The Quiet Transmission Between Two People at Work

The silence in his story felt charged, like the moment right before a wave breaks.
He sat across from me describing a meeting with his boss, and I could feel it — that invisible shift in the air when something unspoken enters the room.

He told me about the conversation — nothing dramatic, nothing explosive.
Just a simple exchange where his boss said one thing, but the space between them said something else entirely.

He had felt it immediately: a tightening across his chest, a flicker in his stomach, the swift rise of an emotion he didn’t yet have language for.

As he recounted the moment, he began sensing it again with that inner sonar of his —
that way he can feel the echoes inside his body:

The first sharp wave — new, surprising.
Then the older ones — familiar, patterned, the same ones that often surface when power dynamics enter the room.

He didn’t rush to correct himself.
He didn’t try to push the feeling away.
He paused and stayed with it.

I watched him give the emotion enough space to breathe.
And in that space, a clarity began to form:

The boss wasn’t the source of the feeling.
The feeling was his — rising through the lens of his own history, his own meaning-making, his own expectations.

Emotions transmit between people even when no one names them.
They creep like currents under the surface of water — shaping the tone, the pace, the posture, the choices.

As he listened more deeply, something softened in him.
His shoulders dropped.
His breathing deepened.
And a tenderness appeared that hadn’t been there minutes before.

“What I actually want,” he said softly, “is to keep my heart open — even at work.”

That was the turning point.
Not the conversation with his boss, but the conversation he was finally having with himself.

The moment he saw that he had agency over his own heart, the whole story shifted.
He wasn’t trapped in the dynamic anymore.
He was standing inside his own clarity.

And in that clarity, his heart opened on its own — not through willpower, but through awareness.

Reflection

It wasn’t his boss that needed to change — it was the way he was listening to the movement inside himself.

The Invitation

This week, notice one moment at work where you feel a subtle shift in your body — a tightening, a spark, a contraction, a warmth.
What happens if you pause long enough to let it rise and fall without fixing it?

Next Step

If you want to explore this kind of inner listening in your own work life, you can book a conversation with me here:
https://calendly.com/annalscott/purpose-call