Latest / Lead With Clarity: Practical Insight for Senior Leaders / The Version She Almost Gave
Transcript
- Blake Holman: Welcome to Lead with Clarity. This is a space for leaders who want to grow without losing themselves in the process. Each episode is a short reflection on leadership, influence, and the inner work that shapes how we show up for others. It's not hype, not noise, just clear thinking for the journey of leading well. I'm excited to share that today's episode is number 250, signifying 250 days in a row of this podcast. Today's episode is entitled The Version She Almost Gave. Here we go. Imagine this. It's the last Friday the company exists. Forty people are sitting on beanbags and folding chairs in what used to be the main office. They're waiting for their founder to say something that makes the last two years feel like they mattered. She has two versions of this speech open on her laptop. The first one is three paragraphs long. It says the market moved faster than anyone expected, that timing is everything in this business, that she's proud of what they built together. Every sentence in it is technically true. It's also the version that skips one detail. Eight months ago, she overruled her own head of engineering on a platform migration because she did not want to slow down the fundraise. That decision is the real reason there's no runway left. The tidy version doesn't mention it once. She opens her laptop, looks at both drafts side by side, and starts talking before she's decided which one she's actually giving. There's a line that names exactly what she's standing between right now, and it comes from Brene Brown. Brene wrote, owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we'll ever do. Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston. She has spent more than two decades studying shame, vulnerability, and courage. She wrote that line in The Gifts of Imperfection, a book built on a single counterintuitive claim. People don't get hurt by the parts of their story they're willing to look at honestly. They get hurt by the parts they spend years quietly managing so nobody else has to see them. Ownership, in her research, is not a mood or a feeling of confidence. It's the specific act of looking at the whole account and refusing to edit out the part that costs you something to admit. Bring that back to the beanbags and the folding chairs. The tidy version of her speech is not a lie. It's an edit, the kind every leader learns to make instinctively. Because a polished failure story is easier to deliver and easier for a room to receive. But the room already senses that something is missing. This explanation covers everything except why it actually happened. Forty people who spent two years building something together can tell the difference between a founder grieving out loud and one carefully managing the message. This one's easy to get wrong. People here own your story. And assume it means confessing everything to everyone, turning a farewell speech into a full accounting of every mistake along the way. That's not what Brown is describing. And it wouldn't actually serve the room either. Nobody sitting on those beanbags needs a spreadsheet of the leader's worst decisions. What they need is smaller than that. One true sentence that explains what actually happened, said by the person who is finally willing to say it out loud. The harder version of owning a story means finding that one sentence before you decide who else needs to hear it. Not the whole file. Just the specific moment, named plainly, without the softening language that quietly turns a mistake into a market condition. For her, that sentence might be short. It might be, I made a call last spring that slowed us down, and it's part of why we're here tonight. You say that once, honestly, and the rest of the tidy version can stay exactly as written. The room isn't actually asking for a confession. It's asking to be told the truth by someone who's not afraid of it anymore. Here's where a tool could help her tonight and where it flatly cannot touch the part that matters. An AI tool could take a rough outline, hand her back a graceful, composed, farewell speech in 30 seconds. It would arrange phrases like headwinds and tough market in exactly the right order, and it would sound finished. It would also, without ever being told to, Produce the version that leaves out the platform migration entirely because shame is not a variable it can detect inside a prompt. It has never sat in a room it let down and felt the pull to explain itself out of the hardest part. Deciding which sentence costs her something to say, and saying it anyway, is not a task that a tool can do faster or better. It's the one part of the speech that was ever actually hers to write. So here's something to try this week. Find the version of your own story that you've been handing people. The polished one, the one that explains without ever quite confessing. Look for the single sentence you've been leaving out, not because it's private, but because it's the one that costs you something to admit. You don't have to publish it or say it to a room. Just write it down plainly, and notice how different it feels from the version you've been telling instead. Now let's go back to the beanbags and the folding chairs. The founder closes the laptop without picking either draft. Because by then she already knows which one she's giving. The tidy version stays saved, unused, a paragraph she'll probably never open again. What she actually says is shorter and harder and true. For the first time since the platform went down, it feels like the story finally belongs to her instead of the other way around.