She called me after her second job change in a year. A director of operations, and she hated her job again. Each time she had stepped forward into a new office and a clean start. Each time the same current found her. A different face, the same tide pulling at her ankles.
Somewhere in that year, she began to see it. The companies kept changing. She didn’t. Something in her said, maybe I need help. She listened, and she reached out.
She told me about her difficult boss: the meetings, the way he moved past her, how she left every day with her jaw tight and something bitter in her mouth. She felt invisible to him. Disrespected.
I asked her one question. “Did you tell your boss you have an idea?”
Silence. Then, quietly: “No.”
In that one word, I saw where she had abandoned her agency.
She had been waiting for him to ask, waiting for him to see what she hadn’t said out loud. Every time she swallowed what she wanted, she left a little less of herself in the room. He wasn’t refusing her. He was just being him.
I watched it land. Her breath changed. Something cleared, the way water clears when you stop stirring it.
So we practiced asking. Not louder. Cleaner. One sentence with a polished edge: I have an idea, and I’d like time to walk you through it. The first time she said it to me, her voice shook. By the fifth, it rang true.
Then she asked him.
He said yes.
He didn’t change. He kept being exactly who he was. What changed was the woman walking into his office. She stopped carrying resentment home. She stopped looking for the next exit. She brought her ideas into the room and claimed the time they needed.
She stayed. She became COO.
I remember her voice on that call, how it went soft and steady when she talked about him, with nothing left to prove. She had stopped waiting for him to hand her something that was already hers. She belonged in that room. She always had.
Where have I been waiting for someone else to honor what I haven’t said out loud?
If you keep meeting the same boss in different offices, let’s talk.
