In my early twenties, I was working the night shift in a data center with no roadmap, no degree, and no clear plan. What I did have was an uncanny instinct for when something was about to break. I could walk into a shift and feel it immediately. The tension in the room, the subtle signals of systems under strain. Long before alarms sounded, my body already knew.
One Sunday, I picked up an overtime shift while vendors performed scheduled changes. It was easy money. My role was to babysit the systems, check off completed work, and wait for the next shift to arrive. The building was quiet and uneventful, right up until I heard a pop and the entire data center went dark.
My chest tightened and my breathing became shallow. A vendor had hit the emergency shutdown button. I looked around and realized I was the only employee in the building, surrounded by vendors. I grabbed the management call list and started dialing. No answer. I tried again. Still nothing.
Getting the data center back online was on me.
Half a dozen men stood there staring at me. Older, more experienced, more credentialed, all waiting. I felt the surge of panic rise, then I flipped an internal switch. I stepped away, centered myself, took a few deep breaths, and slowed everything down long enough to see clearly. Fear turned into focus. Chaos turned into sequence. I stopped reacting and started fixing.
I came back, stood on a table, and started barking out commands. They listened, not because I had the title, but because I brought calm, clarity, and momentum when it mattered most. We got operations back online.
The next day, I stood in the senior leadership post-mortem, all five feet nothing of me, walking a room full of executives through the sequence, the timestamps, and the decision points. What happened. When. Why. One of them finally asked how I knew what to do when I was at the lowest entry computer operator position.
I didn’t hesitate.
“Because I had to.”
That moment put me on the map. Not because I asked to be seen, but because I ran toward the problem and stayed grounded long enough to solve it. And it didn’t stop there. As the stakes grew, the pattern repeated. Outages that threatened millions. Transformations that shook entire organizations. Boardroom moments when the room went quiet and everyone waited. Each time, the same process held. Center first. See clearly. Move toward the problem. Fix what’s broken.
That was my Norma Rae moment. Not a slogan or a raised sign, but a person standing up when the system froze.
Leadership doesn’t wait for permission. It shows up when something breaks.
That’s why I run to the fire.
