My wife and I have spent close to fifteen years doing pre-marriage and post-marriage counselling together and fter working with over a hundred couples, I have noticed something.

A lot of couples think they are fighting each other.

They are not.

They are fighting something neither of them can see.

Their past.

They thought they were fighting each other, when what they were actually experiencing was the collision of patterns formed long before they had ever met: things learned in childhood about what conflict meant, what love looked like, what happened when you felt rejected, ignored, criticised or unsafe. None of it had disappeared because they got married. It had simply entered the marriage with them.

That happens to far more of us than we realise. We look across the table and assume the problem is the person sitting opposite us, without ever examining what we brought into the room ourselves.

It is not only marriages. Show up to work with the clearest intentions you have ever had, and the same invisible force is standing in the room with you: pressure hits, something older than the plan takes over, and you call the decision leadership, when half the time it is not even you making it.

I have given talks and speeches for the past eleven years. For a long time, I could not write notes for a talk, and I certainly could not use them once I had written them.

Go back further, over twenty years now, to a board presentation early in my career. I was twenty two, twenty three, notes fully prepared, ready to walk in and deliver. My manager stopped me before I went in and told me not to use them. Notes show a lack of confidence, he said. They show you do not know what you are talking about.

I went in with nothing. It was not the strongest meeting I have ever been in, inside the room or outside it. I held my own, but only just, and I carried that manager's line with me for the next two decades. Every talk since, I memorised. Every board, every stage, every client room, nothing in my hand.

Then I started watching the people the whole system tells you to imitate: CEOs with notes on the table in front of them, board members reading from a page without apologising for it, a prime minister and a president who never speak without a teleprompter running the entire time, and nobody in any of those rooms thinks less of them for it.

I knew the notes would help, had known for years, and still could not put my hand on the page, because somewhere back in a room I had not thought about in twenty years, someone had told a twenty three year old that doing so meant something about him.

That was not a lesson about presentation skills. It was a Script, learned so early I stopped noticing it had ever been someone else's rule, and I had been running it for over twenty years by the time I finally traced it back to that room.

Think about the decision you made this week that you were proudest of: the one where you moved fast, held the line, did not blink. Now think about the one from the same week you would rather not discuss, where you softened a message you meant to deliver straight, or let a conversation slide because the timing never quite felt right. Both came from somewhere. One came from you.

The other came from a Root laid down before you had a job title, the ground beneath every reaction, firing first because it fired first for thirty years before this company existed. Or it came from a Script you learned so early you stopped noticing it was a performance: the rules for what earned approval, what made you safe to be around, what you had to suppress to be taken seriously. You did not choose either one. You inherited them, and then spent a career mistaking them for your own judgement, the same way I spent twenty years mistaking a stranger's opinion about notes for a fact about my own competence.

It is the same force that sat in that marriage, wearing a different room. The couple in front of me had never looked at what they brought into their relationship, so they kept fighting the wrong thing, convinced the problem was each other. You are doing the same with a boardroom instead of a bedroom, and the cost is not an argument at the dinner table. It is a decision that shapes other people's careers, made by someone who was never consulted about whether they should be the one making it.

This week, take one decision, a real one, something you actually did under pressure, and ask where it came from: not what you told the room it came from, but what actually produced it. If you cannot answer honestly in under a minute, that is the answer.

1. If you traced your instinct for conflict, for pressure, for being challenged, back to its actual source, whose voice would you hear first?
2. Whose rules are you actually following when you decide what strength is supposed to look like in front of your team?
3. If the twenty three year old version of you were in the room for your next big decision, whose opinion would still be running it?

See you next Monday.

​​​​​ ​Unsubscribe · Preferences​