Part One. The Long Road to Coaching, and the Cost of Leading Well
This is a two-part reflection on leadership, responsibility and the quieter realities behind visible success. In Part One, I share the experiences that shaped my path, from service life through senior leadership and into coaching. In Part Two, I explore what those experiences have taught me about discernment, trust and choosing depth over noise in a crowded world.
This is a different kind of post for me.
As the year draws to a close, I’ve found myself reflecting, not on titles, turnover or milestones, but on what truly compelled me to step into coaching as a profession, and why this work, done well and with integrity, matters more now than at any other point in my career.
Before coaching, before entrepreneurship, before leadership programmes and frameworks, there was the Royal Air Force an environment that shaped not just how I led, but who I became.The RAF teaches you responsibility early, often before you feel ready for it, it teaches you quickly that leadership isn’t theoretical, it’s practical, human, and frequently uncomfortable, you are trusted with people, decisions and outcomes long before you have the language to describe the weight of that responsibility, but you feel it nonetheless, and you carry it.
The Cost That Rarely Gets Spoken About
There is one moment from my service life that has never left me.
I was deployed to the Falkland Islands for four months, four months away from home, away from routine, away from the life that continues regardless of whether you’re present for it or not.When I returned, my very young child didn’t want to know me, I wondered if he even recognised me, not because of anger, or upset, or rejection, but simply because I had been absent long enough for familiarity to fade.
That moment lands somewhere deep inside you, and it stays there, it forces you to confront the reality that leadership, service and responsibility often come with a cost that is deeply personal, rarely acknowledged, and almost never shared openly, the cost of presence, of balance, of moments you don’t get back.
Both my service life and what followed challenged me in ways I still sometimes struggle to put into words.
From Uniform to the Civilian World
After leaving the RAF, I stepped into various leadership roles in the civilian sector, my last being in 2011, where I took a role with a small growing Facilities Management business. Beginning with a relatively small portfolio and gradually growing my responsibility (over 12 years) for a business approaching £100 million in turnover, with accountability for hundreds of people, significant growth targets, complex stakeholder relationships, and a client base that spanned public and private sectors.
I didn’t inherit success, I supported a business through its growth journey, witnessing both the highs and the very lows, the contract wins that lifted teams and validated months of work, the contract losses that tested resilience, trust and leadership character, the moments when people were at their absolute best, and the moments when they were at their worst.
I led people through change, uncertainty and pressure, negotiated with unions, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, and learned quickly that leadership is rarely clean or tidy, I’ve sat across tables trying to find common ground, failed, tried again, and on more than one occasion found myself in court defending decisions I believed were right, fair and necessary, even when they were deeply uncomfortable.
One Christmas, in the middle of an industrial dispute, I was sent an empty hamper by a union we were negotiating with, a gesture that said more than words ever could.
Leadership has a way of testing your values when the spotlight is brightest and the room is coldest.
The Bit You Don’t See From the Outside
From the outside, that phase of my career looked successful, and it was, but underneath the results, the growth and the progression sat pressure, expectation and responsibility that doesn’t show up on balance sheets or LinkedIn profiles.
The constant decision-making, the knowledge that people’s livelihoods are affected by your judgement, the quiet weight of knowing you will never make everyone happy, and shouldn’t try to.
This is the gap I see so clearly now, the difference between what leadership looks like and what leadership feels like.
Why This Conversation Matters Now
We’ve entered an age where you can appear to be almost anything.
Technology and AI have made it possible to build a presence, a brand and an authority narrative almost overnight, and I sit with a genuine moral tension in the middle of that shift.
On one side, I see opportunity, accessibility and doors opening for people who may never previously have had them, on the other, I worry that we are quietly devaluing craft, experience, study and time served.
Because leadership, and coaching, is not just about what you know, it’s about what you’ve lived through, what you’ve carried, what you’ve been accountable for when there was no safety net.
For me, the latter is non-negotiable.
Why I Chose the Long Road
This is why I didn’t step into coaching lightly.
I trained, I qualified, I reflected deeply on my own leadership first, the good, the flawed, the uncomfortable, before ever offering to walk alongside others.
Out of that came One Feather Coaching, for executives and leaders, built on clarity, depth and trust rather than noise or speed, and later The Human-Centric Workplace, born from the understanding that teams carry responsibility, and often discover they are not furnished with the skills, behaviours and knowledge they actually need to lead well.They both exist to create a safe, grounded space for leaders to pause, reflect and upskill, not in theory, but in the human realities of leadership, decision-making, trust, confidence, communication and the emotional weight that comes with responsibility.
This work is not abstract to me, it is the accumulation of service, leadership, responsibility, mistakes, learning and lived experience, and a conscious decision to do things with integrity in a world that increasingly rewards appearance over substance.
In Part Two, I’ll explore what all of this means in the world we’re leading in now — how we cut through the noise, how we choose who to trust, and why discernment may be one of the most important leadership skills we have left.
See you soon
Louisa
