The Example That Gave Her the Ick
I gave a room of professionals an example of what good support sounds like, and a woman told me it gave her the ick.
She said it plainly, without any cruelty in it, the way you'd tell someone they had spinach in their teeth. And then heads started nodding around the table. Another woman said that if her husband talked to her that way, she'd find it condescending. Someone else agreed. Within about ninety seconds, my carefully built example had been taken apart by the people I built it for.
That was the second of three lunch sessions I led this summer at the Central Exchange, a series on what we carry and how it shapes the way we lead. I'd spent real time on that example. I wanted it to be clean, warm, unmistakably good. And it landed sideways on a roomful of smart women who deal with hard conversations for a living.
It's the most useful thing that's happened in the series.
Here's the example, word for word. It's a manager talking to someone on their team:
"Hey Jessi. I came in hot on Tuesday when we talked and I'd like to apologize, that wasn't fair to you. More importantly, I've noticed you've been managing a lot lately, and I want to check in on how you're really doing. You don't have to share anything you're uncomfortable with, but I want to make sure you know the door is always open. If you look at your plate this week and realize you need to offload a task or take some time, just send me a message and we'll handle it, no questions asked."
Read it once and you might see the problem faster than I did.
Why did the example I was proudest of land the worst?
Because I wrote it to be right, and right is not the same as received. Every line in there is defensible. Put them together and something else happens.
The apology is real, and then it gets used. "More importantly" demotes the thing I just apologized for and turns it into an on-ramp to a different conversation, one the other person never asked to have. That's the move. If your husband opens with an apology and then pivots to his observations about your emotional state, you're not receiving an apology. You're receiving an agenda.
It keeps going from there. "I've noticed you've been managing a lot lately" means somebody has been watching you and reaching conclusions. "How you're really doing" tells you your earlier answers weren't believed. "You don't have to share anything you're uncomfortable with" grants permission for a disclosure you never offered to make. "If you look at your plate this week and realize you need to offload a task" assumes you haven't looked at your own plate, or that you looked and got it wrong.
By the last sentence, one person has done all the noticing, all the assessing, and all the deciding. The other person's only available move is to receive it graciously. Care that leaves someone nothing to do starts to feel like management in a softer voice.
I had also made it too perfect, and perfect is a tell. It signals that the speaker rehearsed this, which means they were thinking about you before they talked to you, which means a conclusion already exists and you're being walked toward it. Being handled by someone with a plan is a specific and unpleasant feeling when you're the one struggling.
The other half of it is that a scripted line comes with no relationship attached, so everyone in the room supplied their own. One woman heard her husband. Someone else heard a boss. Whatever voice they put it in carried years of context I had no access to, and that context did most of the work. My words did almost none of it.
Why do we assume the people closest to us know how our words land?
We assume it because proximity feels like fluency, and it isn't. The conversation in that room kept circling this without quite naming it: after enough years with someone, you expect them to know how you'd take a particular sentence. And you expect that they expect the same from you. Two people, both certain the other one has the manual.
It shows up in marriages, and it shows up in working relationships that have gone on long enough. The colleague you've sat beside for a decade. The person you've reported to through three reorgs. You stop checking, because checking feels like a step backward in a relationship that's supposed to be past that.
The room also went somewhere I hadn't planned for, which is that the same words carry different weight depending on who's saying them. The conversation turned to the difference between a male and a female superior, and how the identical sentence can read as care from one and condescension from the other, or land as authority from one and overreach from the other. Nobody in that room needed the concept explained. They had all lived it.
Does it matter what I meant if it didn't land that way?
No, and one woman said it better than I ever have. She came up to me afterward and told me the thing she was taking from the session was this: when someone is in crisis, my opinion doesn't matter.
“When someone is in crisis, my opinion doesn’t matter.”
I love that sentence. It does in eight words what I've been trying to do in forty-five minutes.
Your intent isn't the measure. It's not nothing, and I'm not arguing that you should ignore what you meant. But the person in front of you is the one holding the experience, and their read on it is the only read that counts. You can say the thing you would have wanted to hear, in the tone you would have wanted to hear it, and still miss, because they are not you. That is the whole job, and it's harder than any script.
Which is why the example failing was better than the example working. If it had landed, twenty people would have written down a sentence and gone back to their offices with a line to deploy. Instead, they spent fifteen minutes talking about how words actually travel between people who know each other, which is the thing I was trying to teach and couldn't have taught by getting it right.
What does this change for how you lead?
It moves you off of scripts and onto checking. If the words themselves aren't doing the work, then the only reliable move is to find out how it landed rather than assume.
That's smaller than it sounds. It's asking "did that come out the way I meant it?" after something you weren't sure about. It's noticing the pause before someone answers you. It's being willing to say "that landed wrong, let me try again," which costs nothing and buys an enormous amount.
For the people you've known longest, it means going back and asking a question you think you already know the answer to. You've probably been running on a read of that person you formed years ago. They've changed. So have you. The manual is out of date and neither of you has mentioned it.
I'm keeping the example in the talk. The next time I use it, I'm going to say out loud that it doesn't work for everyone, and then ask the room what they'd want to hear instead. That's a better session than the one I planned.
The series ended earlier this week. I walked into the first lunch in July with material I'd been working on for months. The best of what I'm leaving with came from the tables.
Jessi Bixler is an entrepreneur, marketing strategist, and the author of The Story We Share (Next Thing Press, 2025), a memoir about the ripple effects of sexual assault through a family and the systems that respond to harm. She speaks to leadership audiences and advocacy organizations on what people carry and how it shapes how we lead.
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