The role that best prepared me for lobbying wasn’t a job at all. It was growing up as one of seven kids, sandwiched between four brothers and two sisters. The house ran on negotiation, alliance-building, and a healthy dose of chaos.
In a family that size, nothing gets decided by fate. You learn early that getting the last piece of pizza, the front seat, a later curfew, almost anything that you want, requires reading the room before you speak up. Who’s in a good mood tonight? Whose side does Mom instinctively take? Which sibling will back you up if you float an idea first? I was negotiating coalitions before I knew what the word meant. That’s not so different from walking into a legislative office and figuring out, in real time, who the persuadable votes are, who the immovable ones are, and who needs to hear your pitch from someone else first.
I also became an expert at having patience with competing personalities. Seven kids bring seven different operating systems; some respond to logic, some to charm, and some need to feel like the idea was theirs all along. You can’t run the same script and expect it to land. Lobbying works the same way. A staffer who cares about the data wants a memo. A member who cares about the story back home wants a constituent anecdote. Learning to adjust your approach without losing your actual message was a skill built at the dinner table, long before I used it in a conference room.
What I didn’t appreciate until later is that a chaotic household also teaches you how to lose gracefully and keep playing the long game. Not every argument at home went my way, and not every meeting at the Capitol goes how I would hope. What matters is staying in the relationship for the next round because, with seven siblings and in the lobbying world, there’s always a next round.
