Roses are fragile. I'm a dandelion.

Walt Disney talent scouts came to Utica, New York. My best friend’s cousin, Annette Funicello, was discovered and invited to audition with Walt Disney for a new series,?The Mickey Mouse Club.?Annette was several years older than we were, but, boy, were we jealous!

All of my friends were Italian-American girls, brunettes with big brown eyes, just like me—and just like Annette. We were all cute and we could all dance. So the big question was, “Why her?” Roseanne, Annette’s cousin, tried to explain that Annette had taken dance lessons, was very talented, and had everything they were looking for—but we didn’t want to hear it.

We hardly knew Annette because she was in junior high and we were in grade school, but we decided we didn’t like her. We walked home from school every day saying bad things about her. I was so depressed to know that a girl from Utica was going to be famous and it wasn’t going to be me! I moped for days. I drove my parents crazy. My mother tried to cheer me up. She told me that we see down the street, but God sees around the corner, and I couldn’t know what was waiting for me around that corner. I asked her if she knew.

She said, “Your?time will come, Rose, and when it does, you’ll know.” My snippy, little grade-school response was, “When? Next Tuesday?” Mom told me to be patient. I was not at all satisfied with her answer, so I continued to mope.

At the end of the week, I was walking home from school commiserating with my friends. When we got to my street, I waved goodbye. I headed toward the house with my head down, still despondent over what was clearly the wrong choice by those Walt Disney people. I was not at all sure that I would survive not being famous.

It was a rare and beautiful spring day. Under normal circumstances, I would have been delighted. Upstate New York winters always seemed endless in their dreariness. Today was a gorgeous exception. My dad was standing in front of our house picking dandelions from a patch of grass we referred to as our front yard. Head down, I mumbled, “Hello,” as I attempted to walk by him. It didn’t work. He firmly called to me, “Rose, I want to see you.”

You can imagine my “mopy-ness” didn’t go over well with my self-reliant, make-your-own-way dad. He loved me dearly but he had no patience for my self-indulgent, celebrity fantasy about being discovered by the Disney scouts—and my devastation that someone else got picked, and “Why not me?”

I knew he wasn’t pleased with me, so I tried to postpone the encounter. He was not to be put off, however.

He held up a dandelion. He said, “Rose, what do you see?”

I was aware that the answer on the tip of my tongue wasn’t going to fly, so I shrugged and said, “It’s a dandelion, Dad.”

He came right back at me: “Rose, look deeper, what do you?really?see?”

Even at nine, I was the Queen of Rhetorical Responses. I replied, “I don’t know, Dad, what do?you?see?”

He knew what I was doing, and, a little amused, he humored me. And, then . . . he surprised me: “I see the end of a long winter, the dawn of a new season, children frolicking in their front yards, bringing bunches of these dandelions to their mothers to place in juice glasses on the sills of kitchen windows. I see lovers walking hand in hand, stopping to pick bunches of them to exchange in silent I love yous. I see the promise of warm summer days and endless fragrant nights.”

I could feel my tears and the lump in my throat. All I could say was, “You see a lot, Dad.”

He smiled and said, “Soon, Rose, the prettier flowers will come along, and this once welcome introduction to spring will become an intruder—a distortion to the lawn. That’s when I, like many homeowners, will go to the local nurseries to buy chemicals to rid our lawns of this weed. But the beauty of the dandelion does not lie in its brief moment of glory. For those of us who have worked at pulling up dandelions, we know they come back each year, double-fold. The beauty of the dandelion is, it’s in its root and its resilience.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in. Then, he said, “Your mother and I named you ‘Rose,’ but roses are fragile. In your heart, you need to be a dandelion.”?

I don’t know exactly what happened to me, just that some deep understanding gripped my being. I cried while my dad held me.

In the arms of a poet, a philosopher, and a U.S. Marine, I learned my life’s most important lesson: resilience.

I have carried that story with me ever since. Over the years, friends, students, and colleagues have solicited my perspective on what I consider to be the most significant attribute of well-regarded leaders. There are probably a dozen or more good responses to this question.

What?I?would call attention to are those individuals who make a conscious effort to keep the ego in check, those who resist becoming overly inflated in times of triumph or self-flagellating in times of challenge.

There is joy during the moments of glory and steadfastness in times of defeat.

Authentic leaders are the ones who keep coming back, the ones who are resilient and focused, and who fight to keep their integrity and help others do the same.

They are the ones who lead by example, those who go the distance. I refer to them as kindred spirits—they are my fellow dandelions.

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* My second book, The Leadership Conversation, is filled with stories like this one, wisdom, humor, straight talk, and ways you can master the art of conversations in both your personal and professional life. Click here to check it out!

*Illustrations done by the fabulous Eugene Yoon at fassforward .