Permission for Candor

Behind the Glass Wall, Part V

One Monday morning, Allan Wong (our VP of Sales) casually mentioned that he’d spent the weekend working on one of our initiatives. When I replied that I didn’t expect that level of effort from him, his response was something like “I wouldn’t do it unless it was fun.” Allan wasn’t talking about the workload — he was talking about the feeling of being engaged. That innocuous statement wormed its way into my mind. What was it about Jonah Group that made work fun?

Recently, Allan had the idea to tackle this question together with joint pieces about the “engineering of authenticity” in a corporate setting, from the dual perspectives of “Founder” (me) and “Sales VP” (Allan) at Jonah Group, the software consulting company we worked at together for many years. His article on this topic parallels this one.

Fifth time’s the charm

By the time we’d hired Allan, we had already tried four other sales leaders. Around that time, we knew we still needed guidance on how to strategically improve sales as opposed to just watching it happen organically by doing good work (our main technique to that point). None of the Jonah founders were natural salespeople, preferring to hide out within strategy, operations, or even delivery, relative to the unsettling task of picking up the telephone and asking clients to buy (more) software from us. We were good at service, relationships, and repeat business, and our closing rate was high due to honest, cogent messaging. But we weren’t especially motivated or successful hunters.

In addition to attracting new logos, helping us to focus our energy on campaigns that would land, and finessing our message for each new potential customer, we needed someone to “crack the whip”-basically holding us to account when we weren’t spending time on effective prospecting. When we explained all this to Allan during his interview, he couldn’t hide his nervous incredulity.

He would later describe to me his internal dialogue at the time, in which he’d wondered how he was going to reasonably pull off what we were asking without getting fired. He didn’t yet realize that at Jonah, speaking up and expecting more from your colleagues was not only not a firing offense, but a required aspect of what we needed from our sales VP, and indeed from all of our staff. We wanted to be pushed to higher heights.

By the time we were nostalgically remembering his interview, Allan had fully internalized this aspect of Jonah’s culture, and was thriving within it. Self-motivated and energetic, he worked tirelessly to succeed in the hybrid role. I’d characterize his “whip-cracking” as gentle (perhaps overly so) but nonetheless apparent. Despite the fact that we didn’t require it, he regularly worked overtime and weekends whenever he felt it necessary. And hallelujah, he also made many sales over the years, and contributed to many others.

A hot-button policy

Not everyone is as gung-ho as Allan, but if you work in a project-based software business, there’s usually some point at which things get difficult and there is a need for the team to work some overtime to get over the hump, often around deployment time. Additionally, project success was very important to our people and our brand, for which “zero project failures in 20 years” was a fiercely defended claim.

But one of our management goals was to make sure our people didn’t suffer burnout. This wasn’t lip service. As developers ourselves, the founders had seen what this looked like at clients or other software companies, and we wanted to make sure we avoided it in ours. We viewed ourselves as a people-oriented, family-friendly company, and understood that people have busy lives outside of work.

Convincing staff that this was a true belief was the delicate bit. We did expect senior staff to independently manage their own efforts to meet goals, and for all staff to work harder in the crucible of a project’s difficult moments, but we didn’t want the death march to be a defining characteristic of our company. Overtime is a hot button issue, often pitting clients against employees, and we had to balance the needs of both groups.

We introduced paid overtime, but wanted to discourage people from working “elective” overtime to game their compensation after reaching the standard 40-hour of effort during the week, so we set a 44-hour weekly threshold, above which the “overtime accrual” clock would start. When people grumbled, however, we changed the threshold to 40, stipulating that project managers would have to approve overtime before it was worked. We had timesheet mechanisms for returning overtime to team members if they felt they needed rest, using a policy of “equivalent time off” after a hard push. They could also elect to be paid for the overtime instead. Finally, we created a “burnout KPI”: the average number of hours worked, per person, per week, including both billable and unbillable hours.

We also trained our directors to push back against unrealistic or unnecessary customer expectations early, and to negotiate the re-baselining of project timelines when appropriate. Founders and senior staff also provided support to help stickhandle these conversations with clients, showing our staff that the leadership team wasn’t hiding from tough discussions.

This kind of client education took years of relationship building before it sunk in as something they appreciated about our approach to work. Protecting staff from overtime seems to fly in the face of the customer’s need for speed, but the benefit, of course, is the team longevity, efficiency, morale, and the better relationships they often wish they had.

The paradox of optionality

What’s the difference between a dog tied to a tree and a dog sitting under a tree? Optionality.

Overtime was usually requested by leaders or managers, who would provide the rationale for it. That said, it wasn’t strictly mandatory. Trusting people to choose to participate when their teams were in trouble, as opposed to requiring them to participate as a matter of upholding their standing, soothed potential resentment. I understand that there are some shades of grey with any “request” arriving from a boss, but these can be calibrated with reasonable application of the policy over time.

It turns out that when people feel respected, they’re more likely to optimize for the mission as well as their paycheque. Agency is the air that a bottom-up culture breathes. Without it, “work-life balance” becomes a battle between the employee and employer about how much / little work should be done. With agency, the employee is an active participant rather than a cog in a machine, increasing their internal motivation and energy.

I’m proud to say that our final aggregate average burnout KPI, across all staff, over 21 years of operations, was 40.1 hours per week. We worked hard, and rested in the intervening spaces.

The value that wouldn’t fit

When I worked on the last Jonah Group rebranding exercise, I had polled all leaders in the company as to their views of our values. Our branding consultant helped us sort them into four categories:

1. Permission-to-Play Values: those that reflect the minimum behavioral and social standards required of any employee. These tend not to vary much across companies, and shouldn’t be claimed as differentiators. This group includes things like “Integrity, Teamwork, and Respect”
2. Aspirational Values: those that a company needs to succeed in the future, but currently lacks. A company may need to develop a new value to support a new strategy, for example, or to meet the requirements of a changing market or industry.
3. Accidental Values: those that arise spontaneously without being explicitly cultivated by leadership, and take hold as valuable cultural touchstones over time. They usually reflect the common interests or personalities of the organization’s employees.
4. Core Values: those deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions; serving as its cultural cornerstones. They are inherent and sacrosanct; they can never be compromised, either for convenience or short-term economic gain.

He explained that Core Values define “red lines”-those that are promoted consistently, and which should result in someone being fired for continued contravention of them. This is a more difficult exercise than you might think. For example, adopting “flexibility” as a core value might mean firing someone for being inflexible, which itself suggests inflexibility of a kind.

I’d always really valued and sought out “fun” work environments, but one of my co-founders (Drew) had me scratching my head with the proposition that “I don’t expect work to be fun… it’s work!” I’d think “true enough, but… it sure is nice when it shows up.”

Tracing back to the origins of fun at Jonah, I usually concluded that our hiring decisions played a major role. We valued smarts because that’s what we were selling, so we hired for it whenever we could find it. We also looked for what we called “the love,” which was an indication of some kind of nerdy enthusiasm for the abstract process of solving problems through software; some indication of passion for what would put most of society to sleep if discussed at a dinner party. Think “the story of my most difficult debugging session.”

Another major contributor may have been the value we placed on individuality, which we would model by publicly celebrating creativity and innovation, participating in employee-led initiatives, replacing founder ideas with the better ones that staff may have proposed, and allowing people to choose training and presentation topics that leaned into personal interests.

The research supports the conclusion that these are all valuable contributors to organizational health and effectiveness, but it points more directly to “psychological safety” as the granddaddy of them all.

The sense of felt permission

Much has been said about the concept of “psychological safety,” a term coined by Amy Edmondson in her 1999 research paper, and the subject of her subsequent 2018 book “The Fearless Organization.” She summarized it as “a sense of felt permission for candor”-specifically, “the shared belief that you can speak up without fear of being humiliated, punished, or marginalized” (Edmondson, 2020).

Though people will vocalize ideas when they trust that they will be heard and considered, providing safety doesn’t mean that ideas won’t be challenged. In her speech to the 2020 Global Leadership Summit, Edmondson noted that “Psychological Safety is not being nice, a license to whine, [or a] guarantee that your ideas will be applauded and free from conflict.”

Google validated this concept with their own study of 180 teams over two years ( Project Aristotle), investigating major positive contributors to team dynamics. Psychological safety topped every other factor, including dependability, structure/clarity, meaning, and impact. It also mattered more than talent, seniority, and tenure. Teams that sensed they were valued and respected were more successful than all others.

Edmondson suggests five main things leaders can do to build psychological safety:

1. Frame the work as a learning problem, not an execution problem. Expecting flawlessness encourages people to hide mistakes. Conceding uncertainty and expecting problems encourages openness.
2. Acknowledge your own fallibility, signaling that imperfection is allowed.
3. Model curiosity and ask open questions, as opposed to sarcastic ones that signal premature rejection of the idea.
4. Solicit input directly by asking specific people specific questions, instead of waiting for people to volunteer information.
5. Share information about how you work (work-style preferences, what you find difficult, what you’re learning), and invite others to do the same. An asymmetry of information (employers knowing more about their staff than the reverse) reinforces hierarchy and silence.

Unfortunately, psychological safety seems uncommon at work, despite widespread understanding of its importance. I wonder in general why open, authentic communication is rare. Surface conversations are the primary antagonist in the ongoing saga of my laments.

Culture emerges

Culture is more like a burbling stew. The chefs in the kitchen periodically taste and adjust the spices to try to improve the flavour. Their best bet is to use fresh ingredients and to cook with love and attention.

Leaders sometimes make the mistake of concluding from this that culture can simply be “left to emerge,” excusing themselves from any of the efforts required to attend to the noxious gases wafting in from the kitchen. Maintaining a healthy culture means periodically adjusting goals, people, and policies, using the company’s brand values as a guide. A healthy culture can’t simply be lassoed and tucked away for later use.

Worse than inattentive leaders are those who openly revel in the “positive culture” that staff clearly don’t feel. I believe that most leadership teams are well-intentioned, but they often make the mistake of attempting to jam culture-building positivity into an angry room. Reacting to the horrendous grades received on the last employee survey by encouraging staff to participate in subjectively “fun” activities to improve morale (e.g. “game nights”) is tone deaf, the equivalent of attempting to quell an angry mob by juggling and smiling.

We had a lot of fun and we enjoyed each other. Two of the most coveted distinctions at the annual “Jonah Awards” were “funniest team member” and “individual you’d most want to have on your team.” We would always spend some portion of our weekly leadership meetings cracking jokes, laughing at the vagaries of politics, working life, or other random topics. Our HR manager would sometimes shake her head and bury it into her hands whenever we approached NSFW territory, but closer examination would reveal that she was usually giggling at the same time. Work can be stressful and annoying, and difficult scenarios are always just around the corner. But my most cherished memory of the Jonah environment was that we were always laughing.

Learning to share

Even after many years of repeating the message that we wanted the “unvarnished truth,” our staff often still avoided rocking the boat. They wouldn’t always notify the founders or their direct managers, but they’d still whisper complaints to one another. Trusted advisors within the company enjoined me to understand this within the context of the obvious power dynamic. Whenever I’d hear this, my retort would be “but in the entire history of the company, we’ve never penalized or fired anyone simply for speaking their minds. Surely that should count as evidence?”

But alas, I can only make that claim-no proof exists. Insisting during the hiring process that openness and debate are highly valued doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to get it. Stirring the pot and sampling the stew until you arrive at “fun” might be the best we can hope for.

That won’t stop me from braying into the wind, however: workers of the world-I implore you-try it out in a small way and see what comes of it. Gently brace your colleagues and leaders for the constructive criticism that will follow, and then… let it fly. Personally speaking, I’ve almost always had some form of positive response whenever I’ve cared enough to agitate for change-not just at Jonah. If your experience is different, maybe there are better places to work.

References

Amy Edmondson:

• Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams (1999, Administrative Science Quarterly)
• The Fearless Organization (2018, Wiley)
• Global Leadership Summit quotes (Brian Dodd, 2020)
• Lean Blog interview (2020)

Google Project Aristotle:

• Understand team effectiveness (Google re:work)
• What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team (NYT, Feb 2016)

Other References:

• Architects Don’t Ignore Gravity (2026, Joseph Fung, At Practice Substack)

Music

• Voiceover music from #Uppbeat: ‘Nimbus by Roger Gabaldà, License code: 55DMOE4OCXADXRVW
• Podcast music from #Uppbeat: ‘Happy Days’ by Matrika, License code: 350CGWTBAMCGT7YH

Originally published at https://summersoul.substack.com on October 20, 2026.

Published by Being Publications. If this article resonated with you, support the author with 50 claps and a few encouraging words. Being Publications is a place where writers grow together. Join the movement. :)

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Behind the Glass Wall, Part V was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Compensation Equation

Apple Podcasts Web Embed

Part II of this series showed how truth travels with stress, and how trust underpins what owners express to employees. Part III asks a harder question: what do we owe each other once the numbers are set?

Strangers at the table

Imagine two climbers on a glacier, roped at the waist: if one slips, both may fall. Or two rowers in a shell: pull out of sync and the boat spins; pull together, and they slice through the water with ease. Two people in a marriage both win, or they both lose. There is no third outcome.

Now imagine the partners in each of these pairs openly negotiating on the explicit value of the other in the relationship, in dollar terms. It’s absurd, predictably inflammatory, and well… just off-putting, especially in light of how much each depends on the other.

Such is the situation between employees and the companies they work for. Two strangers size each other up across a table, estimating what the work will be worth, how the person will interact with the culture, and what the person and the company will become as a result of their participation. They commit to a salary before either side has seen a single day of actual work. The guess calcifies into a contract, and both parties spend the next year discovering how wrong they were.

A salary is nothing more than a stab at the proposed value exchange between employee and employer, agreed to at a point when the future dynamics of the relationship are cloudy at best. We agree on a number and take a leap of faith. Further, the initial negotiation locks both participants into an adversarial mindset that only loosens over time with the development of mutual trust. How should we align our thinking in this context?

Worth is a guess

For brevity and immediacy, in this section I will adopt the first person when referring to owners, and the second person when referring to employees, noting the obvious fact that I was once an employee (and am not an owner now), and you may be (or will become in the future) an owner.

One of the most oft-repeated complaints I’ve heard over the years is “why don’t you just pay me what I’m worth?” This presupposes that I don’t think I’m already doing that, but there are many potential answers to this question.

There is no single “market value” for your salary. The market will pay a wide range of values for your set of skills. Additionally, one company may be able to extract more value from your work than another, making you more valuable to them (note that this doesn’t mean they’ll pay you more).

Consider two potential salaries: one from company A and a lower one from company B. If all else were equal, you’d likely choose the higher salary at company A. But all else is not equal:

• you might not ever find company A
• company A may not be hiring
• company A might want you to work longer hours
• part of the job at company A might be relatively unpalatable to you
• you may have to travel a long way to get to company A’s office
• you may prefer the culture at company B
• your boss at company A may be a nightmare to deal with
• your growth prospects at company A may be limited, especially if you’re placed in a unique or niche role

You want to be paid “what you think you’re worth,” or maybe even a bit more than that. I want to pay you “what I think you’re worth,” or maybe a bit less than that. Your idea of what you’re worth will often not match mine, because our internal assessments of you don’t match, and because different people value things differently.

It’s really fun when both of us feel like we got away with murder. Remember that IKEA advert where the shopper yells out “START THE CAR!” because she feels like the cashier made a mistake in totaling her bill? You secretly enjoy the feeling of making out like a bandit when it comes to your compensation. I don’t blame you. For my part, I enjoy the feeling of finding a great jacket on a 20% sale. This doesn’t mean I wouldn’t buy the jacket at regular price, but who doesn’t like a good sale?

By definition, any salary you accept will be more than the least you’d have been willing to accept, and less than the most I was willing to pay. And it’s probably going to be more than what I think I could have negotiated, and less than what you think you could have, due to our respective FOMO on the deal that “could have been.” We’ll both feel this more acutely as soon as we agree on a number. But exhaustively optimizing the number is not constructive. We’re each trying to make progress by getting most of what we want.

Your salary should be somewhere in the overlapping intersection of our ranges, or else some change (welcome or otherwise, from either party’s perspective) will eventually ensue. If you accept an offer near the lower end of your range or below, you’ll eventually leave. If I ever agree to pay you more than the upper end of my range, eventually you’ll be laid off. Both of us can make value determinations independently, so in a sense there is no reason for either party to fret about the number before or after an offer is accepted. We can agree to disagree, but a contract is a matter of choice and agreement. The best outcome in this dance is for both parties to try to get compensation off the table as a point of discussion, because it has been set at a mutually acceptable level.

Hiring managers are incentivized to fill open positions now, and are willing to pay a premium to get it done, especially if there is a short-term problem they need to solve. The same is true in reverse if the candidate needs the income now. There’s a time value to solving problems sooner rather than later.

Note, however, that this pendulum is self-correcting. If the employer is overpaying (from their perspective) to get you to sign now, they’ll likely try to rebalance in the future by restricting your annual increases over time to recoup those losses, or to get you back into their target range for your role. If you capitulated due to financial stress, you’ll likely later argue that you need to be paid more, even if you’re not bringing more value to the company, and you’ll continuously scan for better opportunities now that the pressure is off.

To feel good about an offer means you should know ahead of time the minimum salary you would accept, and I should know the maximum I would be willing to pay. It’s the same thinking that makes a good investor in the stock market — your entry/exit position prices should be clear in your mind before you begin, or you’ll be dangerously swept up in the emotion of price swings, buying high and selling low.

Internally committing that we will each be happy to accept a salary proposal that respects our internal number helps us to manage our emotions. Employers have more practice with this because they hire many people, so some mental prep may be more useful for you. It also prevents unnecessary resentment from being carried forward and unleashed in the future, generating the stability we both want for the relationship over the long term. We can stop talking about money and get down to business.

Moving the needle

Once the initial number is set, another (annual) struggle begins. Salaries tend to rise over the long term, but this only makes sense to the company if the employee is concurrently becoming more valuable to the company over that time frame. The simple fact that an employee has been working for some time at the company does not increase their value. Here’s what does:

• becoming more efficient at the same job
• increasing the quality of your work in a way that matters to clients and colleagues
• taking on higher-value responsibilities that currently have no home within the organization
• taking on a management function, raising the value of all the people you manage and removing worry from owners and leaders
• contributing to the life and culture at the company, giving the community a more positive day-to-day experience
• in the consulting business, being able to convince a customer to pay more for your time; more generally, improving the ability to raise prices on a product or service as a direct result of your work

If you can reasonably show that any of these is true, then you have the basis for a salary negotiation. Good employers will usually be completely fine to pay the increase for your additional contributions. Conversely, if they can’t see that value, they won’t want to pay the premium.

“Tenure” is weak as the sole argument for an increase. Employment law already attempts to quantify the financial debts owed for the tenure provided, so it’s a good idea to be familiar with your region’s treatment of them (your employer certainly is). “Inflation” is another weak argument for an increase, as both parties experience it concurrently.

Sometimes people threaten to leave because they believe themselves to be worth more on the market. This may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they’re worth more “where they sit.” In fact, many regularly overestimate their worth to their current employer, and underestimate their replaceability. The choice of a middling or low performer to leave the company is often a relief to the employer. It removes the need for an uncomfortable conversation and a possible severance payment, and presents an opportunity to hire a better replacement.

It’s also true that many employers have no idea of the potential value of their employees, because they either don’t know their workers well enough to unlock it, or they have an incomplete mental model of what is truly valuable to the business. It behooves you to regularly assess the additional value you add to an organization, and make this plain in the input to your performance reviews. If your employer simply isn’t listening, then a change is in order.

Employees with a scarcity mindset may assume that the company “simply doesn’t want to pay more so that they have more for themselves” and are somewhat suspicious that they’re being taken advantage of. I concede that owners with a scarcity mindset may indeed fulfill those expectations. But I’ve regularly seen the exact opposite occur at Jonah Group and at other companies where I’ve been privy to those conversations.

If you’re vastly outperforming others in your salary peer group, the company will likely give you bigger increases to get you back into what they believe is the target range for the value you bring. If there is a large gap to be bridged, though, employers will often do this in two or three “hops,” because they predict that this will give you a better overall “experience” with respect to how your compensation is progressing. The downside of this is that it doesn’t maximize your financial return, but there’s a balance here: a very large increase all at once soon gets taken for granted, and the much smaller one that ensues in the following year makes you wonder what you did wrong.

An employee’s decision to stay, or an employer’s decision to continue to work with an employee, should be based on a mutual appreciation of facts, of which salary research, responsibilities, and intangible contributions should all be represented. Neither party should be sheepish about discussing these openly with the other. A discussion about worth can raise the temperature, but grounding it in facts and shared understanding of them can also lower it. A decision to continue working together should be good for both parties. Ending the relationship can also be good for both parties.

The hidden ledger

In my experience, people tend to focus too squarely on the base salary negotiation. Decisions on value are usually much more nuanced than that, because intangible value can be vast.

For the employer, this shows up as your proactiveness, positivity, energy, leadership, and cultural participation, among other things for which the company is the primary beneficiary. Similarly, the intangible value associated with the organization’s environment and culture (belonging, social opportunities, purposeful work, culture, career development, training opportunities, etc.) accrues to the employee. They are often the unexpected dark horse of the compensation equation, whose appearance is a quiet, welcome surprise.

The value of intangibles often eclipses the error bars associated with the base salary, and stretches the acceptable base salary range significantly.

Owners have broad data associated with a wide variety of hires and working arrangements, allowing them to better calibrate the value of intangibles they give and receive. They also understand comparative performance and salary dynamics because they spend time comparing the relative performance of their staff members to assess increases and bonuses. Finally, they know how easy or difficult it is to find people to fill certain roles, because they are continuously engaged in that practice. Over time, they develop an intuitive understanding of how to hire and manage toward long-term health and ROI.

Employees usually understand the intangible value they may receive, but don’t necessarily consider how the intangible value they contribute can affect their compensation. This puts them at a disadvantage during salary negotiations. Additionally, unemployed candidates are often caught in a crucible of stress from having to secure their meal ticket. This may give rise to a mindset that the employer’s “power position” in the negotiation is heightened, leading to poor results.

One antidote is to prepare a list of questions for your prospective employer — not just to show you spent time preparing questions, but because open conversation helps to put you on a more level mental playing field. Thoughtful questions also help employers muse about your intangible value to the organization. Ask about the company’s approach to overtime (not simply their policy), and relate your own. Ask about the extra-curriculars that happen within the company, implicitly showing an interest in the culture. Perhaps talk about something you’d like to do to improve the community and ask if there is space for that within the organization.

Some intangible benefits have real financial costs. Beyond the items on your offer letter, employers fund premium tools, celebrations, training, office infrastructure, and swag. I’ve always thought it should be more obvious to employees that such investments come from the same pool as the year-end bonus. When employees petition for these benefits, that money isn’t magically fabricated — it’s subtracted from what’s left over at the end of the year. If the company spends more on benefits or intangibles now, the bonus pool shrinks later, albeit disproportionately for owners, whose bonuses are larger. Understanding this trade-off helps both sides prioritize investments that actually move the needle.

If I can’t pay you more but want to, I’ll try to highlight other things that provide you with additional intangible benefits, such as the value of being part of the community, because I want you to join or stay. Another tool in the box is to pay you with variable compensation, in the hopes of having a better chance to retain you if we do well, but to limit my exposure to loss if we do poorly. I’ll try to design this so you’ll be paid more than your minimum if we do well, but less than my maximum if we do poorly. If you leave anyway, I’ll feel crappy for days, and I’ll blame myself for not being able to convince you to stay.

Intangibles can help make up for the perceived compensation deficit on either side of the base salary. Owners who are proud of what they’ve built will generally pay more for people who improve the value and health of their company, despite the salary range suggested by the market for that role. Conversely, employees who enjoy and appreciate their work culture and environment will generally accept less than what they could get on the open market, especially in the short term. Treating each other well thus improves the stability of the relationship, which is good for both parties.

Contractor envy

Employees often wonder if they’d earn more as a contractor. This is true on a per-hour basis, but the higher rate isn’t simply a premium; it’s hazard pay. What you receive in stability, community, and growth is what they’re trading away.

Contractors do their own sales work, assuming the risk of finding new work after every project. They don’t incur the cost of pensions, health benefits, payroll taxes, bonuses, performance reviews, or the time spent coaching and helping to guide their careers. And they suffer a direct loss of revenue due to work shortages, sick days, training, and vacations.

Contractors also often miss the deeper connections and huge social benefits of being “part of the family.” Many contractors view themselves as “hired guns,” offering specialized skills over a fixed time frame to the highest bidder. They fulfil their commitments so that they can get paid and tip out the door. Both sides understand the deal.

A choice of full-time employment states a simple preference for community and predictability. Don’t confuse an hourly rate with a relationship.

The empty room

Take a walk outside myself
In some exotic land
Greet a passing stranger
Feel the strength in his hand
Feel the world expand

-Hand Over Fist (t=2:24), Lyrics by Neil Peart, 1989

Even with a stranger, a handshake can be a poignant moment of connection. This Neil Peart lyric captures the essence of that human interaction. We feel an expansive energy, piercing through our own margins into the unlimited.

Remote work created the empty room, both literally and metaphorically. It has really put a negative dent in how we experience and express our work relationships, slashing our intangibles in the process. In my view, this transition has ruined company culture in many ways. Some examples:

• young people don’t get coached and mentored
• employees don’t develop an implicit understanding of how to be valuable, which they’d normally get through regular light-touch professional interaction
• owners no longer feel the social value of interactions within their companies, and thus don’t spend as much time designing for good culture
• employees don’t experience this value directly either, and are less focused on participating in the culture
• remote work chips away at our patience with one another, in the same way that a thin piece of glass separating two drivers induces road rage as a valid response to a minor traffic transgression
• in aggregate, we care less about each other, because we simply don’t interact in person

Remote work also introduces greater instability in the employer/employee relationship, as the lost intangibles no longer provide the salary “buffer” they once did. The compensation equation can more easily become unbalanced, resulting in more frequent layoffs and resignations.

One of the in-office rituals I really enjoyed was handing out bonus cheques. For me, it was a poignant moment of celebration. It meant we did something valuable together, and we now got to share in the spoils. I got to say “thank you” and shake your hand for working so hard. I felt like a benefactor. I also received my bonus cheque, which I was just as delighted to receive! One of my partners would sign my cheque, and I would sign his. We’d also shake hands.

This simple ritual strengthened the bonds of our community, which was one of the primary reasons I invested my heart and soul in building a company in the first place. With remote work, it has completely disappeared, alongside many others. Financial recognition has obvious value, but the older I get, the more important the community reason becomes, relative to the bonus reason. If you last long enough on this planet, it eventually becomes the only reason.

Care and service

You may take this with a grain of salt, but my partners and I cared deeply for our employees, and always sought to make this clear wherever we could. We linked bonuses to company performance to strap ourselves to the same mast. We spent large sums on celebrations and social events, understanding that a little appreciation goes a long way. And we provided work time flexibility, trusting that people would weave work into their lives in ways that were optimal for them. Each year we acted on suggestions from staff about how the company could be improved, which resulted in office improvements, longer vacations, overtime pay, and pension matching.

Whenever a valued employee left the company, it really stung. Their value to the organization would disappear, but I would also experience a much more visceral loss. Managing your career is a struggle, and of course everyone has the right to make decisions that are best for them. Emotionally, though, sometimes it could feel like a rejection of our efforts to show them that we cared.

In ruminating on the loss of a valued staff member and feeling sorry for myself, I once asked a trusted employee, “What do you expect from the company for agreeing to continue working here, and what should I expect from you for hiring you and continuing to employ you?” He responded, “Just pay me my salary, and you can expect me to put in my hours.”

Picking up my jaw from the floor, I implored him to repeat himself with further context, which he did. It turns out there was a vast chasm between what he and I thought we owed each other, with his expectation being more transactional. He was quick to add some of the things he appreciated about working at Jonah, but didn’t necessarily expect.

The gap may be partially generational. There used to be a notion in the zeitgeist that our companies should “care about us” if we’ve “served them for years.” Let’s ignore for the moment that “care” and “service” are sufficiently abstract as to make them less-than-useful concepts with which to understand each other’s expectations. The big lesson here for me was that we should expect mental models of “what is owed” to diverge widely.

In a bygone era, the relationship between employee service and employer care may have been more concrete, implicit, and understood by both parties. I still see news stories about tearful employees after a mass layoff, who relate feelings of betrayal over the abrupt ending of the relationship after “so many years of service.” It’s heartbreaking, but also flies in the face of my trusted colleague’s expectations.

For better or worse, these concepts are no longer implicitly baked into our working arrangements, nor are they anywhere to be found in our employment agreements.

In recent decades, both employees and employers have drifted more toward explicit self-interest, with both sides regularly electing to sever the relationship when it no longer suits. The chicken-and-egg question of which came first doesn’t matter anymore: the era of gold watch retirement parties is dead, and in the large, both parties played a role in killing it. “Job-hopping to get ahead” and “layoffs to streamline costs” can both be viewed as either necessary or opportunistic.

We should realize that companies are motivated to keep people stably employed for at least the simple financial reason that they can amortize the hiring, training, and acclimation costs over a longer period of time. It’s true that some companies don’t value the intangibles, like the long-term cultural benefits of long-standing employees, but when they make layoff decisions that discount them, it becomes their loss as well.

“Care” arises from an appreciation of the intangibles offered by either side of the relationship over the long term. I still believe this appreciation can be intuitively felt and acted upon, as ethereal and unexpressed as it may be.

Not only are they difficult to quantify, however, but it can feel somewhat gauche for either side to trade on them in a compensation context. What should we do about this?

The unselfish edge

In any negotiation, most people focus exclusively on the value they can extract from a transaction, as opposed to the value they can offer their counterparty. I used to be like this, assuming that both parties would be responsible for representing their own needs.

However, exclusive attention to your side of the ledger without also considering what the other party might gain is a mistake. It emerges from a scarcity mindset — a baseline internal “program” that assumes that we must grasp after scarce resources (in this case, money) to improve our lot. Both candidates and employers can suffer from this. Indeed, it’s emblematic of the IKEA bandit’s thinking.

A scarcity mindset doesn’t just narrow the deal; it narrows the relationship. When you enter a negotiation focused on extraction, you signal that it’s a zero-sum game. The other party can feel that, and they respond in kind. You start working at the company, instead of with it.

Growth stalls because both sides start protecting themselves instead of investing in each other. The employee stops proposing ideas that might make the company richer but don’t benefit them directly. The owner stops funding training or stretch assignments because they’ve decided the employee is a cost to control. Discretionary effort — the extra mile that drives innovation — evaporates.

Trust erodes because every interaction becomes a transaction. A culture budget gets cut. Annual reviews become battles instead of calibrations. Bonuses become negotiations instead of celebrations. Small betrayals don’t dissipate; they accumulate.

Eventually, the organization becomes a collection of individuals guarding their own interests. No one takes risks. No one shares information. No one commits beyond the contract. And when the next downturn comes, there’s no reservoir of goodwill to draw on. You’re all strangers at the same table.

The “law of attraction” has no mystical basis; it simply works because you notice and gravitate toward the things your mind is already focused on. I didn’t really see baby strollers until my wife and I had a kid. Then they were everywhere.

If you negotiate from scarcity, expect your counterpart to do the same. A scarcity mindset expects and attracts those with the same mindset on the other side of the transaction. You may even land a job, but shouldn’t be surprised if you end up working in a transactional, adversarial, “every man for himself” culture. At the very least, over-indexing on salary is off-putting, especially early in the conversation. Everyone knows that a number needs to be set, but you’re signaling (perhaps unintentionally) that this is all you care about.

Consider the reframe from the beginning of this article: both parties win, or they both lose. Think about the benefit your future employer would get from hiring you. This opens a thread that is more likely to lead to openness, intrigue, and reciprocity in the hiring manager. Some good questions in this vein might be “How would you define excellence in this role? What’s really impressive to you?” Or “If I’m hired, I also hope to be able to contribute to the company community and culture. Beyond the baseline expectations for this job, how else would you hope that employees contribute to the company at large?” You’re not fishing — you’re showing you care about getting this right. That signals investment beyond your paycheck.

Owners practice the unselfish edge by naming what they’re offering beyond salary, before the candidate asks. Volunteering information about bonus structures, culture investment, and the potential for equity all signal that you see the relationship as more than a cost line. Candidates feel that, and are more likely to respond with the same openness.

One approach here is to ask your prospective employer, in the abstract, what process they use to integrate the intangible value provided by their employees into compensation. Even if they can’t quantify, listen closely for a reasoned response. I’ll admit I’ve never heard this question in my entire career, but I’d have been impressed if I had, especially since I had a good answer for it.

The answer should paint a picture of how care and service are related in the employer’s mind, which might generate some trust that they will try to value them in real terms when the time comes. It also begins to set shared expectations appropriately. It will be obvious if they haven’t thought about this at all, telling you that you’ll likely be exchanging salary for time.

After the handshake

Compensation starts with a guess. Two strangers estimate each other’s worth before either has seen a day of actual work. That number matters, but it’s not the whole show.

The real work happens after the contract is signed. Intangibles (stability, community, growth, mentorship) become the buffer that lets both sides invest in long-term value rather than fighting over small salary discrepancies. When employers name these explicitly, and employees recognize that value, the relationship stops being transactional and becomes mutual.

The unselfish edge isn’t about altruism. It’s about recognizing that your counterparty’s success is tied to yours. Ask what hidden benefits your employer gains from hiring you. Name what you’re offering beyond the job description. Employers who do the same, volunteering information about bonus structures, investing in culture, and compensating for intangibles, are building the trust that makes money conversations easier over time.

Here’s how to move forward:

• Know your minimum before negotiating; accept anything above it without resentment, then stop obsessing.
• Inventory your contributions — culture impact, client relationships, and stretch assignments — and bring them to compensation discussions.
• Frame negotiations around shared gain, not extraction. Ask “How do you define excellence in this role?”
• Weigh the full package: salary, bonus, culture, stability, and growth. Don’t optimize for base alone.
• Understand the trade-offs. Salary increases, culture investments, and bonuses all draw from the same pool. What’s spent now is subtracted from what’s left later.

Replace “am I getting enough?” with “is the total exchange balanced?” That’s where trust lives.

Part IV will discuss equity, where the owner mindset gets written into a contract.

Next in this series: Part IV — Betting on Each Other

Text written and spoken by Jeremy Chan — a human being!

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Behind the Glass Wall, Part III was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

She said it standing in my kitchen, keys already in her hand like she’d decided before she walked in.

“You’re too lovely for someone like me. I mean that as a compliment.”

I remember laughing, because it sounded like one. I remember the kettle was on. I remember trying to say something back and not finding it, and the kettle clicking off behind me like it had finished before I had.

I didn’t cry that night. I want to say that plainly, because I expected to, and kept waiting for it on the drive I took afterwards, windows down, radio off, going nowhere in particular. It never came. What came instead was quieter and lasted a lot longer.

I kept turning the sentence over like a coin I couldn’t tell was real.

Too lovely. Not not lovely enough. Too much of the good thing. I didn’t know what to do with a rejection that complimented me on the way out.

For a while I told people that story as it flattered me. Look, someone thought I was too good for her. I said it at bars, a little proud, like I’d won some award in a category nobody actually wanted.

It took months before I noticed what the sentence had actually done. It hadn’t said anything about her leaving. It had made the leaving about me, about some excess I apparently carried, some too-muchness she couldn’t hold. And I’d thanked her for it.

I think I’ve been called lovely more times than I’ve been asked to stay.

That surprised me when I first noticed it was true. A friend suggested an exercise once: write down every compliment you remember getting in the last year. I sat with a notebook, and there were a lot. You’re so easy to talk to. You make people feel important. You listen better than any guy I know.

Then I tried writing down every time someone had chosen me, specifically meaning stayed when staying was optional, meaning picked me over something else that was also on the table.

The second list was shorter. Embarrassingly short. I sat there for a while just looking at the gap between the two.

I don’t think this means I’m unlovable. I want to be careful here, because I know how easily that thought shows up dressed as self-awareness when it’s really just cruelty wearing a calmer voice. I think it means something else, closer to: I’d gotten very good at being appreciated from a distance, and much worse at being wanted up close.

People liked describing me. Nobody seemed to want to keep me.

There’s a difference between being someone’s favourite person to be around and being someone’s reason to come home, and I didn’t understand that difference until I’d spent years collecting the first and calling it the second.

I used to think the problem was that I hadn’t found the right person yet. Somewhere in there I started suspecting the problem was closer to home that I’d built a version of myself specifically for admiration, one that handled things well, said the right thoughtful thing at the right moment, never asked for too much space. And that version was, genuinely, pretty easy to like.

He just wasn’t very easy to love, because he never let anyone close enough to find out what loving him would actually require.

There was one person I won’t say much about her, because this isn’t really her story, who stayed past the point where the easy version ran out.

She saw me irritated over something small. She saw me go quiet for two days because I didn’t have it in me to sound like myself. She saw me get genuinely upset in a way that wasn’t controlled, that didn’t resolve into some measured observation about my feelings, that was just messy and low and hard to watch.

And she stayed.

I remember being more confused by that than grateful for it. I kept waiting for the kitchen sentence. You’re too much. I mean that as a compliment. I had a whole response ready. I’d practiced not needing her to stay.

She never said it. She said other things instead, smaller and less quotable, the kind you forget the exact wording of but remember the feeling of for years. Once she just said, “You don’t have to perform fine for me. You can just not be fine.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I think I actually asked her to say it again, not because I hadn’t heard, but because I needed a second to figure out whether I believed it.

I wanted to be loved for the parts of me that weren’t lovely. I just hadn’t ever shown anyone those parts long enough to find out if they would be.

We didn’t work out, in the end, for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this. But something in me had already shifted by the time it ended. I stopped being surprised when someone saw the unglamorous version of me and didn’t leave. I started expecting it, a little. Not confidently. Just enough to stop flinching.

I still think about the kitchen sometimes. Not with the sting it used to have. More like a photo I keep finding in a drawer — I know exactly what it is, I know when it was taken, I just don’t feel the same way looking at it anymore.

I don’t think she was lying that night, keys in her hand. I think she meant it as kindly as a person can mean an exit. I think “too lovely” was the closest word she had for something nearer to I don’t know how to want something I’m afraid I can’t keep.

That’s not really about me. I understand that now, mostly. I understood it in my head long before I understood it anywhere else.

I still catch myself, sometimes, being lovely to people. Playing the easy, low-maintenance version of myself in the first weeks of something, the one built for admiration instead of closeness. I catch myself doing it, and I don’t always stop. Old shapes are hard to unlearn even after you’ve named them.

But I notice it now. That’s different from before. Before, there was nothing to notice.

I don’t have a tidy ending for this. I know that’s supposed to be the part where I tell you I learned to love myself, or that I finally know my worth, or something with the word journey in it. I don’t have that.

What I have is smaller. I know the difference now between the two lists: the one full of compliments and the one nearly empty of people who stayed. I know which one I’d rather be building.

I just don’t know yet whether I’ve stopped being the guy who’s easier to admire than to love.

Maybe I’m still him, some days. Maybe that’s the part I keep avoiding.

Originally published at https://divyanshugoyal2.substack.com on September 19, 2026.

Published by Being Publications. If this article resonated with you, support the author with 50 claps and a few encouraging words. Being Publications is a place where writers grow together. Join the movement. :)

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You’re too lovely to be loved; I was never enough was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How do I feel?

Honestly?

I don’t know.

And maybe that is the most accurate answer I can give.

I feel okay most of the time.

Which is strange.

Because the emotional pain I felt during the first few days was so intense that I genuinely thought it would stay like that for much longer.

But it didn’t.

Or at least, it isn’t as intense anymore.

And now I’m confused.

Am I slowly healing?

Or am I just running?

Am I actually processing this breakup?

Or am I keeping myself so busy that my emotions don’t have enough space to catch me?

I don’t know yet.

Maybe it’s a little bit of both.

Yes, I miss him.

Yes, I crave him.

Yes, sometimes my entire body wants me to grab my phone and ask him:

How are you?

But I don’t.

Even when my heart yearns for it.

Even when it screams for it.

Even when there is this very annoying part of me that just wants to know if he is okay.

I don’t text him.

And somehow, that feels like progress.

Not because I stopped loving him.

I didn’t.

I am still madly in love with him.

But because I keep asking myself one very simple question:

Do I want him back?

And the answer is no.

Not because I don’t want him.

There is a difference.

I want him.

I miss him.

I love him.

But I don’t want a relationship with someone who does not want a relationship with me.

He told me he doesn’t love me anymore.

And no matter how much my heart wants to argue with that sentence, my brain needs to accept it.

I have to love myself enough to respect that reality.

And respect myself enough not to chase someone who chose to leave.

So why do I still want to text him?

Because I genuinely want to know that he is okay.

That is probably the hardest part.

I still care.

But then I ask myself something else:

If he texted me right now and asked:

Are you okay?

What would I say?

I would probably say:

Yes. I’m doing great.

I would lie.

Not maliciously.

I just wouldn’t want him to worry.

I wouldn’t want him to know how much I cried.

I wouldn’t tell him how heavy my chest felt those first few days.

I wouldn’t tell him how difficult eating became.

I wouldn’t tell him how many times I almost reached for my phone.

I would protect him from my pain.

So then I think:

If I would lie to him and say I’m okay, why do I assume he would tell me the truth if he wasn’t?

What exactly am I expecting to gain from asking?

So instead, I pray.

I pray that he is okay.

I pray that he is safe.

I pray that he is healthy.

I pray that he is happy.

And then I leave it with God because I trust God more than I trust my need to know everything.

And sometimes I also tell myself:

Why wouldn’t he be okay?

He was very clear.

He lost feelings.

The relationship had started feeling heavy for him.

So maybe ending it actually brought him relief.

Maybe he feels free.

And if that is what he needed, then maybe he genuinely is okay.

I hope he is.

And then people started putting ideas in my head

A lot of people asked me why we broke up.

So I told them.

Long distance.

He said he lost the spark.

He said he lost feelings.

And then people looked at me like I had just told them something completely unbelievable.

They reminded me:

But fifteen days before the breakup, he told you he loved you on your birthday.

He wrote you a whole paragraph.

He sent you gifts.

He was telling you he loved you.

And then came the sentence almost everyone seems to love saying after a breakup:“There’s someone else.”

Maybe he met someone.

Maybe he became attracted to another girl.

Maybe that’s why he ended things before I travelled.

Maybe he didn’t want two girls existing in the same country at the same time.

At first, I completely rejected it.

No.

Not him.

There is no way.

But then my brain started doing what heartbroken brains apparently love doing.

Collecting moments.

Replaying conversations.

Remembering things that felt slightly strange.

Connecting dots that may or may not actually belong together.

And slowly, this possibility started living inside my head.

I want to be very clear:

I don’t know if there is someone else.

I don’t know if there was someone else.

I have no proof.

Maybe there isn’t.

Maybe my friends are wrong.

Maybe heartbreak is just making me search for an explanation that feels easier to understand than:

Someone simply stopped loving me.

But now the possibility exists in my mind.

And strangely, that possibility hurts differently.

The breakup itself doesn’t hurt as violently anymore.

The thought that he doesn’t love me anymore still hurts, obviously.

But now another pain has entered the room.

The thought that maybe there is someone else.

Maybe he became attracted to somebody else.

Maybe there was something I didn’t know.

Maybe I trusted someone while something was happening behind my back.

And suddenly anger appears.

Part of me wants to know. Part of me really doesn’t.

There is a fight happening inside my head.

One part of me wants every answer.

Who is she?

When did it start?

Was there emotional cheating?

Was there attraction?

Was he talking to someone?

Did he compare us?

Did he already know he wanted out while still telling me he loved me?

Was anything real?

Was everything a lie?

And then there is another part of me saying:

Fuck this.

It is done.

Why do you need to know?

What exactly will the answer change?

If there is another girl, the relationship is over.

If there isn’t another girl, the relationship is still over.

If he loved you genuinely, it ended.

If he stopped loving you earlier than you realized, it ended.

If someone else exists, it ended.

If nobody else exists, it ended.

So maybe knowing every detail won’t actually free me.

Maybe it will just give my brain new material to torture me with.

And still…

human beings hate unanswered questions.

Especially when their hearts are involved.

So right now, I’m living inside that uncomfortable space between:

I need to know.

and

I genuinely don’t want to know.

I think the person I’m angriest at is myself

When I imagine that there might have been someone else, something strange happens.

I don’t only get angry at him.

I get angry at myself.

I feel like I disappointed myself.

Because throughout our relationship, there was always this tiny voice in the back of my head.

Something saying:

This is too good.

This is too perfect.

This cannot be this easy.

There has to be something wrong.

And every single time, I fought that voice.

I told myself:

Stop sabotaging something beautiful.

I told myself:

You have been hurt before. That does not mean every person will hurt you.

I told myself:

Trust him.

And I did.

That was huge for me.

I am not someone who lowers her guard easily.

But he somehow made me feel safe enough to do it.

Slowly, the walls came down.

I started trusting his words.

I started believing him.

I started believing the love.

I started feeling emotionally safe.

And then…

boom.

The relationship ended.

And emotionally, it felt like someone drove a knife straight into the exact place I had finally decided to leave unprotected.

That is probably why part of this hurts so much.

Not only because I lost him.

But because I trusted.

And now the angry part of me wants to say:

See? You should have listened to yourself.

I have always trusted my intuition.

My sixth sense has been right about so many things throughout my life.

With him, whenever that intuition whispered something uncomfortable, I would immediately silence it.

No.

Not him.

He would never.

Maybe some of those instincts were fear.

Maybe some were intuition.

Maybe I will never know.

But right now, it feels like I betrayed a part of myself by constantly dismissing that voice.

And I am trying not to turn this into:

Never trust anyone again.

Because that would mean this breakup takes something even bigger from me.

I don’t want to become someone whose lesson from love is to build higher walls.

Maybe my lesson is simply:

Trust people.

But trust yourself too.

And now comes the beautiful part

I shared a lot of darkness.

So let me tell you about something else that has been happening this week.

Something I didn’t expect.

I am slowly coming back to life.

Not romantically.

Personally.

I didn’t realize how much of myself I had put aside while I was with him.

I was so focused on him.

So concerned about him.

So emotionally invested in his life, his struggles, his plans, his future…

that somewhere along the way, I forgot parts of mine.

I forgot that I wanted to start a podcast.

I forgot about the scientific theory I had been working on.

I forgot how deeply I love anthropology.

I forgot how curious I am.

I forgot how obsessed I can become with science, ideas, people, society, questions and life.

I forgot how much I love learning.

I forgot how ambitious I am.

At one point, when I spoke about continuing my anthropology studies, he told me something along the lines of:

NCC is doing well. Why do you want to do anthropology?

And somewhere inside the relationship, that dream became quieter.

Not because he forced me to give it up.

But because I allowed other things to become louder.

This week, that part of me started making noise again.

And God, I missed her.

So I started doing things

Not thinking about doing them.

Doing them.

I contacted AUB about anthropology.

I spoke to my doctor there.

She connected me with the chair of the department.

And I am planning to start preparing for the master’s process in January.

I started drafting the podcast I have wanted to create for so long.

I am pushing myself at work.

Not because I want to distract myself forever.

But because I remembered how alive I feel when I am working toward something I believe in.

I started looking again at the scientific theory I had abandoned.

I am reading.

I cut my hair.

On Monday, I start therapy.

Next month, I want to start taking care of my nails again.

I want to take an online course.

I want to try yoga.

I want to go back to the gym.

I want to take care of my body.

My mind.

My health.

My dreams.

My career.

My money.

My future.

My curiosity.

My life.

And maybe that is what this season is slowly becoming about.

Not:

How do I get him back?

But:

How do I get myself back?

I’m also finally taking my health seriously

My health has not been great lately.

And I kept postponing things.

Ignoring things.

Telling myself I would deal with them later.

So I finally went to a cardiologist.

He was honest with me.

He told me my health is not okay & some things need monitoring.

He also reassured me that, based on what he saw, this isn’t something I should panic about.

So starting Monday, I’m going to be monitored with a heart Holter and a blood-pressure monitor, and I’ll be doing the tests I need.

And strangely, even that feels like part of choosing myself.

Going to the doctor.

Starting therapy.

Taking care of my body.

Taking my dreams seriously.

Doing the things I kept postponing.

I think heartbreak can sometimes wake you up in places completely unrelated to love.

It makes you look at your life and ask:

Okay.

What have I been neglecting?

And the answer for me is:

Quite a lot.

Maybe this is the beginning of my Men Detox era

And I mean that with love.

But also…

seriously.

I think I need a break.

A real break.

Not from love forever.

Not because men are terrible.

Not because I suddenly became cynical.

But because I genuinely want to know what happens when all the energy I normally pour into loving somebody else gets poured back into me.

What happens if I become obsessed with my own potential for a while?

What happens if I date my own dreams?

What happens if instead of wondering whether somebody is texting me, I wonder what chapter I’m reading next?

What happens if I invest in my health?

My career?

My education?

My podcast?

My theory?

My body?

My friendships?

My spirituality?

My finances?

My success?

What happens if the next person I fall madly in love with for a while is…

me?

I don’t mean in some fake Instagram quote way.

I mean in the very practical sense.

Showing up.

Making appointments.

Going to therapy.

Taking the course.

Reading the book.

Working hard.

Going to the doctor.

Sleeping.

Praying.

Moving my body.

Calling my friends.

Building something.

Keeping promises I make to myself.

Maybe that is what self-love actually looks like.

Not staring into a mirror saying affirmations.

But becoming someone you can rely on.

Day 6 feels different

I still love him.

I still miss him.

Sometimes I still want to text him.

Sometimes I wonder if someone else exists.

Sometimes I feel angry.

Sometimes I question everything.

Sometimes I think about the relationship and wonder how something that felt so safe ended so suddenly.

But the difference is…

he is no longer the only thing happening inside me.

There are other emotions now.

Excitement.

Curiosity.

Ambition.

Hope.

Determination.

A strange little hunger for life.

And maybe this is what healing starts looking like.

Not when you stop missing them.

But when you start missing yourself too.

And then you go looking for her.

To every woman choosing herself

If you are going through the same shit right now, maybe nobody needs to tell you:

Forget him.

You probably can’t.

Not yet.

Maybe nobody needs to tell you:

Stop loving him.

Because emotions do not disappear because somebody gave you good advice.

Love him if you still love him.

Miss him if you still miss him.

Cry if you need to cry.

But while you are doing all of that…

choose yourself too.

Book the therapy session.

Apply for the degree.

Start the project.

Go to the doctor.

Cut your hair.

Read the book.

Take the class.

Call your friend.

Move your body.

Pray.

Build something.

Learn something.

Create something.

Take one tiny piece of the energy that is currently screaming:

I miss him.

And turn it into:

I miss me too.

Then go find yourself.

Carry yourself.

Stand up for yourself.

Keep going.

Keep blooming.

Keep creating.

Keep succeeding.

Keep becoming.

Keep lighting up the world around you.

And maybe one day, without even noticing exactly when it happened, you will realize that the person you thought you could not live without is no longer at the center of your life.

You are.

So cheers to every woman going through heartbreak and still choosing to get up.

Cheers to the women crying before meetings and still walking into the room.

Cheers to the women who miss someone and still refuse to abandon themselves.

Cheers to loving someone deeply and still knowing when you need to walk away.

Cheers to uncertainty.

Cheers to therapy.

Cheers to new hair.

Cheers to unfinished dreams coming back to life.

Cheers to unanswered questions we may eventually stop needing answers to.

And cheers to Day 6.

I still don’t know exactly how I feel.

But I think I am starting to feel like myself again.

And maybe, for today, that is enough.

Revisions to the Submission Guidelines of Being Publications

Day 6 of My Breakup: I Think I’m Choosing Myself Again was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Risking the Truth

Apple Podcasts Web Embed

Part I of this series mapped the Alignment Gap between owner and employee mindsets. We saw that closing it requires good intentions and a willingness to shoulder a load. But it can also demand an acceptance of uncomfortable truths, leading to a transparency paradox.

Ode to the truth

Truth is one of the few technologies that reliably and profoundly improves a life — and relentlessly punishes the dishonest. The truth never contradicts itself; it is always internally consistent. Tangled webs of deceit become unnecessary. A commitment to the truth helps you to navigate all manner of future difficulties and misunderstandings, because your actions and choices, even when they turn out to have negative consequences, can always be explained in rational terms that people will be able to understand.

The truth will inevitably reveal faulty logic, personal weakness, poor decisions, and insufficient consideration, among other things with which we’d rather not contend. It’s completely impervious to protests over the pain that accompanies its lessons. Perhaps you’ve felt the echo of its familiar pattern: illuminating your folly, slapping you silly, and tossing you mercilessly into a foul, dark cavern, with nothing more than the tiny flashlight of humility with which to desperately clamber back to relative grace.

Despite this savage treatment, a commitment to the truth is the only way I know to enter into harmony with the world. And the most uncomfortable truths are often the most useful: the painful moment of regret coincides with the opportunity to abandon a wretched part of your soul and make a change for the better. Stray from the path and the truth offers a choice: writhe in frustration and discord, or integrate its lessons and rediscover your place in the natural order. Not much of a choice, really, though I’m fairly certain I’ll continue to audition both approaches.

Consistently seeking the truth, speaking it to others, and being honest with yourself, offers a wild bounty of gifts. Here are four:

• Better solutions: Awareness of a set of true facts associated with a problem is usually the first necessary step in a winning strategy to design a good solution.
• Deeper bonds: The truth seeds and nurtures an unshakeable, lifelong trust in your relationships, which you can depend on in times of need. A high-value reputation is also on offer.
• Personal growth: Denial keeps you stagnant. Honest self-assessment is the prerequisite for personal evolution.
• Cognitive relief: You are able to live life freely and out in the open, weaving yourself into the natural order as you grow, cultivating aliveness, gratitude, and inner peace.

Philosophically speaking, the truth leads you to the only vantage point from which you can really experience the intrinsic beauty of life’s perfection, and your place within it. In a business context, however, this might be an unnecessarily lofty goal. Further, the whole truth in corporate communications can also have unintended negative effects.

Buzzword bingo

At Jonah Group, we generally took a “more is more” approach to information sharing than many traditional companies, and spent more time and effort on this because we felt it produced better alignment. Our staff was often surprised at how much we did share, often indicating to us that they’d never seen that sort of thing before. But there were good reasons for this.

Sharing the ownership structure of the company helped staff to trust and understand the motivations of decision makers. Exposing company revenue projections helped staff to understand the underlying trajectory of the business, and the risk we all took together in continuing to work for it. Knowing company profit explicitly told staff how they were sharing in the pain or the spoils as a contributor to the company. It also allowed them to contextualize and value investments we’d made in the business. Knowing bill rates for staff members helped directors to optimize costs and revenues for their projects. And explaining bonus calculation formulae allowed staff to reverse engineer their performance attribution from their actual bonuses, aligning payouts with the results of their annual reviews.

In the larger corporate world, however, “Transparency” is such a pervasive value buzzword that it has unfortunately become devoid of any real meaning. Leaders and employees alike love to talk about the importance of “embracing transparency,” but much of the time the value is only partially lived, or it’s wielded so inappropriately that it destroys the intended benefit.

This to say nothing of the fact that “honesty” is what branding experts would call a “Pay to play” value — i.e. you generally have to be largely honest in your communications to have the slightest chance of having a healthy business. It need not be present in a list of differentiators.

Employees will also avoid speaking up because they fear the potential repercussions of being outspoken. Managers justify the need to spend an inappropriately gross tonnage of time collecting status by referencing the “need for traceability and transparency.” If the reporting of so-called “bad news” can’t be avoided, it is often couched beneath the protective dome of “being transparent,” the only problem being that it likely wouldn’t have been reported at all if the opportunity to hide it was still available.

I worked for a company that claimed “Radical Candor” as a core value, but which (as far as I could tell) sometimes struggled (as we all do) even with “regular” candor. It’s not that our leaders didn’t have good intentions; it’s more about the fact that whoever put that on the values list didn’t really wrestle with the thorny problems that living up to that value entails.

People usually state a preference for the truth even as we swim in a soup of falsehoods. We must admit to ourselves that society is largely built atop a fabric of lies. Some lies are simply social lubricant (“I love your new hairdo”), some are understood to be exaggerations (“the best fried chicken ever made”) some originate from a self-serving, willful neglect (“tobacco isn’t bad for you”), and some are outright malevolent (e.g. character assassination). Lies exist on an infinite moral continuum of grey shades. There are thousands of reasons to lie… but are there any good ones? That’s a query for each of us to ponder.

The case for lies

One clarifying question is “is this truth constructive to the particular moment?” If the truth is destructive, it should probably be heavily tempered or simply omitted. On the other hand, if the truth is on balance constructive, even though it may also be potentially painful or offensive, then we should prepare to spend time and effort communicating it and working through the resulting fallout.

Employees are often upset with owners or leaders because they get the feeling they’re being misled, or at least that important information is being hidden from them. You may have guessed that my somewhat lengthy preamble to this point is meant to contextualize a discussion on when transparency can’t easily be employed by leaders. The point here is to give voice to the difficult choices leaders have to make in navigating this terrain.

In unhealthy organizations, leaders may hold the reins tightly on the flow of information, or skip the truth entirely because they understand that knowledge is power, and they prefer to be the ones wielding it. For the record, this isn’t the kind of company I’d want to lead or be a part of. But this doesn’t mean there aren’t sometimes good reasons for leaders to be circumspect.

My (hopefully obvious) motherhood stance is that corporate half-truths or information hiding should always in some way be constructive for the organization. In my experience, leaders are generally not malevolent, nor do they “tell lies for fun.” In designing their communications, each leader is usually setting a careful balance point between two or more competing values. The point they choose often ends up defining the culture of the organization.

Sometimes I’d desperately want to tell my staff a more complete story than I did, but felt I couldn’t for some other reason. Sometimes I couldn’t even tell them that this was the reason I couldn’t tell them, as it would be a dead giveaway for the thing itself. This was very frustrating to me, especially when people would criticize the management team over inadequate communications. And I was well aware that each such occasion chipped away at the benefits of being fully truthful, about which I’ve already waxed poetic.

Here are a few corporate scenarios that don’t lend themselves well to the full truth:

• The team may feel powerless to respond to the information being communicated.
• The inherent power dynamic makes it feel like leader opinions carry an oppressive weight. The same power dynamic also suppresses the sharing of employee opinions, owing to their fear of career repercussions.
• Hot-button topics relative to peers tend to whip people into a comparison frenzy: think bonuses, hiring and firing decisions, promotions, and all manner of people issues.
• Leaders may have a responsibility to maintain confidentiality, perhaps on behalf of another staff member. Clients might also require that information only be shared on a “need to know” basis.
• It would take far too long to rationalize and deliver the information in a way that employees would understand, not because they didn’t have the capacity to, but because that understanding would require nuanced attention, consideration, and optimization, the time for which are often in short supply in everyone’s busy day-to-day work life.
• The marginal benefit of some additional information is so small that it’s just not a high enough priority to spend time on it.

Doubts are destabilizing

The elephant in the room is an abstraction of all of the above: transparency travels with stress. The role of the owners and leaders in a company, in part, is to make an uncertain future appear relatively certain to their team members, who probably don’t want to have to deal with any number of challenging thoughts on a daily basis. Hiding things erodes trust, but sharing them causes stress.

And that stress has real negative effects. There were many nights that I couldn’t sleep due to worry over the risk of something bad happening at our company. This was exacerbated by my desire to be unencumbered by secrets, which I also find stressful. My instinct was usually to share my worry with whomever would listen.

At one point in our history, we were moving from an office with about 20 desks to a bigger one with about 60 desks, a kitchen, den, reception, 2 offices and 2 meeting rooms. It was exciting, but somewhat of a risky bet, and I felt that keenly. Instead of hiring a moving company, we individually walked our computers and desk items from the old office over to the new one.

Somewhere along that walk an employee asked me sheepishly “so… can we afford this?” I told him “Yeah, I think so!” which generated a nervous laugh. I don’t like to overpromise and underdeliver, so I tried to explain further how I was feeling, which was both excited and stressed out, and trying to calm myself down by seeing the bigger picture. “Look, what’s the worst that can happen? The company could fail.” I said somewhat carelessly, to which he immediately exclaimed “DON’T SAY THAT!!”, the palpable worry tattooed across his face. He prodded me for more information about just how close to the bone we were. The answers to that didn’t really help, even though in reality the business was quite healthy. More nervous laughter.

I stopped talking, but thought to myself “We’re literally walking our office contents to the new place: it should be fairly clear that we run a pretty lean shop!” In my mind it should have been painfully obvious to everyone at the company that potential failure is always lurking just around the corner. A company is nothing more than a group of people trying to make something work, together. Surely they understood that…. it might not work!

Misinterpreted information can also be potentially inflammatory, making the tone of communication extremely important. During the 2008 financial crisis, we ran into cash flow issues owing to a downturn in customer IT investments. We held a staff meeting to discuss potential risks associated with the economy, what we were doing about it, and what everyone could do to help. Days after the meeting, two people quit. One indicated that “you told us the company was in deep financial distress and perhaps even close to failure” (which we didn’t, and which it wasn’t).

There’s a reason that airline pilots project calmness and control, even though commercial flight is fraught with obvious risks. It wouldn’t be particularly constructive for a pilot to get on the horn to say that “we’re using fuel much faster than expected, and there’s a small chance we won’t make it to shore, so just to be safe, please make sure your affairs are in order.” Nor would it be appropriate for a flight attendant to walk around wearing a parachute pack while all you have is the rumored flotation device.

Complete openness during a crisis that everyone can already clearly see, however, is an absolute requirement for the management team. When the oxygen masks fall, there’s no longer any use in pretending. Here, care must be taken to be open, attentive, and human, and mitigating plans should be clearly and fully enumerated and expressed. The potential negative fallout from the crisis should also be named, giving full voice to the team’s potentially unexpressed worries. No matter how well-intentioned the hiding of information may be, during a crisis, a dearth of honesty implies untrustworthiness.

The same can be said of any brand communications. I’m proud to say that our marketing messages generally matched our internal messages about our brand. Companies often cite the “dangers of IP leakage” or some other such abstract risk associated with keeping company information private. The prospect of internal documents becoming public would send a bone-chilling tingle down the spines of their leaders. But what they’re really thinking is “what if someone finds out that the stories we tell our people are different from the stories we tell our customers?” I think it’s more fun to identify what you really believe in and truly try to sell that.

Beyond the daily challenges of what to share and what to withhold lies a more fundamental question: what happens when the company’s survival itself is uncertain?

Six months from zero

An ability to contemplate business failure and proceed anyway may very well be what separates entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs. Owners live with a low-level hum of anxiety that employees rarely hear, even after many years of apparent success. It’s a rational fear: according to Innovation, Science, and Economic Development Canada, roughly half of new businesses are no longer operating after ten years. For an owner, this isn’t a statistic; it’s a daily reality.

Jonah Group was never on the brink of collapse, but we also never really had committed forward-looking contracts beyond 3–6 months into the future at any given time, so we couldn’t really see much further than that. This always meant potentially zero revenue in six short months! We always grew organically and white-gloved our long term clients, but this was consulting… there is never any real recurring revenue. How could we know if it was going to last?

The uncertainty isn’t unique to consulting. Even the greatest pop act of all time couldn’t predict the wildly successful future that they would have, despite what onlookers might have imagined. Watch the clip below from a 1963 Beatles interview in which George, John, and Paul wonder about their future prospects.

George: I mean, we don’t know. It may be next week. It may be two or three years, but I think we’ll be… in the business, either up there or down there for at least another four years.

John: You can be bigheaded and say, “Yeah, we’re going to last 10 years.” But soon as you’ve said that you think, you know, “we’re lucky if we last 3 months,” you know?

Paul: You know, probably the thing that John and I will do will be write songs as we have been doing as a sort of sideline now. We’ll probably develop that a bit more.

We always viscerally felt the ongoing potential for failure. The risk of failure exists whether or not you acknowledge it openly. It confused me when staff seemed reluctant to spend time talking about potential failure modes, and how to try to mitigate them, but later I came to realize that that’s what they wanted me there for.

Even though owners have a more direct responsibility and financial motivation to “keep things going,” it might be valuable for employees to think of this as a shared responsibility. Employment is more like throwing your lot in with a crew of sailors who are all trying to keep the boat afloat. In the end, everyone has to do their part to try to plug holes, bail water, and throw each other life preservers whenever the waves are rough, even if you don’t own the boat.

Even if owners are quietly absorbing the stress of potential company failure, what does this mean for the person on the other side of the glass wall? That warm security blanket may be borrowed, not owned.

The illusion of security

There is no job security. I could end this section here and let you ponder the obviousness of that claim, but will elaborate further in case that wasn’t enough.

A company’s health is based on its ability to sell business and execute on its promises while also turning a profit. If the company doesn’t do as well as it plans to, then some may have to be laid off, despite the fact that the owners probably don’t want to do this. If the company fails, everyone will be affected.

In this sense, “employment” provides an illusion of safety relative to (say) being a contractor or even an entrepreneur. While this illusion may be useful to reduce your overall stress levels, it doesn’t reduce your risk. In fact, it probably increases your risk relative to the owners, who are generally the last to be “laid off,” even if the laid off employees are more valuable than they. Sorry about that.

Contractors tend to understand this more keenly, relying on themselves to find ongoing work. They’re more likely to maintain emergency funds to deal with employer instability. They are more likely to stay current on skills and emerging technologies, as they need these to sell themselves. And they continuously cultivate professional networks outside the company. Employees should do all of these things as well.

Nothing is talked about less openly in a company than the reasons for someone’s removal. This process is fraught with legal liability, cost, high emotional stakes, and cultural disruption.

On a more personal note, I hate laying off good employees. I don’t want to do it, and I really am sorry that it’s painful for them. The employee feels like their professional and cultural identity is being ripped apart, and they now bear the burden of new financial risks, not to mention the cultural impact on the company. Additionally, the psychological toll on both the decision maker and the people conducting the official proceedings is often not understood by staff. Anyone who has ever had to do this will know what I mean.

As an owner, whenever this happens, I feel like it’s my fault for failing to increase revenue to the point at which I could retain you. This guilty feeling generally increases with the length of your tenure at the company. I usually can’t sleep well for a few weeks before and for a few weeks after. The severance payment is expensive for the company, but I hope it’s at least enough to take the edge off and get you back on your feet.

This is in stark contrast to the prospect of laying off bad workers, problem sources, or generally toxic people. I definitely won’t lose any sleep over this, and invariably, the next day I’ll feel refreshed, and I’ll have new thoughts of how to hire better next time, which is satisfying because it makes me feel like I’ve improved. Overall, I feel like I did something difficult, healthy, and necessary for the company.

Employees remaining in the company appreciate this because it reinforces what it means to be a positively contributing team member. Their work feels more meaningful, and they become even more motivated to perform — not out of fear, but because they implicitly understand that their leaders actively appreciate and manage toward good performance. The mood inside the company improves. In a larger sense, layoffs of people who “don’t fit” are an expression of company values. They strengthen the credibility of the brand, and drive shared commitment to it.

As it relates to “the truth,” my HR reps have always advised me to “say as little as possible” during “the conversation” in order to limit potential liability. I’ve always thought this to be dehumanizing, though, so I’d often ignore this advice, especially for those with whom we’d had a long relationship. I generally won’t discuss your performance if you were in the “problem” camp, since this only invites further complexity and liability, and at this point I don’t want to bother re-litigating all of the pain I think you’ve caused, with which you’ll of course disagree.

So what does reduce your risk as a good employee? A benefit of being the CWO (Chief Worrying Officer) for a company initiative is that you’ll be less likely to be one of the first to be laid off, because you’re fulfilling a difficult-to-replace management function. Other important dimensions as to who gets laid off are cost, liability, tenure (which is a proxy for institutional knowledge and cultural importance), and the leverage you gain by training and managing colleagues.

The road to heaven

I’ve never been a fan of the aphorism “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” as it seems to cast shadows on people with good intentions. Good intentions also pave all roads to heaven, and further, all roads paved with bad intentions lead to hell! Good intentions are the best we’ve got, and we can only hope our leaders have them. The good news is that most do, most of the time.

But hoping your leaders have good intentions isn’t a strategy. If you accept that some information will be withheld, the question becomes: what do you do with the information you do have?

Even well-intentioned leaders may hide information, striving to do right by their teams. Living with that ambiguity is a condition of employment, not necessarily a betrayal. A useful diagnostic question for employees is “Is this omission protecting something important, or avoiding accountability?” The former warrants trust-building patience. The latter warrants deeper inquiry.

Try to avoid creeping paranoia about leader communications. Feel free to read between the lines, asking yourself how what wasn’t said might affect you. Think of contingency plans to mitigate negative scenarios, though understand that these may never surface, and that errors of interpretation can occur. Probe leaders with questions that invite disclosure within appropriate bounds, e.g. “what are our key milestones for the next 90 days?” as opposed to “are we going to survive the next quarter?”

Leaders often calibrate information sharing based on who demonstrates reliability and professionalism with sensitive data. Not panicking or gossiping. Providing thoughtful input when consulted. Showing discretion with confidential details. Volunteering for cross-functional work. Each of these signals that you can be trusted with sensitive information. And trust, earned this way, tends to compound.

The Alignment Gap closes not when we know everything about each other, but when both sides trust enough to work with what we each have.

Part III will explore what we owe each other in return — compensation, equity, and the unspoken debts that bind us.

Text written and spoken by Jeremy Chan — a human being!

Voiceover music generated by Suno

Podcast music from #Uppbeat

https://uppbeat.io/t/soundroll/indie-invasion

License code: JJPXJ3PTBR7ARTIY

Originally published at https://summersoul.substack.com.

Revisions to the Submission Guidelines of Being Publications

Behind the Glass Wall, Part II was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where did all the real ones go?

The ones who preferred silence.
The ones who worked hard without needing an audience.
The ones who lived hard lives.
The ones who grew up facing real struggles and still found their way.
The ones who remembered Allah more than they remembered the camera.
The ones who found Allah and chose the path of good.
The ones who fight their nafs every single day to become better.
The strong, focused, and disciplined souls of this Ummah.

Where did they all go?

Because what I see now is something else.

The dark reality of social media:
Achieve something want to announce it.
Eat something want to post it.
Dress well need to post it.
Go somewhere post it.
Look good post it.
Look even better post it again.
Check the likes.
Check the comments.
Do something else post it once more.

But one real question is still there:

When was the last time you did anything just for yourself?

In this time of endless content, likes, comments, reach, and the constant urge to be seen…
When was the last time you did something without thinking,
“What if someone is watching?”
“What if someone appreciates me?”

Umm… That would have been beautiful if the One watching was Allah in your mind, that would be pure love.
Hoping for His appreciation is something completely different.
But this constant need for people’s eyes and people’s praise is not the same thing at all.

Looking for acknowledgment is human and understandable.
Wanting to be seen is natural.
But is it healthy when it happens every single time, every single day?

Ask yourself honestly.

When was the last time you went somewhere and simply enjoyed the moment without posting it?
When was the last time you fed a hungry person and kept it completely private?
When was the last time you helped someone in need and told no one about it?
When was the last time you read a book and kept the reflection between you and your diary?
When was the last time you cried in sujood and didn’t feel the urge to share the emotion later?
When was the last time you spent quality time with your family after a long gap and didn’t feel the need to announce it?
When was the last time you gave sadaqah quietly, without even your left hand knowing what your right hand did?

Maybe you are doing these things…
But you are not posting them.
Because you are truly present.
Because you are enjoying them for yourself.

If you cannot remember the last time…

Then I strongly recommend you start today.

Do something only for yourself.
Not for the feed or likes or validation.

Just for your heart.
Just for your Akhirah.
Just for the sake of Allah.

Become a person of honor, love, strength, and discipline that future generations need.
Become great even when no one is watching.

I am trying.

So why not you?

Make memory in private.

Revisions to the Submission Guidelines of Being Publications

#productivity, #social media addiction, #Islamic reflection, #digital detox, #niyyah

Where Did the Quiet Ones Go? was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It can happen anywhere.

A grocery store. Facebook. A waiting room. The comment section under someone else's post. A name appears on your phone that you haven't seen in years, and suddenly an entire version of your life walks back into the room.

"Ree! Oh my goodness. I haven't seen you in forever."

Then comes the question.

"What have you been up to?"

I never know how to answer that.

What have I been up to?

How much time do you have?

Because if you knew me twenty years ago, there is no reasonable three-minute update that gets us from there to here.

I've become a nurse.

I've become a mother.

I've become a writer.

I've held babies, raised children, worked long shifts, changed careers within a career, learned things I never expected to study, buried people I thought would be here longer, loved people, lost people, forgiven some things, stopped forgiving other things, questioned myself, found myself, misplaced myself again, and learned that becoming is apparently not a project anyone finishes.

But that seems excessive beside the produce section.

So I usually say something like, "Oh, you know. Life."

What a ridiculous little word for all of it.

Life.

As though that explains anything.

The funny thing is, the person standing in front of me may still be talking to the version of me they knew.

They remember what I was like in high school.

Or nursing school.

Or at a particular job.

Or during a relationship.

Or before I had children.

Or when my children were small.

They remember my hair a certain way. My priorities a certain way. The things I talked about. The things I believed. Maybe the things I tolerated.

And because that's where their experience of me stopped, that's where I remain in their mind.

I do this to people too.

We all do.

There are people I haven't seen in fifteen years who remain permanently twenty-seven in my imagination.

Then I see a photograph of them with a teenager and have an unreasonable reaction.

How do you have a teenager?

You were twenty-seven five minutes ago.

So was I.

Apparently time has been operating without consulting any of us.

This became especially obvious to me recently when I thought about the people who have known different versions of me.

There are people who knew me before I was a nurse.

People who only know Nurse Ree.

People who knew me before motherhood.

People who cannot imagine me apart from it.

People who knew me when my entire professional identity fit comfortably inside a hospital.

People who met me after writing became part of the picture.

People who know the polished professional version.

People who have seen me in pajamas with my hair doing something that should not be documented.

Nobody knows every version.

Not even the people closest to us.

That used to bother me.

I wanted to be understood completely.

I wanted people to know the context.

If you knew why I made that decision, you would understand.

If you knew what happened before that moment, you wouldn't judge it the same way.

If you knew what I was carrying then, maybe you'd see me differently.

I've always been a context person.

Give me the whole story.

The part before the part everyone is talking about.

The history.

The why.

Maybe that's the nurse in me. Maybe it's the writer. Maybe it's simply how my brain has always worked.

But I've learned something uncomfortable.

Nobody gets the whole story.

Not really.

Even the people who love us deeply experience us from the outside.

They see our decisions.

They don't hear every internal argument that preceded them.

They know what we told them.

They don't know every thought we edited out.

They may know that we struggled.

They don't necessarily know what 2:13 a.m. felt like while we were struggling.

And we don't know that about them either.

This is one reason I've become slower to believe I completely understand another person's life.

We love simple explanations.

She stayed because she was weak.

He left because he didn't care.

She changed careers because she couldn't handle the old one.

They stopped talking because one of them must have done something terrible.

Maybe.

Or maybe there are seventeen chapters you haven't read.

People are complicated.

Stories are complicated.

Sometimes even the person living the story doesn't fully understand it until years later.

I have looked back at decisions I made and finally understood my own motivations differently.

At the time, I thought I was being patient.

Years later, I realized I was afraid.

I thought I was being loyal.

Sometimes I was avoiding change.

I thought I had failed.

Later, I realized I had simply reached the end of something.

I thought I was starting over.

Actually, I was carrying far more forward than I understood.

Time does that.

It edits the meaning of things.

Not the facts.

The meaning.

That's why the person I was twenty years ago isn't someone I want to erase.

She embarrasses me occasionally.

Let's be clear.

There are outfits I would like removed from the historical record.

There are decisions I would prefer not to present as evidence of my judgment.

There are things I believed with tremendous confidence despite possessing approximately six percent of the necessary life experience.

But I like her.

More now than I used to.

She was trying.

She was ambitious.

She loved deeply.

She wanted a meaningful life, although she didn't yet know exactly what meaningful would cost.

She believed adulthood would eventually become stable.

That's adorable.

I want to hug her.

Then perhaps warn her about several people.

But mostly hug her.

There was a time when I looked backward primarily through criticism.

Why did I do that?

Why didn't I leave sooner?

Why didn't I start sooner?

Why did I care so much what they thought?

Why didn't I recognize what was happening?

Why did I waste time?

Those questions are easy to ask when you're standing at the end of the chapter holding information the earlier version of you didn't have.

Of course I can see it now.

I'm looking backward.

Hindsight is an arrogant narrator.

It knows the ending and then criticizes the characters for not knowing it on page twelve.

I don't want to do that to myself anymore.

The woman I was made decisions using the information, resources, maturity, fears, responsibilities, and circumstances she had then.

Some decisions were good.

Some weren't.

Some were spectacularly questionable.

She gets to be human.

So does the woman I am now.

That may be the part we forget when we're obsessed with personal growth.

We imagine becoming a better version of ourselves means eventually reaching a version we won't need to forgive.

I don't think she exists.

Future me will probably look back at current me and shake her head about something.

I hope she's gracious.

I'm doing my best over here.

There is freedom in realizing you don't have to disown your previous selves in order to grow.

You can outgrow a belief without being ashamed that you once believed it.

You can change your mind.

You can change careers.

You can become more religious, less religious, more ambitious, less interested in impressing people, more private, more outspoken, more careful, more adventurous.

You can become someone your younger self never predicted.

That isn't hypocrisy.

It's development.

Of course, there is another side to this.

Sometimes people don't like the version of you that comes next.

That can be painful.

Especially when they benefited from the old version.

The woman who always said yes becomes inconvenient when she learns no.

The woman who explained herself endlessly becomes "different" when she stops defending every decision.

The person who absorbed disrespect to keep peace suddenly seems difficult when she starts requiring actual peace.

Growth changes relationships because relationships develop around patterns.

Change the pattern and everybody has to adjust.

Some will.

Some won't.

There are people who will keep trying to interact with a version of you that no longer exists.

They'll push the same buttons.

Expect the same reaction.

Bring up the same history.

Assign you the same role.

And sometimes you'll surprise yourself by stepping right back into it.

Isn't that fascinating?

You can spend years becoming a confident adult and then spend one holiday dinner with family and suddenly feel fourteen.

Someone says one sentence in the exact tone they used twenty-five years ago, and your nervous system apparently owns a time machine.

There she is.

Teenage you.

Ready for battle.

Family has a remarkable ability to preserve our earliest roles.

The responsible one.

The dramatic one.

The quiet one.

The difficult one.

The successful one.

The baby.

The peacemaker.

The one who always needs help.

Those roles can follow people long after they stop being accurate.

Maybe that's why some people feel freer after moving away or entering a completely new environment.

Nobody there knows who you're supposed to be.

You get to introduce yourself without footnotes.

There is power in that.

But there is also something valuable about the people who have witnessed multiple versions.

The ones who knew you before the résumé.

Before the accomplishments.

Before you figured out how to present yourself professionally.

People who remember your first apartment.

Your terrible haircut.

The car you drove until the dashboard resembled a Christmas tree.

The job you hated.

The person you dated whom everyone politely agreed not to discuss later.

There is intimacy in shared history.

You don't have to explain the reference.

They were there.

As I get older, I value those relationships differently.

Not simply because they've lasted.

Longevity alone doesn't make a relationship healthy.

But there is something precious about someone who has watched you change without demanding that you remain familiar for their comfort.

Someone who can say, "You've changed," and mean it as recognition rather than accusation.

I hope I am that kind of person for others.

I hope I leave room for people to surprise me.

I hope I don't imprison my children inside old versions of themselves.

That matters enormously to me as a mother.

Parents collect versions.

The baby.

The toddler.

The little girl who loved one particular dress.

The child who couldn't pronounce a word correctly.

The teenager with the phase we are absolutely forbidden from mentioning in front of company.

We remember everything.

Our children don't always appreciate this.

But nostalgia can become a subtle kind of resistance if we're not careful.

I don't want to love my children so much as who they were that I fail to become curious about who they are becoming.

The daughter standing in front of me today deserves to be known today.

Not compared constantly with the little girl she used to be.

Not trapped by mistakes she made three years ago.

Not required to maintain interests, plans, or opinions simply because she once announced them confidently.

Children need permission to evolve.

So do mothers.

Motherhood changes us so profoundly that sometimes people forget mothers remain individual people undergoing development of our own.

We're expected to be stable while everyone around us grows.

But I'm not the same mother I was when I first became one.

How could I be?

My children have taught me.

Life has taught me.

I have gotten things wrong.

I have apologized.

I've changed my mind about parenting.

I've learned that what works beautifully for one child can fail spectacularly with another.

I've learned that loving someone doesn't mean always knowing what they need.

I've learned that motherhood includes releasing versions too.

The baby becomes the child.

The child becomes the teenager.

The teenager becomes an adult.

You don't get to keep any version simply because you loved her.

That's one of the quiet heartbreaks of parenting.

Every stage ends.

Even the beautiful ones.

Maybe that's why photographs can make mothers cry without warning.

You aren't only seeing the child.

You're seeing a world that no longer exists.

That couch.

That house.

Those little shoes by the door.

That voice.

That version of yourself.

Everyone in the picture has moved forward.

You can visit, but you cannot move back in.

There is grief in that.

There is also grace.

Because if nothing changed, nothing could become.

My faith has given me a language for this that I didn't always have.

I've spent years thinking about purpose as though it were one destination.

Find your purpose.

Singular.

As if God hid one correct assignment somewhere and my responsibility was to locate it before time expired.

I don't see it that way anymore.

Purpose can have seasons.

There were seasons when my primary work was clinical.

Seasons when motherhood consumed nearly every available part of me.

Seasons of survival.

Seasons of rebuilding.

Seasons when writing began asking for more room.

Maybe the thread isn't one job title.

Maybe it's what God keeps developing through all of them.

Compassion.

Courage.

Discernment.

Service.

Truth.

Mercy.

Things that can travel with you when the title changes.

That comforts me because I am still becoming.

I don't know what the next decade will call out of me.

I don't know what work I will be doing.

I don't know which dreams will become real, which will change shape, or which I'll eventually laugh about because I cannot believe I ever wanted them.

I hope I remain open enough to find out.

There is one thing I do know.

I no longer want to spend so much energy proving continuity.

I am allowed to contradict an older version of myself.

"I thought you said you'd never..."

I probably did.

I have said many things.

Some of them were even correct.

Then I lived more.

New information is allowed to change me.

Experience is allowed to change me.

God is allowed to change me.

Love is allowed to change me.

Loss certainly has.

Motherhood has.

Nursing has.

Writing has.

Age has.

I would be more concerned if eighteen years passed and nothing did.

So when someone from long ago looks at me and says, "You're different," perhaps the answer doesn't need to be defensive.

I am.

Of course I am.

You remember a woman who hadn't lived these years yet.

She didn't know the people I know now.

She hadn't held the babies I've held.

She hadn't walked through the rooms I've walked through.

She hadn't survived the things I know I can survive.

She hadn't written these words.

She hadn't asked these questions.

She didn't know what I know.

But she brought me here.

I owe her something for that.

Not lifelong obedience.

Not shame.

Gratitude.

She kept going long enough for me to become this woman.

And this woman will do the same for whoever comes next.

Revisions to the Submission Guidelines of Being Publications

The People Who Knew Me Before I Became This Version of Me was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How an Owner Mindset Turns Friction Into Purpose

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Morrissey’s “ Shoplifters of the World Unite “ is often read as a manifesto for the disenfranchised; a metaphorical call for marginalized and rebellious youth to unite against the established social order. It might have been intended as a play on the Marxist slogan “Workers of the world, unite!”, recontextualized to empower disillusioned youth.

It includes a dark lyric in the second verse that hits close to home for anyone who has ever worked under a CEO: “But last night the plans for a future war was all I saw on channel four.” For the employee, looking in from the outside, the owner’s strategy can feel like those secret war plans — nefarious, opaque, threatening, and completely outside of their sphere of control, prompting the need for employees to “unite and take over.“ You see a cost-cutting measure or a sudden pivot and assume that you’re the target. You suspect they’re “up to no good,” and that the war may be against you, or at least that you will be an unwitting casualty.

In reality, the war is usually against bankruptcy, a market shift, or a competitor with deeper pockets and better execution. The friction isn’t necessarily born of malice; it’s born of an asymmetry of information and, more importantly, an asymmetry of risk. This is the Alignment Gap.

I’ve stood on both sides of this divide-five years as an employee, two decades as an owner/operator, followed by another three years as an employee. Sometimes the disconnect is a failure of communication, but more often than not it is a fundamental difference in what each side stands to lose.

I see you rolling your eyes and busting out your tiny violins, but this series isn’t a plea for owner pity, nor is it a defense of bad management. It’s intended as a public service announcement for employees: to help them understand why some decisions are made, and to potentially reinterpret owner behaviour in this context.

In this article, we discuss the origins of the Alignment Gap, what owners are really looking for in employees, and how to narrow the gap between you and your company’s owner(s) by adopting an owner mindset. The central, clarifying question we must all answer is “what would I do if I was in control?”

Communication breakdown

Communicating at a useful level of fidelity rarely happens on the first try. In addition to the fact that our words are not perfect vessels, they carry the weight of cultural context, emotional bias, and both the speaker’s and listener’s projections.

“What I said,” “what I think I said,” “what you heard,” “what you think you heard,” and “what we made it mean” can all be different. And sometimes we just aren’t listening to each other with our full attention. Our self-centeredness may prevent us from practicing empathy. Thankfully, the more our own folly is exposed in public, the more familiar we become with our own communication inadequacies over time.

Communication problems are exacerbated when “owner-speak” and “worker-speak” collide. It can seem like we’re just talking past each other. Owners speak the language of “opportunity, revenue, and survival,” whereas workers use “task, schedule, and delivery.” We thus experience urgency and risk differently: owner urgency is driven by sales timing, legal liability, and cash flow, where employee urgency is driven by client dissatisfaction, product deadlines and quality control. All are real, but they rarely align temporally or structurally across the delivery/management divide.

Hierarchy can also introduce problems. Org charts should exist primarily as tools for managing communications-filtering information so people aren’t drowning in demands they can’t meaningfully address. But an org chart also signals with Orwellian precision which thoughts and opinions count as “more equal than others.” It may feel frustrating that decision-making authority resides solely with owners; employees may question, but owners dictate.

This asymmetry can suppress ideas, as employees wrestle with the prospect of applying heart and soul to efforts over which they ultimately lack authority. But it also does something much more diabolical: it absolves employees from the responsibility of fixing the very problems they highlight. The hierarchy effectively licenses cynicism, creating a safe space that protects employees from the consequences of their own observations.

You’re thinking “but I don’t see ‘solving company problems’ in my job description. Is this really up to me?”

Seeds of action

Early in a career, it is rational to externalize difficult problems. You lack the mandate, the resources, and perhaps the judgement to solve them alone. The shift from “performing assigned tasks” to “identifying and owning unsolved problems” can be very uncomfortable, and some never make it. We’ve all heard the protest “that’s way above my pay grade,” excusing the would-be participant from further effort and toil. This is ironic because owning the solution would rapidly improve their pay grade.

It isn’t necessary to cross this chasm if that’s simply not how you want to work. But while this may be perfectly optimal for you, it pays to be honest with yourself about the implications of that choice. Three important things happen by remaining purely in an order-taking, “delivery” mindset:

• your compensation won’t rise as fast as it could have
• you can’t complain as much about “the way things are” because you’ve decided to be more passive in your response to problems
• you lose the potential satisfaction of driving your team toward a better world, the personal value of which is vast; this is a matter of using work as vehicle for self-expression and a source of meaning and purpose

In my career, I’ve found that I could easily accept the first thing, within reason. Though venting can be comforting, doing so without helping to find a solution eventually feels fraudulent. Who wants to be known as a complaining non-participant? Living with the third thing over the long term would tear my psyche apart. I accept that different people are different. And I don’t expect that I will always enjoy my work. But — call me unreasonable — I do need for my work to be personally meaningful in some regard. You might find your purpose elsewhere, but I can’t abide by the idea of spending eight hours of each of my life’s days in self-suppression mode.

It may seem harder to originate change from the bottom because you can’t exactly act with unfettered freedom. Also, some of the context required for optimal decisions resides at the top, where strategic thinking, business constraints, and risks continually migrate. It may be initially difficult for you to holistically survey the problem space.

This does not mean that you don’t have the opportunity to share constructive input, defend your opinions, and influence the ship’s heading. Owners are often insulated from the situation “on the ground,” and they know it. It’s usually impractical for them to directly and continuously poll everyone in the company for ideas related to a proposed direction. “Bottom up” communication is usually more timely, practical, and embedded with intelligence rooted in the realities of delivery. The juicy new ideas usually originate from the places where the negative effects of the status quo are most keenly felt.

This should go without saying, but there’s absolutely no reason for owners or senior management to be the only ones fielding ideas for improving the company. A good leader will defer to whomever can recognize and help solve problems.

So in the normal course of business, we notice problems. We use different languages to describe them. We misunderstand each others’ intent. We assume we don’t have the mandate to speak up. We fail to trust that our voices will be heard and valued. And so we end up doing little to make changes for the better. What’s missing here? The answer is simpler than you might think.

The economics of worry

When a person (owner or worker) in the organization seems “thick-headed,” they aren’t necessarily ignoring your idea; they may be calculating the cost of failure in a way that you might not yet see. They’re wary of spelunking through unknown caverns riddled with uncertainty, cost, and risk, especially if the proponent’s ideas seem to ignore important realities and constraints, or haven’t been fully mapped to their potential consequences. This kind of thinking is evolutionary: it keeps us safe from the prowling lion just outside the encampment.

Employees sometimes miss the fact that the better decisions, solutions, and processes they might propose also positively affect the owner’s bottom line. As such, any clear-thinking owner wants to integrate valuable feedback if there’s a chance it would improve the business. You could say that some leaders find it hard to “get out of their own way,” but most would make the required changes if they recognized the opportunity. The question is… will you help them?

Everyone wants “change for the better,” but ideas and opinions are cheap relative to execution. And though we can’t fully predict what will work, we all know that it will likely be hard, and that some group of people will have to worry about it. This is your trump card as a person with an idea: you can, with impunity, appoint yourself the CWO (Chief Worrying Officer) for that idea.

Whenever considering a new idea, ask yourself:

• Who is going to manage this thing now and in the future?
• What does that mean for their day-to-day?
• Is it reasonable to expect them to make the necessary changes to support the idea?
• Does the idea have enough value to warrant this cost?

Owners hate having to worry alone. I suspect I may even resent it a little, even though you might say I invited this complexity upon myself. Complete authority over strategy and execution can feel lonely, isolating, and even scary. My “wrong moves” occur in full view, and can negatively affect the lives of my people.

Offloading worry has real value to me, and believe it or not, I will compensate you for relieving me of it, because it creates a better risk/reward balance for me. The burden of negotiating the path to reward is shared. I’m looking for people who have good ideas and are willing to stay the course to implement them.

The most valuable employees aren’t those who wait for direction; they identify the gaps — the “orphaned” problems that no one has claimed — and step in to shoulder them. You don’t need to be an owner to adopt this mindset, but if you do become an owner, it’s automatic; you have no choice. Ultimately, the economics of worry means that you get paid not for what you know, but for what you’re willing to carry.

The owner mindset

Let’s say you’re ready to give this a shot. How to proceed?

I remember participating in extended office environment design sessions to address complaints of noise from constant foot traffic over our wood floors. This led us to engage in a consultation with a professional interior designer, and finally to purchase and install industrial carpeting along the well-travelled walkways. We also hung sound dampening acoustic boards for increased privacy and quiet. The project incurred significant time and expense, but it was a definite upgrade to the office design, which was much less noisy, as hoped.

Just before the installation, an employee tossed out a thought that “carpets shouldn’t be installed because they trap unwanted dust.” Ignoring the fact that the carpets were to be cleaned twice a week, making this a non-issue (which he didn’t realize), it was disheartening that he didn’t acknowledge the noise problems we’d fought so hard to solve, the thousands spent fixing them, or the fact that we were doing this solely for the benefit of our people. I thought to myself “why do we even bother trying to help?”

Barging in with complaints and peppering the decision maker with uninformed opinions makes it easier for them to dismiss you. If you arrive with questions, and considered and reasonable suggestions for improvement that consider the fuller problem space, they are much harder to ignore; doing so would seem idiotic.

You’ll still have to locate the right audience and practice your rhetorical framing, but after a while you should start to see some movement. The takeaway here is to more fully inhabit the owner mindset. Owners will listen to you as long as:

• you’re willing to listen to criticisms of your proposed approach
• you don’t abandon the idea the moment things get difficult
• you’re committed to developing and rallying a tribe, aligning minds in your organization one at a time
• you help people navigate the inevitable growing pains of adoption
• you remain flexible and patient over the long haul
• you’re willing to risk your relationship capital and reputation even when facing detractors
• you speak the language of risk and reward, proposing metrics and targets to measure progress and success

If the owner green-lights the initiative, they will of course try to help you where they can.

Practice translating your thoughts into a language your counterpart can understand (and filter their words through that translator in reverse), to narrow the Alignment Gap.

Jot down a short business case for each of your ideas, which means thinking about the cost of each idea, as well as its potential benefits, over the short and long term.

Ask yourself if you would risk your own money on this bet. It’s easy to play poker with someone else’s stack. The benefits don’t always have to be immediate cash; there is often hidden value to be found in intangibles like “employee satisfaction” and “worker retention.” Once these have been identified, though, come up with a rough financial model that assigns costs and values to make it easier to calculate ROI. This need not be exact; just directional.

Enhance your credibility by having skin in the game: time, energy, and reputation. If you’re feeling plucky, propose a value-sharing bonus to tie a reward to your outcome, or stake part of your bonus on the success of the attempt.

Making your mark

In a 1994 interview with the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, Steve Jobs talked about these idea more broadly, framing them as a general approach to a limitless life. While I did acclimatize to the owner mindset in business over the course of my career, I must admit that I’m still very much a student of applying this thinking to my own life. Nevertheless, his thoughts still ring very true.

When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and your your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. But life that’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact. And that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it.

You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life and actually something will… you know if you push in something will pop out the other side; that you can change it… you can mold it. That’s maybe the most important thing… is to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.

I think that’s very important and however you learn that, once you learn it, you’ll want to change life and make it better because it’s kind of messed up in a lot of ways. Once you learn that, you’ll never be the same again.

— Steve Jobs, 1994

Persistent miscommunication within an organization can fuel discontentment and even paranoia. But good communication is everyone’s responsibility-and you can only control your own. Be a full and enthusiastic proponent for what you care about. At some point you may feel like you are dragging the rest of the company along (including the owners), putting up with non-verbal road-blocking, side-eye doubt, and even a little kicking and screaming along the way. Remember that it can be difficult to even consider the merit of an idea without constructing opposing thoughts, so these won’t be in short supply. Treat resistance not as rejection, but as a stress-test of your proposal.

Owners appreciate people who apply their energies to improving things while sharing their front-line perspectives. You can design a much better solution together than either of you could alone. You are not the disempowered “shoplifter” you might imagine. The Alignment Gap narrows when someone decides to own changes for the better. Choosing to step into the gray area where solutions are proposed, decisions are made, and consequences are shared adds a sense of purpose to your daily work.

Text written and spoken by Jeremy Chan — a human being!

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Originally published at https://summersoul.substack.com.

https://medium.com/being/revisions-to-the-submission-guidelines-of-being-publications-65509a92ca44

Behind the Glass Wall, Part I was originally published in Being on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.