You End Things Before They Are Done

“You pushed for a decision so the waiting would stop, and the person who needed one more minute to tell you the truth never got it.” – Stephen Scott Johnson

#5 The Nine Expressions of Frequency: From Pattern to Power series

A client of mine had run a consultancy with the same business partner for nine years when he told her he was thinking of leaving. He said he'd tried to raise it more than once, and every time, a few sentences in, she'd cut him off and asked what he wanted to do about it. For years, she'd been answering questions he hadn't finished asking.

A few days later she sat down with him and asked him to go through it all again, and every time she felt the urge to ask what he wanted to do, she said "what else?" and kept listening. It took forty minutes, and he ended up staying in the business. She told me it was the first time in nine years she'd heard everything he had to say.

That need to have it decided, even if it means cutting someone off mid-sentence, is what happens when the Assassin Expression of Frequency is activated. It's one of nine ways your nervous system responds when pressure rises, which I write about in my book Ascendant.

Your body finds not knowing harder to sit with than knowing something bad is coming, so you'll push for a decision just to make the waiting stop.

At its best, the Assassin pattern means you can tell something's going wrong before anyone has said so, like the yes that comes a second too slowly when someone agrees to a deadline. And in one sentence you can say the thing everyone in the room has been avoiding, so everyone can stop pretending.

Under pressure, you can't stand anything being left undecided. An unanswered question feels like a door left unlocked at night, and you can't settle until you've checked it. Your friends are still working out who had what on the bill, so you pay the whole thing to end the conversation. Someone you love starts telling you something hard, and you say "just tell me what happened" before they've worked out how to say it. You feel better immediately, until the next undecided thing comes along.

When uncertainty feels unbearable, you start solving moments that haven’t finished unfolding.

Researchers at University College London gave people a game where turning over the wrong rock meant a mild electric shock, and measured how stressed they got. People were more stressed when they had a fifty-fifty chance of a shock than when they knew for certain one was coming, and they sweated more and their pupils widened(de Berker et al., 2016,Nature Communications, DOI: 10.1038/ncomms10996).

When the Assassin is activated and coherent, you still see what's wrong before anyone else does, and you still say it, only later, once the other person has finished. You stay alert without living on edge.

So here is this week's practice...

Next time something's left hanging, a decision nobody has made or someone taking their time to get to the point, notice the tightness in your chest that wants it settled. Before you say the thing that ends it, take one slow breath and ask "what else?" Then notice what they tell you that you'd never have heard, and whether the tightness passes on its own.

To what matters most,