You can't trust your feelings, but you can learn to trust your principles. And if ever you are in doubt, draw it back to one, and only one:

Just be a good person.

What happened on the field in Round 3 didn't begin on game day. It began in the culture Craig McRae has built at Collingwood. A culture in which the conditions exist for a player to offer something of himself that is rarely asked and rarely given.

As leaders, we get to make ‘the thing’. What ‘the thing’ is, well, that is up to us to give definition, something so compelling that we willingly give up some part of us for the benefit of a collective endeavour, a belief in something bigger than any one of us.

The 'experiment', by definition, is ambiguous and uncertain. The future is unknown and unknowable, and the 'experiment' is required if only to reveal another unknown, and leaders must hazard themselves in this pursuit.

When you stop trusting your own story, you hand your power to someone else's. To trust our story, even when it is forming and reforming, just the roughest outline, waiting to be coloured in.

Whilst the future will tell its own story, the leaders at the Suns who have been driving this process are crystal clear, and it seems that Christian Petracca understands what he brings and how he can make himself invaluable to the club and its vision.

The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming…

Tom Stewart has always known disappointment isn't a detour - it's part of the journey. His circuitous path into AFL football taught him that early. Friday night was just another reminder of the game's capacity to humble anyone, anytime.

To be known as a ‘big game player’ means you are respected. No, it's even more than that. It means that you are trusted in the moments that matter by the people who know when it matters most.

Isaac Quaynor and Collingwood won deep.
It is time for the game to win deep.

For the Essendon leaders, it will be a mix of deep reflection and bold imagination, built on what is real, the simple truths, with a compelling story to ignite, motivate and bond individuals into one team and one club through the shared future and journey they will undertake together.

Like all great coaches, Chris Fagan is someone you feel good about, but his ‘secret sauce’, if I can boil it down to one thing, is that he also makes you feel good about you.

By living the game your entire life, you chose growth over fear long ago. It is the minimum expectation of elite sport as you navigate the many difficult transitions the game expects of you.

'Learning to surf' from a leadership perspective means accessing the best part of yourself at the crucial moments, those times when your emotional state could well betray you.

Yes, the pure talent, the specky, the kick at goal which could not have been more precise. But then the craziness, and the sense-making of the Saints players. Faced with a unique situation, they contrived a unique solution, knowing that if we could just get the ball in the hands of Nas, well, he would do the rest.

As leaders, we seek to create the conditions for organisations and teams to perform at their best. As part of this, we are often required to simultaneously hold two contradictory ideas, and the rascal/villain will present as this. In doing so, we potentially become complicit in their story, and need to decide whether we are okay with that.

If you were to recruit a person based on one characteristic, what would it be?

The point of departure was the moment Noah Anderson gathered the ball from the centre bounce, carried it, gave it off, got it back, kicks it slightly across his body, celebrating from the moment the ball left his boot, marking the place where the Gold Coast Suns’ ‘so far’ story met its ‘not yet’ story, creating an ‘us story’ for a club that, until this moment, has never been able to find it.

As leaders, we get to draw the outline of a future, something that inspires, knowing that others will need to colour it in. Most of the time, however, we are colouring in the outline of a future, which at the time existed only in the imagination of a courageous and inventive few, but now so familiar that we almost forget who drew it for us.

The most important person in a club is the one with the ball in their hand.