It’s Friday. The post-it is still on my desk, exactly where I left it Wednesday night.
“I’m going to think about whether I know anyone.” Seven words. I’ve been reading them the way you read something that might contain information you don’t have yet: slowly, looking for what shifts.
I have spent twenty-four years learning to read the end of a call. The thank-you that means goodbye. The “we’ll circle back” that has never, not once in my experience, resulted in any circling. The follow-up question that means someone is still thinking. I can hear the difference. What I cannot figure out, two days later, is whether seven words from someone I trust constitutes a signal or a kindness.
I keep arriving back at: a signal.
What I don’t know is what signals do, from here.
Here is the gap I did not adequately account for. I know how to deliver the service. I know how to have the conversation. Wednesday confirmed both of those things in ways that surprised me, including the ways I surprised myself. I was good at the call. That is, I should say, an incomplete sentence. I was good at the conversation part of the call. What I did not spend enough time thinking about is how a consulting practice finds clients once you are no longer sitting inside an institution where clients already exist.
For twenty-four years, clients came to me through infrastructure I did not build. Accounts handed down, introductions made by the company’s name, meetings scheduled because someone at the organization had already said yes to a relationship in principle before I showed up. I was good at that. What I was good at was everything that happens after someone shows up.
What I have been building, for four months, is the part before someone shows up. I understood this theoretically. I’m starting to understand it specifically. The referral logic makes sense: one conversation leads to another conversation which leads, eventually, to someone who has the problem and the budget and the timing lined up at once. The logic is sound. What I cannot yet estimate is scale. How many first conversations become second ones. How many of those become anything at all.
One person said she would think about it.
That is where I am.
Zoe read the post about the call. I know because she came downstairs this morning, poured herself coffee, looked at me at the kitchen table, and said: “She sounds real.” Three words, then back upstairs.
I sat with that for a while. I think “she sounds real” was about the contact, not the post. Or maybe both. I honestly don’t know how Zoe parses these things, and she has been parsing them since June without me in the room.
I said in yesterday’s post that I’m starting to think this models the right thing for her, being in the middle of a decision in public instead of just showing her the after. I meant it when I wrote it. I still mean it this morning. I’m also aware that I wrote it, published it, and she read it before I had a chance to decide whether I actually wanted to say it, which is more or less how this whole project works and which I keep choosing to continue anyway.
The conversation my mother meant when she said to talk to her has still not happened. Three words on the way to the coffee maker is not that conversation. It is getting harder to call the gap between those two things a coincidence.
The unnamed document is open in a tab I close and reopen without making progress. Two unfinished sentences: one about what the noticing is for, one that starts “which is why.” I have known for months that both require the other side. I still cannot see the other side from here.
The post-it is on my desk. I don’t know when “I’ll think about it” becomes something or doesn’t. I don’t know what I do if it doesn’t. I’ve been sitting with that particular not-knowing for four months and I’m getting marginally better at it, which I did not expect, and which I’m not certain counts as progress.
The call told me I can do this. It did not tell me this is going to work. Both of those things are true at the same time, and I am sitting in the space between them, reading seven words, waiting to find out if they go together.