14 posts
You restate because you don't trust you were heard. The team logged the restatement-pattern at meeting two. By meeting eight, they're just waiting for you to finish so they can speak. Trust the first sentence.
You wonder why your team's gone quiet. They didn't get more agreeable. Three meetings ago you shut down a half-formed disagreement without realizing it. The team noticed. The team always notices.
The most informative thing in a 1:1 is what your report was about to say before you said something instead. The cost of filling silence is invisible to the manager and unmistakable to everyone else.
The hallway, four days after the 1:1. They ask about the thing they raised. You stand there for a half-second too long. They probably didn't notice. You did.
Your life got measurably better. You can prove it. And you're complaining more than ever, about things that would have been invisible to you two years ago.
You're in the car. Nobody is talking. The radio is on but neither of you is listening because the air in the vehicle has changed composition. You did something. You know you did something because you can feel it.
You apologized. You used the word 'sorry.' You made eye contact. You may have even meant it. And it didn't work.
Pay attention to the next argument you witness. Not the words. The music. The pace, the volume, the rhythm. They sound identical.
You said the right thing. It was thoughtful. It was measured. And it landed like a brick through a window because you said it at 11 PM after both of you had been awake since 6 AM.
There's a move that the best communicators use constantly and almost nobody else notices. It's not a technique. It's not a framework. It's silence. Specifically, three seconds of it.
Six words. One question. Zero correct answers. What follows is a negotiation so predictable it could be scripted, so universal it transcends culture, and so frustrating that entire relationships have been quietly evaluated based on how two people navigate it.
English has roughly 170,000 words in current use. That should be more than enough to say what you mean. It is not.
This is a memorial for all the sentences that never made it to the end. The half-thoughts. The almost-points. The 'what I was going to say was' that trails off into nothing.
You're about to have this fight tonight. Maybe not tonight. But soon. And it's going to be about something incredibly stupid, and it's going to feel like it's about everything.