I'm in a meeting, and my chest tightens before I've even finished hearing what the problem is. My breathing goes shallow and fast. My mind takes off catastrophizing before the person talking has gotten to the end of their sentence, and it's frankly very unpleasant.
This isn't a one-time thing. It's been happening in meeting after meeting lately. One issue after another, nothing written down, nothing handed to me ahead of time, just voices stacking up faster than I can sort through them. A client's upset about something we haven't diagnosed yet. A hire isn't working out, and nobody's said so out loud. Two or three more like that, usually, before the meeting's even half over.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, a question I've been chewing on for years shows up again: is this how it's always going to be?
The plate was never going to stay empty
For a long time, that tightening in my chest was just the tax I paid for being the person who's supposed to have an answer. My lizard brain ran its own weird anxiety disco on top of it, grading me harshly, convinced that a full plate meant something had gone wrong. And underneath that sat a quieter assumption I never said out loud: shouldn't doing this job well eventually mean the plate stays empty?
It hasn't. Not once, across all the years I've been doing this. The plate refills before I've finished feeling good about clearing the last version of it.
For a while I took that personally. If competence meant fewer problems, and the problems never actually went down, what exactly was supposed to be improving? I'd look at the refilled plate and read it as evidence against myself. It took me longer than I'd like to admit to see that I'd been measuring myself against a metric that was never going to move, because it was the wrong metric from the start. Fewer problems was never the deal the seat came with.
What actually changed
I don't get fewer problems, and I likely never will. What changed is my relationship with them, and I think that change is the durable kind.
Before the old reflex gets to run the show, I've been practicing something small. One breath, and a line: I am so good at this. This is where I shine. I've done this before. Most things are solvable.
I've been saying some version of that to myself for years. What's different now is what it does. My shoulders drop before I've solved a single one of the problems people just described to me. My breathing evens out. The problems haven't moved an inch; they're exactly as unsolved as they were a minute ago, but something in me has, and that shift is the part I've learned to pay attention to.
Here's the part that still surprises me. In the middle of someone describing their issue, with the mantra and the breath doing their quiet work, I find myself in a strange calm where the problem turns back into facts. It loses some of its negative charge. And I get this odd, sturdy confidence that it will all work out, not because I can see the solution yet- most of the time I can't but because I've been in this exact spot enough times to know the terrain.
This was the job description all along
Somewhere in the middle of all this (waves hands), I remembered something. Finding a calm way through whatever's getting said out loud, in whatever order it comes at me, usually without a manual for most of it, is the part I'm actually good at. That's the real value I bring in the COO seat, more than any process I've built or system I've implemented. Anyone can follow a process when the inputs behave. The job is what happens when they don't.
I'm not going to pretend this is some tidy arrival story where the tightness in my chest stopped showing up. It still does, most weeks, usually a beat before the line does. I don't welcome the problems, not exactly. What's different is what I do with a full plate now. I've quit seeing it as proof I'm failing at this and started reading it as the actual terrain, the place where whatever I'm good at gets to show up at all.
The problems aren't going to stop showing up. That's just the math of the job. What I pay attention to now is the fifteen seconds after someone says a problem out loud, because that's the only part I actually get to choose.
I know what mine is. What's your superpower?
Sarah writes String by String weekly on LinkedIn. If this landed, subscribe there or connect with her, she reads the replies.
