Rational and informed questioning of self isn't weakness, but a natural and essential response to leadership's inherent ambiguity, the reason we need leadership in the first place.

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.