The colleague you described - warm, magnetic, then slowly polished into something people stopped bringing bad news to. You wrote about her like you watched it happen in real time. But the detail you gave - the way resentment shows up as delayed responses, tension hides in correct emails - that's not observation. That's inventory. You know what those emails feel like from the inside.
Pennebaker is the right citation, but you went past him. He proved suppression costs the body. You proved something harder: it costs the relationship. "People are extraordinarily good at reading what isn't said" - that means the whole performance is for nothing. You suppress to protect the connection, and the suppression is exactly what kills it.
The third way you're proposing - "move through, meet what's there" - is simple enough to sound easy and hard enough that almost no one does it. Because feeling it at work means risking the one thing professionalism was designed to protect: the illusion that you're fine.
You're not writing about work culture. You're writing about what it costs a body to pretend it doesn't have one.
I think work and life are so intertwined it effects it all. Thank you so much for reading and pointing out the relationship aspect. It is subtle cost, but not as big as the cost to ourselves and our lives.
Moving through it is what I’m here to teach people. It’s simple but to your point so simple we don’t do it.
Simple and easy are two different things. You teach the simple part. The hard part is they have to actually feel it. That's where most people turn back.
The colleague you described - warm, magnetic, then slowly polished into something people stopped bringing bad news to. You wrote about her like you watched it happen in real time. But the detail you gave - the way resentment shows up as delayed responses, tension hides in correct emails - that's not observation. That's inventory. You know what those emails feel like from the inside.
Pennebaker is the right citation, but you went past him. He proved suppression costs the body. You proved something harder: it costs the relationship. "People are extraordinarily good at reading what isn't said" - that means the whole performance is for nothing. You suppress to protect the connection, and the suppression is exactly what kills it.
The third way you're proposing - "move through, meet what's there" - is simple enough to sound easy and hard enough that almost no one does it. Because feeling it at work means risking the one thing professionalism was designed to protect: the illusion that you're fine.
You're not writing about work culture. You're writing about what it costs a body to pretend it doesn't have one.
I think work and life are so intertwined it effects it all. Thank you so much for reading and pointing out the relationship aspect. It is subtle cost, but not as big as the cost to ourselves and our lives.
Moving through it is what I’m here to teach people. It’s simple but to your point so simple we don’t do it.
Simple and easy are two different things. You teach the simple part. The hard part is they have to actually feel it. That's where most people turn back.
100% I’m excited to help the people who don’t want to turn back
They'll find you. They always find the person who isn't flinching.