People talk about “big shoes” like they’re meant to intimidate you. I’ve started to think they’re just opportunities wearing a costume.
Over the last four years, I’ve taken on three different roles at Heirs Holdings. Each one asked something new of me, usually before I felt ready enough to give it. Right now, I’m double-hatting two roles I couldn’t have pictured myself in when I first walked through HH’s doors. And here’s the thing that surprises me every time: and it’s not how much my role changed. It’s how quietly the growth happened and I didn’t even notice.
Recently, I stepped in as relief officer for my department while the Head of my Department was away on leave. Not my first stretch assignment but this kind is the type that makes you pause mid-week and think, wait, when did I become someone who can do this?
The truth is, nobody hands you that kind of responsibility on a whim. It’s not a leap of faith, it’s a receipt. Years of learning, observing, asking the “obvious” question anyway, and saying yes to the things that scared me a little, all quietly building a case for me before I knew one was being made.
I hadn’t noticed I wasn’t that person anymore. That’s the funny thing about growth; the fact it rarely shows up with a fanfare and a name tag. It shows up as the meeting you get invited into, the project you’re trusted to run solo, the deadline you somehow hit, the mistake that taught you more than any training presentation ever could. And then, one day, someone hands you a responsibility that would once have flattened you, but it doesn’t.
Looking back, I can trace every one of those moments to the same source: someone believed in me before the evidence fully caught up. That’s not a small feat. It’s a debt I’d like to keep paying forward; by taking chances on the people around me the way people once took a chance on me.
Which is exactly why this month’s theme lands so close to home.
As Heirs Holdings prepares to open applications for the second cohort of its Graduate Trainee Programme, I keep thinking about where my own story started. Four years ago, I was one of more than 50 graduates walking in for the first time, with big dreams. I had no idea that one “yes” would multiply into a stack of lessons I didn’t ask for but absolutely needed, and a career built by people who clocked my potential long before I did.
So if you’re sizing up the shoes in front of you and wondering if they fit: they’re not supposed to, not yet. You don’t need all the answers on day one. You just need to keep growing into the room you’ve been let into.
One day, you’ll look down and realise that the shoes were never too big. You just grew.
