In Part 1, I told the story of a phone call that lasted two minutes and the self-criticism that lasted four days. The stressor was real and brief: thirty-eight managers waiting for me in a hotel meeting room, and me, oblivious, on my deck in shorts. The anxiety was much older, rooted in a family standard I had carried since childhood: I must always be reliable, always there, never the one who lets people down. I ended with my hiking friend's line: “There's no such thing

One sunny autumn afternoon, I was tossing a football with my two sons. I stood on the deck overlooking our yard, wearing shorts and a tee shirt, heaved the ball high, and watched them maneuver to win the catch. It was great fun. The phone rang. It was a client, the CEO of a manufacturing company. Her question punched me in the gut: “Are you on your way?” It was twenty minutes past the hour I had agreed to lead a training session for 38 managers who had left work early a

If you cannot disappoint people, you cannot lead them with clarity and honesty. It's not that you go around trying to disappoint people. It's that doing what makes sense, having the important conversation, and making the hard decision, will inevitably disappoint your boss, direct reports, adult children, parents, and spouse. Most of us know this in principle. In practice, three forces make it remarkably hard to do. 1. Delusion: What people ask for is not always what serves th