The Wrong Target

Part One

If you have read this far, the small irritations have stopped feeling small. That is the first thing worth saying. The thing that looks like impatience with a colleague, or short temper with someone close, or low-grade dissatisfaction with everything from the food on the plate to the volume of the music in the restaurant, is rarely the thing it appears to be. It is the visible surface of something else, and the something else is rarely on the surface at all.

Most senior people who arrive at this stage have spent years building a very effective discipline around not letting irritation show in the room. The room is too important. The relationship is too important. The team requires composure. So the irritation gets pushed down, redirected, smoothed over, eaten privately. For a while this works. The cost is that the irritation, instead of being addressed at the source, accumulates as residue, and the residue starts to colour everything.

The accumulation is not a moral failing and it is not a sign of weakness. It is a structural problem. The role has not provided a way to address the actual cause of the misalignment, because the actual cause is usually further upstream than anything the role acknowledges. The role gives you tools for managing teams, for handling difficult conversations, for executing decisions under pressure. It does not give you tools for the question of whether the role itself is still the right one. So the resentment, which is partly the body asking that question without being able to phrase it, builds.

What makes this hard to see from the inside is that the surface irritations are, in fact, irritating. The colleague did take too long to make the point. The meeting could have been an email. The acquaintance was being mildly graceless. The senior person who is misreading the situation often is misreading it accurately on the surface and inaccurately on the source. The surface reading is right. The conclusion drawn from it, that the world has become slightly more annoying than it was, is wrong.

The world has not become more annoying. The internal signal has become more insistent. The annoyance is the body's least precise language, and it is using it because the more precise languages have not been available to you.

Part Two

The work of following the resentment to where it is actually pointing is the part most people skip. It is also the part that does the most.

In my own case, the first version of this began in the years leading up to forty. I had developed a kind of low-level frustration that I did not have language for at the time. Things that should not have bothered me bothered me. People who were doing their jobs perfectly well felt slightly inadequate to me. The work I was producing felt slightly inadequate to me. None of these readings were entirely wrong on the surface. All of them were the surface of something I had not yet recognised, which was that the work I was doing was producing a version of me that I did not particularly like spending time with, which made everyone else feel slightly off.

The discipline of not showing any of this, sustained for years, was a meaningful part of what eventually broke the body. The resentment was information. I treated it as character. The body, in the end, was the thing that forced the actual reading.

What I would tell someone in the equivalent stage now is that the irritation is information, and that information is worth following. Not by acting on it in the room. That move makes everything worse. Privately, on your own time, with whatever frame helps you do it, the irritation can be traced. Where is it loudest. Around whom. In what kind of conversation. About what kind of decision. The patterns will tell you something the role will not tell you directly.

In the practice I work in now, this is often where the diagnostic stage begins. The first conversation is usually about something the person thinks is the issue. The actual work begins when we follow the resentment, the boredom, the slight numbness, the things that do not quite fit, to where they are pointing. The picture that emerges is almost never the one the person walked in with. It is, almost always, more useful.

Continue reading: The Question Declined →

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