Observations
Twenty-one ordinary observations. None of them is a test, none of them has a right answer, and none of them tells you anything about your character or your state of mind.
They exist because the secret feels far better contained from inside your office than it is from the floor.
Read a heading and notice what is true. That is all. There is no score, no total and no interpretation at the end, and nothing here diagnoses anything or assesses how well you are coping.
Each one has a box for a private note. Notes are saved in your own browser on this device and nowhere else, and clearing your browser data removes them. Nothing you type is visible to your company or to anybody at all.
If what surfaces is heavier than an observation — sleep gone for weeks, the evenings being got through with drink, or anything darker — that belongs on the safety page rather than in a box.
Nobody is fooled as completely as you think. These are the things people notice, and they have been noticing for weeks.
Notice whether you still walk the way you used to walk. Most men in this position change their route without deciding to — around a floor, past a different desk, in through a different door.
The people you are avoiding have almost certainly registered it. They will not say so.
Notice whether you are kinder than usual to one particular person. It is a common and entirely human response to knowing something about somebody that they do not know.
It is also legible from the outside, and it can read as pity rather than warmth.
Think of the last meeting where you would normally have signed off a plan, a hire, a piece of spend, and did not. Notice what you said instead.
A team can date the beginning of this from that meeting, often to the week.
Notice how often a door that is usually open has been closed in the last fortnight, and who was in the room when it was.
Closed doors and unexplained calendar blocks are the two things people read first.
Notice whether you have given an explanation recently that you knew was thin while you were giving it — a freeze, a delayed decision, a postponed review.
Not a reason to change anything. Only worth knowing that it registered.
Weeks of holding something with nobody to say it to has predictable effects. None of these is a character flaw and none of them is a diagnosis.
If you are waking in the small hours, notice what is actually in your head at that moment. For most men it is not the numbers or the board. It is one specific face.
That is worth knowing because it tells you which conversation you are most afraid of, which is usually the one to do first rather than last.
Notice how many times you have run the conversation in your head, and whether the version you are rehearsing is getting better or worse.
Rehearsal past a certain point stops preparing you and starts frightening you. There is no correct number; only your own pattern.
Notice whether you have stopped having coffee, lunch or a drink with people you normally would.
Men often describe this as not wanting to be liked while doing this. It is understandable, and it removes you from the room at exactly the point people are trying to read you.
Notice, plainly and without editing it, what you have been doing with the last hour of each day for the past fortnight.
If the honest answer is drink, or something else, that is worth taking seriously rather than filing under a difficult period. The safety page says where that goes.
Notice whether the people you live with have asked you what is wrong, and what you said.
You may have entirely good reasons for not telling them. It is still worth being accurate that they can see something.
Four things men say in this position. Each one is doing a job, and the job is usually protecting the person saying it.
Notice whether you are planning to say this in the room. It is often factually true.
What the other man hears is that nobody present is accountable to him. It is the single most reliable way to turn a survivable conversation into a grievance.
Notice whether this is precisely true or approximately true. There is usually a version of it that is exactly true, and saying the exact version costs nothing.
People forgave the truth about money. They did not forgive a reason they later found was false.
Notice the impulse to soften it into something positive. It comes from discomfort rather than from cruelty.
Nobody, afterwards, remembered this line kindly.
Notice that it is the most personal week of that man's year. The sentence is true about the process and false about his experience of it.
Being told it is not personal is what people mean when they say they were managed rather than told.
Four delays worth examining. Some will be genuine. You usually know which.
Notice what would actually change if the next set of numbers came in slightly better or slightly worse. If the answer is nothing, the wait is not analysis.
Almost nobody, afterwards, wished they had been told later.
Notice whether the date you have chosen protects the business or protects you from the week.
Both are real reasons. They are not the same reason.
Notice whether the plan involves somebody else doing the telling, and what your stated reason is.
Being told by a stranger while the decider stayed in his office is the thing men remembered longest and most bitterly.
Notice, concretely, what the first thing each affected person will see or hear is, and in what order the building will learn it.
This is the part entirely in your hands, and it is the part they will still be describing in ten years.
Three things to notice once it is done, rather than before.
Notice it and do not treat it as evidence about your character. It is the end of weeks of holding something.
It usually arrives sooner than men expect and sits badly with them.
Notice which conversation stayed with you and which you have already half-forgotten. There is rarely an obvious reason.
It is not a moral ranking of the people involved.
Notice what the ones who remain are actually watching. It is not the decision; it is how it was done.
That is uncomfortable and it is also the accurate reading.
Of the twenty-one, the one with the largest consequence is how they will find out, because it is entirely yours and it is the part still being described a decade later.