I Nearly Missed the Point

I knew what I would have told a client. It took me a little longer to tell myself.

Last week’s essay was about what happens when trying harder stops helping. I believed what I wrote.

I knew this pattern

I’ve watched it for thirty years in my work with clients. Something isn’t working, a decision has stalled or the expected result hasn’t appeared, and the instinct is to add. More detail. More explanation. Another attempt to make the point impossible to miss.

I’ve told clients countless times to do the opposite. Before adding anything, look properly at what is already there.

I just hadn’t expected to spend this week catching myself doing exactly the thing I had written about. Apparently, that advice is easier to give from the other side of the table.

The week started well. I felt clear about where my writing was going and increasingly certain about what I wanted it to sound like. Then Tuesday’s numbers came in lower than I had hoped, and by Wednesday some of that certainty had disappeared. My first instinct was to fix it.

By then, I was ready to write my way out of my disappointment. More words. More explanation. A bigger question at the end. Then I caught myself and closed the laptop.

When I came back, I read what I’d actually written rather than what I thought I’d written.

Nothing important was missing. If anything, there was too much. I was explaining ideas that didn’t need quite so much help and defending sentences that could have stood perfectly well on their own.

The problem wasn’t a lack of effort. I simply wasn’t paying close enough attention to what was already there.

What I nearly missed

That was my week. It started with clarity, became considerably less comfortable in the middle, and ended somewhere I hadn’t expected. Not with a better content plan or a clever new way to improve the numbers, but with a clearer understanding of my own voice.

I hadn’t needed to find it. I needed to stop crowding it.

Perhaps that’s why this week has stayed with me.

When something isn’t producing the result we hoped for, our attention moves very quickly towards what is missing. What else should I do? What should I change? What haven’t I tried yet?

Sometimes those are exactly the right questions. But not always.

Sometimes the useful information is already there, buried underneath everything we’re preparing to add to it.

I’ve spent much of my working life helping other people slow down long enough to see that distinction. This week I had the slightly humbling experience of having to do it for myself.

I’m glad I did. Not because I ended the week with all the answers. I didn’t. But I’m clearer about something I care about much more: how I want to write, how I want to pay attention and how easily even thirty years of knowing better can disappear when the problem becomes your own.

Expertise isn’t never falling into the patterns you recognise in everyone else. It’s getting a little quicker at noticing when you do.

Where in your own week might adding more be getting in the way of seeing what’s already there? I’d love to hear what you notice.

Talk soon,
Pia

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