Conversations we keep replaying
- Stephanie Edward
- May 22
- 5 min read
Updated: May 27
The ceiling wasn’t as interesting as you’d expect, considering I’d spent the last two hours staring at it through the murky light in my dimmed bedroom. It’s flat, white, matte, with a light and ceiling fan. It was pretty much your basic ceiling.
I wasn’t seeing the ceiling at all, of course.
It was 3 in the morning and I was replaying a conversation I’d had at work earlier that day.
I’d been in the middle of a mid-year review with one of my employees. She’d been doing a fine job. Not outstanding but not mediocre either. Fine. Good. “Meets expectations”. I’d shared comments and anecdotes. We’d had a decent conversation.
However, at the end she’d asked me what we should improve upon to get a better rating next time.
It was a totally fair question but it caught me off guard. It shouldn’t have, though, because it was a question I’d asked my own manager before.
I’d prepared for this conversation with my employee. It’s not like I was winging it. But I didn’t prepare for this specific question.
So, I floundered.
Inside, I knew the answer.
She was incredibly helpful but didn’t fully take ownership of her projects. She didn’t seek out opportunities to add value. She lacked initiative, ultimately.
I became a bit flustered, chiding myself for not foreseeing this, desperately casting about for reasons to step away from the conversation for a moment so that I could jot down ideas and offer her the feedback she wanted in a way she deserved.
Ultimately, I told her nothing came to mind. That everything she was doing was great.
It was a weak response.
Here was an employee who was actively looking for ways to improve, who was not afraid of constructive feedback… and I couldn’t deliver.
I knew what I wanted to convey but I could not figure out how to convey it.
That’s what I was replaying while lying in bed that night. I was, in retrospect, so clearly seeing all the kind but direct ways I could have offered her the information she was seeking.
This situation is not unique in my life.
That was not by any stretch the first time I’d bemoaned the way I’d responded in the moment.
I’d often come up with the perfect rejoinder, explanation, or idea after the fact, wondering why I’d said what I said or why I hadn’t said what I wanted to say.
This happens to us in very specific situations: when we’re under pressure, when we’re tense, or when we feel we’ve been put on the spot.
At those times, we scramble to find the right words, lose our train of thought, or feel exposed or hurried.
This is because we’ve shifted into self-preservation mode. We’re no longer focusing on the conversation itself. We’re instead thinking about how we’re handling the conversation.
When that happens, we’re ultimately thinking about ourselves more than the interaction.
So, the problem wasn’t that I lacked confidence in giving her the tough feedback.
It also wasn’t that I needed better communication skills.
I’d also argue that it wasn’t that I hadn’t prepared enough.
I’d done ample preparation. While it’s true that I had not foreseen this specific question, I’m not sure that more preparation would have resulted in my doing so. After all, I knew what I wanted to tell her; I just froze when the opportunity arose to do so.
The problem was that, with my nervous system dysregulated and in overdrive,
I’d lost the ability to choose what to say… because I wasn’t in a position to think at all.
If you’re interested in the biology behind this it’s that, at those times, our brain detects (rightly or wrongly), that we are in danger, so it activates our sympathetic nervous system, sending us into fight or flight mode.
That’s when our focus shifts from what’s going on in the moment to self-protection, causing us to lose connection with our higher faculties.
We can learn from those interactions we replay in the middle of the night or on the commute home.
Paying attention to how we wish we’d responded can help us prepare for how we might respond differently in future similar situations.
However, that’s not enough.
Coming up with the “right” things to say afterwards doesn’t truly solve the problem.
We need to be able to access and convey those ideas in the moment.
There is a way to do this, even when we freeze or lose our train of thought.
The issue is that most of us haven’t been taught how.
That’s what I will be talking about in my next article.
How to stay present with yourself in conversations where your nervous system kicks it into high gear and you freeze.
In the meantime, I invite you to pay attention to any situation at work where you don’t respond the way you wish you had or whenever you end up replaying a conversation.
Notice how you are feeling in those moments: tense, under pressure, under a microscope, caught off guard.
Don’t judge, though. Just notice and then give yourself some compassion.
This is what I mean by the inner work of work: It’s essentially about being intentional with how you interact with what happens around you.
Warmly,
Stephanie
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This is the kind of stuff I work on with people in one-to-one sessions.
Clarity Sessions are private professional development sessions where we can talk through challenges or aspirations, big or small, and figure out concrete steps for moving forward together.
Want to learn more? Respond to this email or check out the Clarity Sessions page on my website. (Also, keep your eye out for opportunities to enter into draws for a free Clarity Session, which I do regularly, like in my newsletter last month.)
I’ve also just built a new corporate workshop addressing this exact issue.
It’s called Staying Clear in High-Pressure Conversations. Its purpose is to help participants stay grounded and focused when conversations get tense or don’t go as planned. Participants will identify how they lose clarity in those moments and why it happens, describe simple practical ways to regain focus in those high-pressure moments, and work through scenarios and activities to apply these techniques to real workplace situations.
Respond to this email or check out the Corporate Training page on my website to learn more.
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