“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"What is it that's bothering you?"
A former colleague had asked me to attend a townhall that he was holding for his team. He leads a cross-functional group with product, engineering, design, and a few finance people. And they had been through six months of reorganization.
This was the meeting where he was supposed to bring the threads together. He had prepared carefully. He had a clear narrative that he'd practiced. “Here is what changed, here is why, here is where we go from here.”
The reason he'd invited me was to have an outsider's perspective on how it went. The meeting itself went fine. Nobody challenged him. The questions at the end were polite, even supportive.
Yet in our 1:1 debrief, I could sense he wasn't happy. That’s when I posed my question about what was bothering him. "I don't know," he said. "I've given harder presentations than that one. And they went better. I don't understand what happened."
"Did you believe the story you were telling?" I asked him.
There was a long pause. "I believed most of it," he said.
Your audience feels it when something is off
Audiences, especially audiences who work with you across functions and have watched you navigate uncertainty for months, are not primarily evaluating your content. They are evaluating whether you mean it. They may not be able to articulate what felt off. They just know something did.
This is harder to fix than a slide deck. You cannot rehearse your way out of it.
What makes it particularly difficult for cross-functional leaders is that they are often carrying a story on behalf of others. They are asked to communicate alignment they may not fully feel, to a room of people with their own misgivings and priorities.
The younger me always gave in to the temptation to compensate for my own uncertainty by being more emphatic, to layer in more evidence and to projecting certainty. This almost always makes it worse.
An audience can only trust a story that the teller has first been honest with themselves about. What reads as conviction in a room that is with you feels like pressure when your audience isn’t with you.
There is a more effective way. That is to locate the doubt you feel specifically, and decide what is actually true about it. Not because you need to share it with the room. But because an audience can only trust a story that the teller has first been honest with themselves about.
There is a version of this that works in the meeting too.
"I'll be honest — this is harder than it looks, and we don't have all the answers yet. Here is what I know, and here is what we are still working through."
That sentence, said plainly and without apology, tends to land better than ten slides of supporting evidence.
Watch It In Action
In Hamdi Ulukaya's 2019 TED talk “The anti-CEO playbook” he admits, “Honest to God, that was the only idea I had.” What makes the talk worth watching is that you cannot find a gap between what he believes and what he is saying.
Watch specifically from the three-minute mark, where he describes the day he first walked into the abandoned yogurt factory in upstate New York — and notice what happens to the room when a person is simply, completely present in their own story.
Try This Week
Before your next significant presentation to a cross-functional room, take ten minutes with these three questions:
What am I not certain about in this story? Name it specifically — not "the market is uncertain" but the actual doubt you have and are carrying into the room. You do not need to resolve it but need to know what it is.
Is there one sentence I can say that acknowledges the complexity honestly? One sentence, placed carefully, often does more for trust than everything surrounding it.
Where in this presentation am I performing confidence rather than feeling it? That is the section to simplify or reframe — because that is the section the room will sense even before they hear it.
From Elsewhere
In Sufi tradition, ḥāl (حَال) refers to a transient state of the heart — a quality of inner presence that cannot be manufactured, rehearsed, or held in place by effort. Sufi teachers have written for centuries about how a person's ḥāl is immediately perceptible to those around them, not through what is said but through something carried in the quality of attention itself. The concept assumes that inner states are never truly private — they communicate before words do. More on ḥāl here »