always felt one half-step out of formation with the rooms you lead in, take The Close the Leadership Gap Diagnostic™. It is built to help you see whether that difference is actually the thing qualifying you to lead where others cannot.