A client wrote something about me recently. I didn't ask her to, and I didn't know until it was done.

There was one line in it that has stayed with me since. She said that I can hear the thread running through everything you're trying to say before you've quite found the words yourself.

That's Tammy, in Auckland. I've thought about that line more than I expected to, and not because it was generous, although it was. It's what she chose to name. Out of everything we worked on together, the thing she reached for was that somebody had listened for the thread.

I've come to the conclusion that she named it because almost nobody had ever done it for her.

The women I work with are not short of words

She can give you the full context. The history, the constraints, the three options she has already considered and every reason each one is complicated. She can talk for forty minutes and every minute of it will be accurate, intelligent and useful.

What she can't do is say the one plain sentence underneath all of it.

And the more responsible she is, the harder that gets. She has spent twenty years explaining herself in ways that keep everyone else comfortable, so the detail isn't a lack of clarity. It's a habit built out of care, and it works well enough right up until the moment she needs to know her own mind.

Detail is how you stay reasonable. The plain sentence is how you become accountable to something, and there's a real difference between those two things.

Being listened to is not the same as being heard

Most of the women I work with are listened to constantly. They're senior, they're respected, and people pay close attention when they speak.

Being heard for the thread is different. It means somebody is tracking the thing you keep returning to rather than the thing you're currently saying, and noticing that you've mentioned the same discomfort four times in three different disguises.

That almost never happens in an ordinary week, partly because nobody has the time, and partly because she doesn't give anyone the chance. She edits in real time. She reads the room, softens the ask, adds the qualifier, and by the time the sentence leaves her mouth it has been made safe for whoever is listening.

She has become so good at this that she can no longer hear the unedited version herself.

Who do you actually think out loud with

I ask a question that sounds simple. Who do you think out loud with, honestly, without managing their reaction?

The answer is usually nobody.

Not because she is isolated, because most of these women have full lives and good relationships. It's that everybody close to her has a stake in the answer. Her partner has a stake. Her children have a stake. Her manager has an obvious one, her team has one, and her closest friend is at a different stage of her own life and will hear the question through that.

None of them are unkind and all of them are compromised. So she asks the question in a form small enough that nobody has to react to it, and she gets back an answer to a question she didn't ask.

That's the loop, and it can run for years.

What this costs at work

Senior women make consequential decisions for other people all week. She will restructure a team, kill a project, back a person, allocate a budget, and she will do all of it with judgement other people rely on.

Then she will defer her own decision indefinitely.

Not from indecision, because she is demonstrably decisive. It's that there's no forum where her own situation is the agenda item. Every meeting in her week is about something else, and the one conversation that is genuinely hers has never been scheduled by anybody, including her.

That deferral compounds quietly. Two years pass, the question hasn't changed, and by then the situation has usually decided something on her behalf.

This is not a talent

I want to say something about the listening itself, because I don't think it's a talent and I'd rather not have it framed that way.

A reader wrote to me last year and said my writing felt like being spoken to directly, as though I knew her situation. I didn't. What I know is the pattern, and I know it because I've sat in the middle of it myself more than once, in more than one country, usually at a point where I couldn't have told you what I wanted either.

Listening for the thread is a practice. It's noticing repetition, staying quiet slightly longer than is comfortable, and being willing to say the plain version back to somebody who hasn't been able to say it themselves.

Anyone can learn it, and almost nobody does it, because it requires having no stake in the answer.

You are not confused, you are unheard

It took me a long time to see this clearly, and it's the reframe I want to leave you with.

You are not confused. You are unheard.

Those two things feel identical from the inside and they need completely different responses. Confusion says gather more information, do more research, wait until it becomes obvious. Being unheard says none of that will help, because the information was never the problem and you already have it.

What's missing is a room where the thread gets named out loud, by someone who isn't affected by what you decide.

This is why I don't think complex transition can be worked out alone, and it isn't a matter of willpower or intelligence. It's that the thinking needs somewhere to land, and most women in the middle of a transition don't have anywhere it can.

What I'd sit with this week

If you had to say the plain sentence, without the context and without the qualifiers, what would it be?

Don't say it to anyone yet. Write it down and see whether you can look at it.

Where the thread gets named

If you've been going around the same question for two years, I've built something for exactly that.

It's called a Locate Session. Ninety minutes, online, and the whole purpose of it is to have the thread named out loud by somebody who isn't affected by what you decide. You come with the forty minutes of context, and you leave with the plain sentence and a clear sense of what this next period is actually for.

It's USD 300, and there's a short set of questions to answer beforehand, because I want to have done the thinking before you sit down rather than during.

Book a Locate Session here.