Why The Conversation You’ve Been Avoiding Needs To Be Your Next Move.
Want to know a secret?
The portal to the next version of you lies in the conversation you’ve been avoiding.
You know the one conversation I’m talking about.
You might feel that tightness in your throat, your mind rehearsing every possible outcome – the good, the bad, and the ugly. You worry you’ll say the wrong thing. You worry you’ll disrupt the peace.
Yep, that’s the one.
Conversations like this one are uncomfortable.
They bring hiiiiiigh, high sensation to the table and demand that we embody a certain level of bravery.
In my leadership journey, I’ve had to have more difficult conversations than I could possibly count. And I’ll be honest – I used to spend a lot of time avoiding them. Seriously. If there was a hard conversation on the calendar, suddenly my kids were sick, my car wouldn’t start, or my house was on fire. (Okay, my house has never been on fire, but you get the picture.)
It’s taken most of my career to get comfortable with having conversations that come with high sensation, and to illustrate why this matters, let me give you a very real example from my beautifully messy, early days in business.
I once kept an employee on my team who was, we’ll just say, not a match.
The full story is long (and a little dramatic), but here’s the short version: every time this person walked into the spa, the energy shifted. When it was good, it was good – but when it wasn’t, the whole team felt it. You know the type, right? Eventually, people were asking to change their schedules to avoid working with them, or requesting one-on-ones to talk about how their energy affected the team.
And where was I during all of this? I was hiding. I was terrified to have the conversation I knew I needed to have. (Don’t call me today – my house is on fire!)
I talked myself around in circles for months. I told myself, ‘they’re great with guests!’ ‘They’re a top performer. They bring in A LOT of revenue.’ ‘I don’t want to hurt them.’ ‘I don’t want to cause a scene.’
Eventually, months turned into years and I was still making excuses. ‘They have so many regulars.’ ‘They’re in session most of the day, anyway. No one really HAS to interact with them.’ ‘They’re going through a hard time.’ ‘It’s fine.’
But it wasn’t fine.
They were uncoachable, incredibly difficult to work with, and the team (and my business) was suffering because I didn’t want to be the “bad guy.”
The truth? It didn’t matter how many stories I spun or how carefully I justified my avoidance. My discomfort was running the show.
I thought I was protecting peace by staying quiet, but silence is its own form of communication. Every day I avoided that conversation, I was still saying something.
I was communicating that I didn’t care enough to protect my team. That our standards were negotiable. That our values only mattered when they were convenient.
I was teaching my team, without words, that comfort was more important than integrity.
This dynamic lived in my business for longer than I care to admit, but in the spirit of transparency that I value so deeply, I’ll share this with you:
My team watched me allow this person to wreak havoc on our culture and morale for three years. They watched me ignore our core values, bend our standards, and compromise the culture we’d all worked so hard to build – all to keep two people comfortable. (Spoiler: one of them was me.)
Whether it’s a conversation that needs to be had in your business, your relationship, or your family:
- ✨You don’t have to script it perfectly.
- ✨You don’t need perfect timing.
- ✨You don’t need the guarantee of a ‘smooth’ outcome.
- ✨You just have to show up and tell the truth.
Truth is the portal.
The next version of you doesn’t wait until she’s comfortable. She feels the discomfort and walks straight through to the other side.
Every hard conversation is an initiation.
You’re supposed to feel it.
What conversation have you been avoiding?
What could show up in your life if you chose courage over comfort and finally told the truth?