“The most common form of despair is not being who you are.” ~Søren Kierkegaard
A few years ago, I was catching up over coffee with an old friend I’ll call Ray, a trusted mentor. He’s a few years older than me, silver-haired and down to earth, the kind of man who listens with his whole heart.
We were at a small coffee shop near my house. I told him about my first year as a director, how I’d gone from being a counselor whose identity was built around listening and connecting to suddenly managing budgets, writing evaluations, and holding people accountable.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said, “and I feel like I’m bothering people every time I ask for help.”
Ray nodded slowly. “Sounds tough,” he said. “It makes sense that you’re struggling with the transition.”
I kept going, adding to the list, building my case. “And the criticism I get doesn’t help,” I said. “People say I’m too nice, that I’m not strong enough on policy, that I don’t hold firm enough on limits. But they also want the freedom.”
“I’m not sure how much longer I can do this,” I told him.
He let me finish. Then he leaned forward a little. “Can I tell you something I’m noticing?”
“Of course,” I said.
“You’re seeing yourself as a victim,” he said. “Like life is just happening to you and you’re waiting for it to stop.”
I sat there for a moment, hoping for him to follow up with some advice.
But I knew Ray better than that. He always gave you the truth as he saw it and then trusted you to find your own way through.
I drove home with a headache. I told myself it wasn’t fair, that Ray hadn’t heard everything, that I had reasons for feeling the way I did. But the word he’d used had somehow gotten into the car with me.
It was still there when I tried to sleep. Still there at two in the morning when I was staring at the ceiling.
Victim.
I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t put it down.
I turned the word over in my mind the way you turn a stone over in your hand, looking at it from every angle. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I started to see something true inside of it.
I’d been holding onto grievances that I never expressed. I’d been quietly accumulating a sense of being wronged without ever saying a word or trying to change things. That has a name, and the name, as much as it stung, was the one Ray had just handed me.
I had a picture in my mind as I lay there in the dark. I saw myself wearing a wooden sign around my neck, the kind you might see in an old photograph, hung there like a label.
And the word on the sign was “Victim.”
The hard part was that I knew I wasn’t being punished by someone else. Some part of me was choosing to wear it. That image stayed with me, and it changed something.
I started asking myself a question that felt more useful than feeling sorry for myself. If “victim” was the word I didn’t want to carry, what was the word I did want? What would it look like to stand in the opposite place?
I ran through different words. Hero, victor, agent, creator, survivor, overcomer. They all had something to teach me, but none of them were what I needed.
Then a word began to rise up from a deep place. Of all the words it could have been, this one caught me off guard. The word that came to me was “Steward.”
I looked it up that night, and the word “steward” has been around for a long time. At its root, it meant the keeper of the house, someone trusted to look after what belonged to a larger story than their own.
I didn’t go looking for that word, and maybe that’s why it felt so significant. I found myself asking why it had surfaced, what it was pointing to, what it wanted me to understand. It felt less like something I had thought and more like something I’d been given.
I learned that a steward is someone who takes care of what’s been given to them, stays present with intention, and recognizes that what they’ve been given, including the difficult parts, is worth caring for.
It wasn’t the opposite of victim exactly, but it was the antidote in my case. A victim is defined by what’s been done to them. A steward is defined by what they choose to do with it.
Now, years later, the challenges of leadership are still here. I still struggle with criticism, especially when I feel like I’m already giving my best. But what’s different now is perspective.
A few weeks ago, one of my strongest staff members asked for a formal meeting. She sat down across from my desk, composed and direct, and told me that the flexibility I was giving others was making her job harder.
“When people don’t follow through and there are no consequences, the ones who do the work end up carrying more than their share,” she said. “It doesn’t feel fair.”
Inside I was already forming my response. I wanted to tell her that I’d been trying to ease the pressure people were feeling, that I saw how stretched everyone was and I was trying to give them room to breathe.
This was accurate, but it was also the victim talking, the one saying, “What about me?” A steward doesn’t protect himself from hard feedback. A steward tends to what he’s been given, and what I’d been given in that moment was the truth.
The victim in me wanted to be understood. The steward in me knew I was serving something bigger than my own comfort. The department was mine to care for, not to hide behind.
“You’re right,” I said. “And I’m grateful you came to me directly.” I told her I’d been working on holding clearer limits, that her feedback was going to help me do that better, and that the people who do their work with excellence deserve a leader who protects that standard.
The movement from victim to steward is an ongoing process. I haven’t perfected it, and I don’t expect to. I still stumble, still feel the sign settling back around my neck, and have to find my way back.
I used to experience the difficulty of leadership as something happening to me, as if the pressure and the criticism were evidence that I didn’t belong. What shifted was the recognition that this season of my life was asking something of me, not punishing me. I was being called into service whether I felt ready or not.
I’ve thought about stewardship a lot since that night. About what it means to stop merely surviving my life and start tending to it. Those are two very different relationships with the same experience.
That night at the coffee shop, Ray knew me well enough to tell me an uncomfortable truth. He wasn’t gentle about it. But gentleness isn’t always what we need.
Sometimes we need the sign around our neck pointed out to us by someone standing close enough to see it.
I’m not carrying that sign anymore, or at least, I’m trying not to. On the days when I feel it settling back around my neck, I remember the word that replaced it.
Steward.
Someone who tends to what they’ve been given. Someone who asks what life is expecting of them, listens, and answers the call.
That’s the person I want to be.
About Daniel H. Shapiro
Dr. Daniel H. Shapiro is keynote speaker, workshop presenter, and mentor. He is passionate about human connection and the stories we carry with us. For more information about his book, The 5 Practices of the Caring Mentor, or his mentoring and speaking services, check out: www.yourinherentgoodness.com.
