"I felt like a leader."

In the middle of a high school rugby game, one of Jordan's teammates passed the ball forward, ending the play and turning the ball over to the other team.

Jordan could see on her teammate’s face her embarrassment. "You can feel it," Jordan said. "She felt that she did a bad job."

After the game, her teammate found Jordan and shared how disappointed she was in her own performance. Jordan was managing her own frustration. She thought she had played all right, but she had wanted to play much better.

But she took a moment to set aside her self-doubt and chose her response to her teammate with deliberation:

"It's okay, we'll both do better next time."

A specific choice. Not you'll do better. We'll.

Jordan explained the choice herself: "Instead of just making her feel alone on not doing that good, I wanted to include myself as well, because we all need to improve."

Ask Jordan what she did that day and she would tell you she encouraged a teammate.

Here is the same moment in the language employers use. She read what her teammate was feeling. She managed her own emotions so she could stay productive. She held herself to the standard she was offering someone else. She chose words that put her inside the problem rather than outside it. She took responsibility for protecting the spirit of a teammate, without being asked.

Empathy. Emotional Intelligence. Accountability. Leadership.

“I never knew I had those qualities before."

Jordan recorded a few minutes of audio each week about a moment that mattered to her in her rugby season. A report came back naming the durable skills inside the moment she described, defined plainly, with her own words as the evidence. A coach read and edited every report before it reached her.

Leadership kept showing up. In how she made the decision, regardless of how she felt, to hype teammates up when they were down. "Doesn't matter if you're doing good or not." In what she said to her peers after a loss, deliberately infusing positivity into the team dynamics. Different weeks, different stories, same skill, each time backed by something she had said herself.

"Every time I got my reflection back, I was like, okay, okay. I would get really excited, because I never knew I had those qualities before."

That repetition is what changed things. Multiple reports naming leadership as one of her skills, was a case she could not argue with.

"I feel like I was analyzed, and I got feedback of what I do best. I felt like a leader."

The power of naming a skill.

Jordan was leading before any report arrived. She led on the field, in huddles, and in small exchanges with her teammates. None of that was new.

What was new was that she could see it, and say it. In her words, the reports were

"eye-opening to see what type of qualities you have and what type of leader you really are, even though you didn't know before."

The language is hers to use in an application, in an interview, on the next team she joins. Running for class president means standing in front of your whole school and telling them you are a leader.

She ran. She won. Congratulations, President Jordan. We're rooting for you.

About Hidden Skills

Hidden Skills is a tool that surfaces and names the durable skills young people build through real-world experiences: internships, jobs, sports, the arts, and work-based learning. It works alongside programs organizations already run. Students receive a personalized report in their own words, reviewed and edited by a coach before it reaches them. Organizations receive cohort-level insight into the skills their programs draw out.

Skills are named using the Pathsmith™ Durable Skills Framework, licensed from America Succeeds.

Shared with Jordan's and her family’s permission.

This post was drafted with AI assistance and heavily edited by a person before publishing. Student words are never altered.