A Story About the Nonsense We Tell Ourselves

As I leave the seminar room in the late afternoon, there is yet another new folder in my bag.

The hotel stands on the edge of town, a glass façade, in front of it a car park with freshly painted lines, the afternoon sun falling across it. I walk to my car and feel that lightness I know after every good seminar. Two days of “Handling difficult conversations with confidence”, a trainer who knows what she is doing. I took notes, I practised, I nodded, and in my head the models are glowing like little signs: reflect first, then name it, then the I-statement. Appreciative in tone, clear on the substance. I feel more prepared than I have in a long time.

As head of the claims department I have a shelf I am secretly proud of. Certificates in plastic wallets, method folders with coloured dividers, a whole row of spines with words like feedback, conflict, leadership on them. I have attended every seminar the company offers, and a few more at my own expense. When I do not know how to go on, I book the next one, and that is how I have handled it for years.

In the car I see the calendar. 17:00, an appointment I made myself and have postponed three times: “Conversation Frau Ternes.” Petra Ternes has been in my team for fourteen years, a thorough woman everyone used to rely on. Since the spring she has been slipping. Cases lie untouched, deadlines lapse, twice I have had to clear up behind her without her noticing. I have known for weeks that I have to talk to her, and for weeks I have found a reason why today is the wrong day. Too much going on. Too delicate. Let me do the seminar first, then I’ll be better prepared.

Today is not a wrong day, I tell myself. Today I have two folders full of techniques.

I drive to the office, go to my room and put the new folder on the pile. Just before five Frau Ternes knocks and sits down opposite me. I have my opening sentences ready, reflect first, then name it. Then I see her face, tired around the eyes, a smile that asks for leniency, and in that moment everything that was so clear for two days dissolves.

“Frau Ternes,” I say, “I just wanted to hear how you’re doing. Is everything running all right?”

She says it’s all right, a bit much at the moment, privately. I nod, far too quickly. “I know that well,” I say, “take the time you need.” I hear myself talking and know that I am talking around the actual conversation. The I-statement lies ready to hand in my head, and I do not say it. Instead I do what I always do: I smooth things over, I reassure, I let her leave with a good feeling. After twelve minutes she stands up and thanks me for my understanding. I smile back. Nothing has been discussed, nothing will change, and for a brief moment I feel like a good boss, which is the worst part of the whole thing.

I stay sitting, and this time I do not immediately run on. For the first time I ask myself honestly why that has just happened again. It was not the technique; the technique was good, I could still recite it faultlessly this morning. It was simply gone the moment it got serious.

And then I see it. In the moment when Frau Ternes smiled and asked for leniency, there was an old, quiet sentence inside me, older than every folder on the shelf: I have to be liked. If I hurt her, she will stop liking me, so I do not hurt her, so I say nothing true. That sentence wins every time, no matter how many seminars I attend. For years I have been cramming new leadership tools and never changed the one grip with which I hold them. Every folder on the shelf is an attempt to drown out that sentence, and not one of them has ever touched it.

The tool was never the problem. The problem is the sentence underneath.

The next morning I come in early, before the office fires up with phones and inboxes. I ask Frau Ternes to come and see me again. I have not read a new folder and not memorised a formulation; I have only resolved one thing: I will go into this differently. Not as the man who has to be liked. As the man who is responsible for this woman and owes her the truth.

“Frau Ternes,” I say, “yesterday I spared you something, and that was a mistake. Your work has changed since the spring; deadlines have lapsed twice. I am telling you this because I care about you, not because I am dissatisfied.”

It is quiet. Her face tightens, and I hold the look I avoided yesterday. Then something inside her gives way. “Herr Brandt,” she says quietly, and then she starts to talk. About caring for her mother, about the nights, about the shame of not having told anyone. We talk for twenty minutes. At the end there is no solved problem; we have a first route: relief for four weeks and a firm appointment in a fortnight. She leaves with wet eyes, and for the first time in months something feels like a beginning.

Afterwards I sit at my desk and look at the shelf with my training materials. All those certificates, all those methods. They were never wrong; they were just one floor too high. The change I had been looking for in a thousand seminar hours began yesterday one floor lower down, with the sentence I tell myself.