After the Sentence

Part One

The reason sentences like this one sit inside senior people for so long before being spoken is that the senior people know, accurately, what saying them will cost.

Saying out loud that the success you have built is not enough does not feel, inside the culture most senior people operate in, like a neutral observation. It feels like an ingratitude. It feels like a betrayal of the people around you who are still trying to achieve what you have already achieved. It feels like something that will be misheard as complaint, or as humble-brag, or as the kind of comment that will make the listener uncomfortable without helping either of you. For most of the people I work with, it is easier to keep the sentence private than to risk any of that.

The private sentence, over time, becomes expensive in a different way. It begins to fill more of the internal space than the person realises. It sits underneath the dinner conversations, the meetings, the weekends. It colours how the person relates to their own achievements, which they can no longer quite enjoy, because they no longer quite mean what they used to mean. Eventually, the sentence becomes loud enough inside the person that keeping it private is costing more than saying it would.

What I notice, in the people I work with, is that saying it for the first time is almost always quieter than they expected. The ceiling does not fall. The listener does not react as dramatically as they had feared. What happens, instead, is that the sentence becomes real. It now exists outside the person's head. Having existed outside, it cannot easily be returned to the inside, and the person is now, in a small but significant way, committed to attending to it.

Part Two

Most of the work I do with people begins somewhere in the space that opens up after this kind of sentence gets said.

What I want to be clear about is that saying it is not a solution. It is the beginning of the work, not the work itself. The sentence, once spoken, starts to ask for follow-up questions. What exactly is not enough. About what. Compared to what. What would be enough. What would getting there involve. What would it cost. What would it require you to be willing to change or to stop doing or to begin. These questions are hard. The sentence only gives you permission to ask them. Answering them takes longer and requires, in most cases, working with someone who has spent time in the specific territory where the questions get answered well.

The alternative to doing the work, after the sentence has been said, is to return it to the inside, which the mind will try to do. The work is to refuse to let it go back inside, and instead to follow it into the questions that come next. This is slow, ordinary, unglamorous work. It is also the work that most senior people have been avoiding for longer than they have been aware of avoiding it.

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