Ask most people what makes a great assistant and they will talk about organisation. Ask anyone who has worked at the highest levels of public life and they will say something else first: discretion.
It is easy to say and hard to live. Discretion is not simply keeping a secret. It is the accumulated judgement of a thousand small moments - what to repeat and what to hold, who to let through and who to hold at the door, when to be visible and when to disappear.
Why it cannot be taught on the job
By the time a lapse in discretion becomes obvious, the damage is done. That is why it cannot be trained in after the fact. It has to be there from the first day - a settled, instinctive understanding of privacy that the people around you never have to manage.
This is what we screen for, carefully, before anyone is ever introduced to a client. The people we place have operated inside the private lives of high-profile individuals, and they carry that discipline with them. They never need reminding, because for them it was never optional.
The mark of real discretion is that you never notice it working.
In a world where a single screenshot can travel the globe in minutes, that quiet reliability is not a soft skill. It is the whole job.