the roles we play

Jul 23

Dear Reader,

A client's phone rang in the middle of a session once. She glanced at the screen, apologized, and said she needed to take it, just for a second, it was work. And for about thirty seconds, a different person sat across from me. Her voice lifted, her sentences turned quick and bright, and her whole posture reorganized itself around whoever was on the other end. When she hung up she set the phone down, exhaled, and came back. She caught me noticing and laughed. That's my work self, she said, the way you might introduce a colleague.

Most of us carry a small cast like that. There's a version of us that shows up at the office, and another one appears, without ever being summoned, the moment an old friend calls. We don't usually decide to make the switch. We change our posture crossing a doorway before we've said a single word, and the whole thing happens so smoothly that we almost never see it from the inside.

The word performing can make this sound like an accusation, and that's worth resisting. Learning to meet each room on its terms is a skill, one we picked up so early that we can't remember practicing it. Each one is made of real material. It's just that we've been running the whole repertoire for so long, so automatically, that we rarely pause to notice how many there are, or how different they've become from one another.

So that's the invitation this week, and it asks nothing more than attention. The next time the phone rings, or you walk from your car into somewhere that expects something of you, see if you can catch the switch as it happens. The small shift in your voice, the settling into a familiar shape. You don't have to judge it or change it. Later in the year, we'll get curious about where these versions came from. For now, it's enough to start noticing the cast.

Yours in the journey,