One Second
the gap between getting poked and saying something you'll regret is smaller than you think
Many years ago I presented a project timeline to a room of about a dozen people. A junior engineer, maybe eighteen months into her career, raised her hand. “I don’t think we’ve accounted for the migration work. I think that’s another two weeks.”
She was right. I knew it about four words in.
I don’t remember deciding to get defensive. I remember feeling it in my shoulders, something close to embarrassment, and then hearing myself say the migration was “already factored into the buffer.” It wasn’t. She didn’t push back a second time.
Six months later, that same engineer had a much bigger concern about a launch. She mentioned it to a peer instead of to me, and I understood exactly why.
The Thorn
That feeling, right before I opened my mouth is what’s on my mind today.
I recently read Michael Singer’s The Untethered Soul, and there’s an idea in it that I I find easy to apply to leadership. Singer calls it the thorn. Someone says something, or something doesn’t go your way, and it pokes you. A little spike of discomfort. Most people spend their whole lives doing one of two things with that spike. They build a wall around it so it can’t get poked again, or they react outward and try to make the discomfort someone else’s problem.
Neither one deals with the thorn. Both just move it around.
I wrote about this from a different angle a while back in Being Wrong at the Right Level. That post was about what happens after the reaction, the slow erosion of trust when a leader can’t admit a bad call. This is about the half second before that. The moment where the reflex fires and you still, technically, have a choice.
The Wall and the Spike
Singer’s framing is that most of us run one of two patterns when we get poked.
The wall. You get criticized once, it stings, and some part of you quietly decides not to let that happen again. You get a little more guarded. A little less open to feedback from that direction. Do this enough times over a career and you end up running a leadership style built entirely out of old wounds you never actually dealt with. You’re not protecting the team. You’re protecting the thorn.
The spike. This is the pattern Larry was showing in the newsletter linked above. Someone questions you, the discomfort shows up, and instead of sitting with it you push it back out. You get defensive, or you double down, or you find a reason the other person is wrong so you don’t have to feel the poke. It’s faster than building a wall, and it does more damage, because everyone with you watches it happen in real time.
This took me a long time to figure out. The discomfort isn’t the problem. You’re allowed to feel discomfort. The problem is what you do in the half second after you feel it, on autopilot, without ever deciding to.
Watching
Singer’s suggestion is almost annoyingly simple. When the spike happens, don’t immediately become the spike. Notice it.
In a leadership context this looks like a specific and learnable pause. Someone challenges your decision. You feel the pressure in your shoulders. Instead of letting that pressure push the next sentence out of your mouth, you let it be there for one extra second. You ask yourself what’s actually true, not what would make the discomfort go away fastest.
That one second is the whole skill. It’s not suppressing it, and you’re not pretending you didn’t feel it. Just refuse to let the feeling drive for an extra beat.
Trust over Feelings
I write about trust a lot, probably because it’s the actual currency of leadership. You can read They Did What You Said for the other half of this, what happens when your team complies without trusting you. This is upstream of that. Every time you react out of the spike instead of watching it, your team logs the data point. They learn what topics are safe to raise and which ones aren’t. They learn it faster than you’ll ever notice you taught it.
The wall does the same damage slower. A leader who’s quietly armored against a certain kind of feedback doesn’t look defensive in the moment. They just stop hearing that feedback at all. Nobody around them clocks it as a problem until something important doesn’t reach them in time.
Both patterns come from the same place. An old, automatic refusal to just feel the thorn and let it pass. The spike doesn’t care whether you’re in a conference room or a conversation with a good friend. The wall doesn’t care either.
The Practice
You don’t fix this by deciding to be calmer. That’s the wall and the spike both, in disguise, a new layer of management instead of actually dealing with the thing underneath.
What works is smaller and weirder than that. Next time you feel that spike in a meeting, the pressure in the shoulders, the urge to defend or shut down, try just naming it to yourself. Not out loud. Just internally: there’s the spike. You don’t have to do anything else yet. Just notice it’s there before you let it drive.
Do that enough times and the pause stops feeling like work. It’s just the half second you take before you let the truth land.
If you want to talk through what this looks like in your specific team, I’d like to chat with you (schedule time here).
"Do you have the patience to wait till your mud settles and the water is clear?Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?"— Tao Te Ching
You're exactly right Alan that catching that spike and then deciding what to do with it is the essence of self-control. When someone offers constructive feedback with good intent, the right answer is always to be open-minded. 99% of the time that's the way to handle it. Of course, every once in a while we run into people with malice in mind and there's a place for reacting forcefully to those.