When I first started building a global student-led organization, I thought the hardest part would be the logistics. Coordinating across time zones, managing partnerships, keeping a growing network of student leaders aligned toward a shared goal. I was not wrong about any of that. But I was wrong about what would actually be the hardest part.
The hardest part was learning to listen before I tried to lead.
The organization started from a simple observation. Students worldwide were doing remarkable work in their own countries, running community programs, advocating for policy change, building local partnerships, but almost none of them knew what students elsewhere were doing. There was no shared space, no global thread connecting these efforts. I saw an opportunity to build that thread, connecting student leaders globally.
What I did not fully appreciate at the start was how differently leadership needed to look depending on where you were standing. A structure that made sense for one national association did not automatically make sense for a chapter operating under a different regulatory environment, a different language, a different relationship between students and their professional bodies. I had a vision for what this organization could be, but the vision only became real once I stopped assuming I already knew what each community needed and started asking instead.
The Instinct to Solve Before Understanding
Early on, I made the mistake many first time founders make. I moved quickly from identifying a problem to proposing a solution, without spending enough time in the space between the two. It felt productive. It felt like leadership. But more than once, a solution I was excited about did not land the way I expected, not because the idea was bad, but because I had not actually understood the full shape of the problem from the perspective of the people living inside it.
I remember proposing a program structure early in the organization’s growth that I was confident would work across every chapter. It was clean, it was scalable, and it made sense on paper. It was also, I later learned, built around assumptions that simply did not hold true in several of the countries we were trying to serve. The correction came not from me revisiting my own plan in isolation, but from actually sitting with regional directors and student leaders and asking them directly what was and was not working for them.
That conversation changed how I approached every decision afterward.
Building Something That Belongs to Everyone, Not Just Its Founder
There is a particular temptation in founding something, wanting it to reflect your own vision clearly enough that people recognize your hand in it. I understand that instinct. I have felt it. But the moment this organization stopped being something I built and started being something we built together was the moment it actually started working the way I had originally hoped.
That shift required me to get comfortable with a kind of leadership that looks less like directing and more like convening. My job became less about having the right answer and more about creating the conditions where the right answer could emerge, from the people closest to the problem, not from me sitting somewhere else with a plan.
This is not a comfortable lesson to learn quickly. It took real, sometimes uncomfortable feedback from people I trusted and respected before it truly sank in. But once it did, everything about how the organization operated changed for the better.
Why This Now Shapes How I Host a Conversation
I think about this constantly now, in a very different context: sitting across from someone on camera, hosting a conversation for PEG Dialogues.
The instinct to arrive with a fixed idea of where a conversation should go is strong, especially when you have done your research and feel prepared. But the best conversations I have hosted so far have been the ones where I let go of that instinct early, where I actually listened to what the person in front of me was saying, rather than waiting for my next question.
This is, in many ways, the same lesson the organization taught me, just wearing a different outfit. Leadership, and I would now add, good conversation, is not about arriving with the right structure and asking people to fit into it. It is about building the structure honestly, in real time, around what is actually true for the people you are engaging with.
I do not think I would have understood this as clearly if I had not first had to learn it the harder way, through mistakes I made and corrected, and through people patient enough to tell me when my first instinct was wrong.
That patience, more than anything else, is what I try to carry forward now.
