I see a WhatsApp message at 5pm. “Hey do you have a minute?” My stomach tightens. It’s Claudia, my point person at the VC fund I’d been working with for several months. She says a minute, but I know it’s an hour. Because Claudia can talk a young man to the grave.
I call Claudia. “Hey, how are you?” And then I do it. I lie. “Just letting you know I have another call at 5:30.” I didn’t.
By the way, next week I’m teaching this for Lighthouse Communications at Google in Paris. It’s an onsite workshop called “The Art of Saying No” for a team at YouTube.
It went on like that for months: Claudia’s messages asking for time, me lying that I didn’t have it. What was I doing? And why didn’t I just say no? Maybe it’s because I’m a double Capricorn, but sometimes I feel I’d rather burn a project down than give in to a client request that feels counter-productive.
My fear sounded like, “Will they still work with me if I don’t make them feel like I’m working on their stuff every minute, even though I have 10 other clients to attend to?”
But is lying the answer?
I quietly resented the calls that went over an arbitrary 30 minute marker in my mind. I was annoyed because, after all, their project was on my to do list. We were clearly working from two different perspectives: consultant with other clients vs. someone who works at a company with a job she needs me to do now.
I challenged myself to stay open, even when calls ran a little longer than I wanted. After all, we were working on challenging communication problems that needed the whiteboard of conversation, not me working alone at my computer.
Over time, what had felt like a waste of time turned into a productive collaboration. I never said no, but I did learn to name boundaries. “Claudia, I could talk to you all day, and what’s true is I have other things on my plate this afternoon. Can we wrap in 20 minutes? What’s the one question we need to answer on this call?”
I love our calls now. We linger on the personal chit chat before getting to business. We share our favorite skin care products and stories about dates gone wrong. We’ve even been on a personal retreat together.
And we still get shit done.
What’s your fake 5pm call—the boundary you keep faking instead of naming?
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