Years ago, working in corporate finance, I sat across the table from my CEO working through the forecast for the next twelve months. It had already been one of those long days, the kind where your ability to think clearly starts to go.

About 45 minutes in, he ordered pizza. We stopped working, and a conversation about family turned into a much deeper one about marriage. It lasted about 90 minutes.

I had been married seven years and had two children. He was more than 30 years older, married well over 20. Yet he became genuinely curious about how I was navigating marriage, asking question after question about communication and what it means to actually listen to your partner rather than just wait for your turn to speak.

I shared what I had learnt about my wife, particularly how she wanted to be seen and appreciated, rather than assuming my version of appreciation was automatically hers. I did not present myself as someone with marriage figured out. I was still learning, still making mistakes.

We just talked. By the time we finished, we had not actually completed the forecast.

You already know this, even if you have never said it out loud. Whatever is unresolved in the parts of your life nobody at work can see does not stay there. It walks into the boardroom with you and sits in on the calls, and nobody around that table has any idea it is even in the room.

A couple of days later, my CEO called me into his office.

He told me he had gone home, spoken to his wife, approached the conversation differently, asked different questions, listened differently. She noticed immediately. He wanted to say thank you.

I thought little of it. We had eaten pizza, talked about marriage and gone home.

Then, three or four weeks later, we were sitting in a board meeting. I was doing my usual quarterly reporting. Issues across the organisation had been hanging around for far too long: decisions slowed, conversations circled back, and things that should have moved forward hadn't.

Then my CEO started making decisions.

He became clear about what needed to happen, who needed to own it, and what we were no longer going to keep debating, no drama about it, simply cutting through issues that had circled for months and creating movement.

I had worked with him for almost two years and had never seen him operate with that level of decisiveness. Other people in the room noticed too. What has changed?

It was only later I understood. The issue he had been carrying in his marriage had been occupying more space than anyone around that table could have known. He was still functioning as CEO, still carrying the full weight of the role, yet something nobody in the organisation could see was affecting the person making its most important decisions.

Once the tension at home began to shift, he had more space to think, and that clarity showed up in how quickly and confidently he made decisions.

You have been taught to keep the person and the title separate, to leave everything else outside the door. That is not how you actually work, and you know it.

Whatever you're carrying, the conversation you've been avoiding, the doubt you haven't said out loud, does not decide the outcome for you. It shapes what you notice, what you let slide, and what you cannot let go of. That is enough.

Leadership is expressed through decisions: what deserves attention, what to challenge, what to tolerate. Sometimes the right answer is a new framework. Yet you have also sat in rooms where the framework was fine and something else entirely was quietly running the show.

That is why I no longer treat personal and professional as separate conversations, though I am not turning every leadership conversation into therapy. Plenty of the time the read is simply right. Every hard call still passes through you, which makes the person behind the title worth understanding.

As the tools around you get faster, this becomes more relevant, not less. You will still need judgement, and enough self-awareness to know whether your reaction comes from what is in front of you or from somewhere nobody in the room can see.

That conversation with my CEO taught me something I did not fully appreciate at the time. Sometimes you need to understand what the person walked into the room carrying, not just what happened once they got there.

This week, before you make the call you have been putting off, ask yourself one honest question: is this decision actually complicated, or is something else making it feel that way? Do not answer it out loud. Just notice what comes up.

• What is the one decision you have been sitting on for weeks that has nothing to do with the information you say you are still waiting for?
• If the people around your table knew what you were actually carrying into that room, would it change how they read your hesitation, or confirm what they already suspect?
• How long are you willing to let your team absorb the cost of something you have never once said out loud to anyone?

See you next Monday.

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