One Arrow Only

On a Tuesday morning, she opened the email.

A headline number sat near the top. It wasn’t catastrophic. It also wasn’t the one she’d wanted.

Instantly, her body decided what it meant, about her.

A warmth rose up her neck. Her stomach tightened. Her mind did that thing minds do when they’re trying to protect you from embarrassment: it began to write a story at speed.

They’ll think you’ve slipped.
They’ll assume it’s because of you.
You’re going to have to explain yourself.
You’re going to have to earn your place back.

It was astonishing, really, how quickly a number found its way deep into her identity - her sense of who she was, the value she brought to this world.

In very simple terms, it sounded like this:

If this is down, I am down.
If this is up, I am safe.

I’ve lived there too.

When I was in consultancy, the numbers were never just numbers. A week of good utilisation - for me and my team - made me taller. A quieter week made me anxious, like I’d been useless, lazy, unworthy of my pay cheque.

And client feedback... I could be doing perfectly good work and still scan for the line that told me they could see through my game. That I’d been caught as the fraud I was sure I was.

Even now, if the coaching roster is quiet, my nervous system notices. Is it me? And when demand ramps up, confidence creeps back in. See? You’re fine. You’re wanted.

It’s embarrassingly human.

She didn’t slam the laptop shut. She didn’t launch into action. She didn’t do the thing she’d always done - the thing that looks like leadership but is actually self-protection: frantic fixing, immediate messaging, pre-emptive explaining. An attempt to control what other people might think.

Instead, she did something smaller. And braver.

She put her hand flat on the desk - a physical anchor, a reminder that she had a body, not just a reputation - and said to herself:

This is a thing. This is not me. 

Then she did the most important part - the part that sounds simple enough to be dismissed and is anything but.

She separated herself from the scoresheet.

Not in a lofty, spiritual way (though that helps). In a practical, gritty way.

She named the scoreboard for what it was: a snapshot. A partial view. A narrow measure of something complex, with many moving parts and contributing factors. Not to absolve herself of responsibility - but to put the thing back in its rightful place.

And then she named herself for what she was:

A skilled, committed human, leading in a complex world.

She reached for a sentence she’d been practising for months - like you practise a new path through the woods, again and again, until the grass stops growing and the way becomes clear.

I am not the organisation.
I am not the outcomes.
I am not the feedback.
I am not this number.

It didn’t make the disappointment vanish. It made it cleaner.

One arrow, not two or three or four.

She still cared - so so much. That was part of what made her good. Exquisite, even. But she refused to add the extra suffering: the self-attack, the shame, the imagined trial held in a court made of other people’s opinions (that may or may not even be true).

Later that day, in reference to something completely different, someone said, “Why hasn’t this been sorted?”

It would have been easy to hear it as, Why haven’t you sorted it?

Her old self would have swallowed the shame, nodded too fast, promised too much, stayed late, sent five emails to prove she still belonged.

But she’d been practising a different response.

“It hasn’t happened yet,” she said. “I’ve chosen to prioritise some other things first.”

It wasn’t defensive. It wasn’t cold. It was accurate.

Then she did something unfamiliar.

She named the frustration without turning it into blame - for herself or others.

“I get why that’s frustrating,” she said. “Some things have had to move up the list, and others are moving more slowly than we’d like. I feel that too.”

It wasn’t clever language. It made the exchange human. What could have been a judgement became a shared reality.

And somewhere inside her, a small knot loosened.

She stopped outrunning her inadequacy story and started telling the truth about complexity instead - what a relief that was. We are all competent and imperfect.

Later, in the middle of the night, the voice tried to return. It always does - like a stray dog that remembers where it used to be fed.

You should be able to control this.
You’re going to be judged.
You’ll lose the respect you’ve earned.

She didn’t argue. She didn’t banish it. She didn’t start round two of beating herself up because she “should know better by now”.

She just noticed it.

Ah. There you are.

Then she did the thing I am still learning to do - daily, imperfectly.

She chose her inner knowing over other people’s imagined opinions.

What was true was true whether it looked impressive or not.

The work being done - which was pretty amazing.
The care being given.
The countless invisible decisions that never make it into a headline number.
The humans who are not reducible to a metric.

She let herself feel the sadness without turning it into a full-blown story about inadequacy.

And when she noticed herself scanning the horizon - the way I still do when the calendar is quiet - she brought herself back to the grey.

She didn’t fix it that day. Not permanently.

That isn’t how this work goes.

She practised.

She practised separating identity from the scoreboard.
She practised letting feedback be data she could choose how to relate to.
She practised holding this matters alongside this isn’t me.
She practised self-compassion for how hard this all is.

And that’s a real story.

It doesn’t have a punchline or a happy ever after - because it isn’t finished.

And it never will be.