If you are the person your team, your board, or the people around you have learned to lean on; the one who listens, absorbs, and hands things back steadier than they arrived, this is for you.
I met Mich for the first time recently.
Yet for the past twelve years, she has been a quiet presence in the life of someone close to me.
After his father suffered a cardiac arrest and died far too soon, Mich became part of the village helping to nurture this special young man in our lives.
She showed up.
She listened.
She became the person he could think out loud with, when everything in his world had gone quiet.
But something else struck me when I finally met her.
Someone had made room for Mich to be that person.
The person close to me had invited her in. Trusted her. Made space for a relationship where he could say the unfinished, unsteady things, and have them held without judgment.
Mich's role in his life was not assumed.
It was created.
It left me sitting with a question:
If you are the one everyone else thinks out loud with, who is your sounding board?
I know what it feels like to be that person.
For over thirty years, I have stood alongside a demanding career, not as the one holding the title, but as the one who listened, absorbed, and steadied things from just outside the room. I learned early what it means to hold space for someone else's complexity, night after night, decision after decision.
I have been fortunate. I have found people, in leadership circles, in my own practice, in relationships I built deliberately, who could hold that space for me in return.
But I have also learned this: it does not happen automatically, no matter how senior, how capable, or how well-regarded you are. Being the sounding board for everyone else does not guarantee you will have one of your own. Sometimes you have to go looking for it.
The higher you go, the fewer people you can think out loud with
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from succeeding at something you are no longer sure fulfils you, while having no one left to say that out loud to.
You have built a career most people would envy.
The title.
The influence.
The track record.
And yet something is shifting.
Quietly at first. Then unmistakably.
The trouble is, the more senior you become, the fewer people you can safely think out loud with.
Your direct reports are affected by your decisions, so you edit yourself around them.
Your peers may, in some quiet way, also be your competitors.
Your friends outside work do not have the context to really follow what you are carrying.
And so, without quite deciding to, you start thinking alone.
That is often where the real cost begins.
The call you make without ever saying it out loud to anyone first.
The conversation you keep postponing because there is nowhere safe to rehearse it.
The thing quietly eroding your energy, your clarity, your confidence, never named, because naming it would mean admitting it out loud, to someone.
For the leader living it, it can sound like:
I should be able to work this out on my own.
Everyone else seems to manage.
If I say this out loud, what will it mean?
For the people around them, it can look like:
I do not understand why they seem so disengaged.
They used to be so decisive.
Why didn't they just talk to someone?
Underneath both stories may be the same problem.
Clarity rarely arrives entirely inside your own head. It tends to arrive the moment you say something out loud to someone who can hold it carefully, ask the right question, and hand it back to you clearer than you left it. But that only works if such a person exists in your life, and for a lot of senior people, somewhere along the way, that person quietly stopped existing.
Not because they became less capable.
Not because they stopped needing it.
Because the room they had built around themselves had a role for the listener, and no one had thought to build a role for them.
Three things worth carrying with you
1. Being trusted with everyone else's thinking is not the same as having somewhere to put your own. Notice the difference. One is a role you perform. The other is a relationship you need.
2. Thinking alone has a cost, even when you are good at it. Decisions made without ever being said out loud tend to cost more later, in energy, in clarity, in the quiet erosion no one names until it is significant.
3. A sounding board is not weakness, it is infrastructure. The most capable people you know did not get that way by carrying everything unspoken. Somewhere, someone gave them a place to say it first.
Mich reminded me that a role like hers does not happen by accident. Someone has to decide that a person deserves that kind of space, and then build it for them.
Perhaps the question worth sitting with this week is not only who can I be a sounding board for, you likely already know the answer to that one.
It is: who is my sounding board?
If you have spent years being the steady voice for everyone else, I would love to hear what came up for you reading this. Reply with the word BOARD, and tell me what you are carrying without anywhere to say it out loud.
Till next week,
Mary