Wednesday morning. The phone is on the table next to my coffee. I’ve been looking at it for about twenty minutes, which means I’m either preparing or stalling, and the honest answer is probably both.
Yesterday the notification fired and I named the thing I’d been doing wrong. Memos. Organized, credible, framed the way you frame a proposal when you want to control how you’re received. Four months of those. Zero conversations in return. I already knew why. The knowing was not the hard part.
The hard part is this: picking up the phone and asking someone directly if they have a problem you think you can solve, in real time, with no control over what happens next.
I’ve been opening conversations for twenty-four years. This is not a skill I lack. I know what it sounds like when someone feels found. I know how to make a first five minutes feel like the person you’re talking to was already on your mind, not just next on a list. I’ve done this in boardrooms, in bad hotel lobbies, and once in a parking garage in Denver at seven in the morning because that was when the client had thirty minutes. I am not afraid of a phone call.
What I’m afraid of, more precisely, is that the call will confirm something the emails got to avoid confirming. With an email you can decide what the conversation is. You write the frame and send it and whatever happens after that happens somewhere you don’t have to be present for. With a call, the other person gets to decide too. They can tell you the timing isn’t right, or the budget doesn’t exist, or the most honest answer of all: they don’t fully understand the problem they’re sitting with and your solution sounds like a solution to a problem they don’t have words for yet.
An email can’t hear any of that. A call has to.
Zoe came downstairs around nine-thirty. Poured a glass of water, looked at me sitting there with the phone and the coffee, and said, “Are you going to do it today?”
I said I was thinking about it.
She nodded in the way she has where I can’t tell if she’s satisfied or simply done asking. Then she said, “I read the one about the notification,” and went back upstairs.
Not the conversation my mother meant when she said to talk to her. But not nothing either. I sat with it for a while: what it is to have your seventeen-year-old read the unedited version of the decision you’re in the middle of making. Not the organized version. The one where you say “I have not made the call yet” and publish that sentence and wake up to it the next morning alongside everyone else.
I have been worried about what that models for her. I’m starting to think maybe it models the right thing.
One name left on the list. I haven’t spoken to this person in three years. Not a falling out, just the slow drift that happens when you work near someone and then don’t anymore. She ran a customer success team at a company that had exactly the kind of renewal problem I spent my career solving. I’ve thought about her periodically over those three years and didn’t reach out when the gap was still short enough that it would have felt normal. Now it’s been three years and any call I make is, by definition, a thing.
I know how to make a thing feel like a call and not like a request.
The opening I have is simple. Something like: I’m moving toward consulting and trying to find out whether the problem I think exists actually exists for the people I think it exists for. Do you have twenty minutes?
That’s it. No deck. No case. Just: do you have twenty minutes.
I haven’t said it yet. I’m going to. The thing I know about myself and difficult calls is that I don’t put them off past noon. Something happens to my confidence after two o’clock on a weekday that I have never successfully argued with.
It’s ten.