The founder who couldn't say the word 'tired'

He could say "under-resourced". He could say "context-switching". He could say, with a straight face and in front of forty people, that the quarter had been "operationally demanding". What he could not say, in eleven months of fortnightly hours with me, was tired.

The words we're allowed

Every profession issues you a vocabulary, and leadership issues you a very particular one. It's a language built entirely from nouns that happen to other people. Headcount. Runway. Attrition. It is a language with no first person in it.

So when the thing that's wrong is happening in the first person, you have nothing to say. You reach for the noun, and the noun doesn't fit, and so you say nothing at all — and then you go home and you're strange with your children and you don't know why.

What broke it open

Two words, in the end, and neither of them was mine. In session nine he was describing — again — an operational problem, and he stopped mid-sentence and said: "I'm knackered."

He apologised immediately. That's the part I want you to notice. He apologised for the only true sentence he'd said all year.

Try it, out loud

Find one person this week. Not your board, not your co-founder, not the person whose job security depends on you being fine. One person. And say the true sentence, in the first person, with no noun in it at all.

It will feel disproportionately awful, and then it will feel like putting something heavy down. That's the whole trick. There isn't a better one and I've been looking for six years.