Tri Wiranto for Unsplash+
I was in a meeting recently, sitting across from someone walking me through a piece of work they were responsible for executing. It started like a normal conversation, great ideas, progress, context. The kind I really enjoy.
But as we got toward the end and needed to make a few decisions, something shifted. They started opening up to me, so I asked more questions, trying to understand what I was sensing. But by the time the meeting ended, I was the one that felt off. Everything felt heavy, the kind that you can feel in your gut and in your joints.
It took me a minute to name what had happened. I was listening but at the same time I was taking on someone else's emotions. And the moment I realized it, I actually laughed out loud. Because what I pictured (and I mean this literally) was a box with their emotional weight sitting right there inside it. So I mentally closed the lid, picked it up, and handed it back while saying "no thank you, I would not like your gift."
People give you what they're carrying because they trust you with it. That part I genuinely respect. But a gift you didn't ask for is still yours to return.
I've done this for a lot of my career and never well. When I was running my company, speed was my thing. Someone would tell me something, a colleague, a client, a vendor and I'd move on it immediately. I thought that was the job. And sometimes it was. But looking back, I elevated a lot of things unnecessarily because I confused their urgency for signal. I can only see that clearly now, after enough years of watching what happened when I did. I feel the weight of some of those calls.
What I've learned (slowly and over time) is that the goal isn't to slow people down or keep them at a distance. I want people coming to me in motion, when they're being honest. When someone is feeling something in real time and they trust you enough to say it out loud, that's not a problem to manage. That's information you can't get any other way. My kind of people—the ride or dies—the ones who know I'm looking out them, they don't come to me performing. They come to me mid-thought, mid-frustration and mid-figuring-it-out and I want that from them.
But here's the thing nobody talks about: being that person requires a specific kind of steadiness that has nothing to do with staying calm. It's not about keeping your emotions out of it. It's about staying oriented while theirs move. I have to hear them and feel the weight of the situation with them. I have to understand what it actually means to them, not the summary version, the real version. And then I have to step back out and decide what to do with it.
Most of the time, what makes something feel urgent isn't the situation itself. It's the emotional velocity of the person delivering it. When someone is frustrated, it feels urgent. When someone is certain, it feels important. When someone is close to the problem, it feels like it needs to move now. And if you're sitting close enough to feel all of that (which you have to be) it's very easy to mistake their urgency for your own.
That's where the job actually starts. Most of you are good and listening and receiving, but the important part is in what you do when you step back out. When you decide what gets elevated, what gets time, and what gets set down. And sometimes the right call is to do nothing at all, once you’ve taken the time to assess it, feel the weight of it honestly and decided it was (or was not) ready. To some that might look like avoidance, but it's actually discernment accumulated after years of exposure.
I've started thinking about it as a handoff I control. I can fully receive what someone gives me, take it seriously, sit with it and let it matter. But when I leave the room, I decide what comes with me. I don't have to carry their urgency or turn their conclusion into my action before it's ready. The information came in. What happens next is mine to decide.
The job isn’t to carry what you’re given, it’s to decide what belongs to you. Be close enough to feel it but always far enough to see it.
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