Ouch!

Tell me about one big mistake you made when you started as assistant secretary of state.

I have a good story on this one. So the biggest mistake I made, I'm sure I made many mistakes in the job in those early months, but the biggest mistake I made was actually outside of the job. And it impacted my ability to carry out the job. Within about five weeks of being confirmed by the Senate, after waiting seven months to be confirmed by the Senate, I slipped on my driveway and I broke and dislocated my kneecap, requiring emergency surgery and eight weeks in a brace and rehab for three and a half months. It was not what I was expecting one month into the job.

And certainly not after months of waiting to be confirmed by the Senate in the first place.

Exactly. And it was really tough, not only for me, but for the team. It was really disappointing for the team that had been waiting for a really long time for a confirmed assistant secretary. And then a month into the job, I end up having to get out of the office a lot, doing rehab and obviously having the surgery. So it was tough, but at the same time, it was tough. It was also an opportunity. It was an opportunity to say, wait a minute, what are we going to do here? How do we adapt to this? This is a curve ball. Let's figure out what we do. And everybody rose to the challenge. The team figured it out. Everyone around me said, OK, you can't come in this day. We're going to figure out how to get you the information you need. And it also, once I got done being frustrated and I can assure you I was extremely frustrated by this, once I got done being frustrated, it also occurred to me that I had the opportunity to do something with this, which was show people what resilience looks like, push through it, figure out how am I going to overcome this and get this job done at the same time. And that's what we did.