When the Person Who Believes in You is the Only One Who Can Reach You
When the Person Who Believes in You is the Only One Who Can Reach You
There are periods in life where logic doesn't reach you.
Where willpower doesn't reach you. Where even your own self awareness, the thing that usually helps you course correct, stops working entirely.
I know this because I lived it. For several years, running the business I had built from nothing, I was so deep inside my own story about what I was going through that I had become, for all practical purposes, unreachable.
And looking back now, the thing that eventually got through wasn't a strategy or a framework or a moment of sudden personal clarity. It was a person.
The Story I Was Telling Myself
By the time I was at my lowest, post covid, navigating an industry that had fundamentally changed overnight, I had built a very convincing internal narrative.
I was different from the people around me. The stakes were higher. What I was carrying was something that people with jobs rather than businesses simply couldn't understand.
I remember a night at the local pub with a group of old close friends. People who genuinely loved me. I sat in the middle of all of them and felt completely, utterly alone. Looking around at them laughing and thinking: they have no idea.
I had constructed an airtight case for my own isolation. And inside that case I sat, surrounded by people who were trying to give me something I desperately needed, completely unable to receive any of it.
That is what sustained pressure does when it's been carrying too long without anywhere to go. It doesn't just weigh you down. It rewires how you see the people around you.
The Person Who Stayed Anyway
My wife Siobhan had a front row seat to every version of the darkness I went through during those years. The anger I didn't recognise in myself. The withdrawal. The times I tried to manage everything internally and quietly built a wall between us without realising that's what I was doing.
I thought keeping it from her was a form of care. What I was actually doing was making everything worse.
She had a line she would say during some of those harder periods. That she knew the best version of me. That I had just gotten distracted and lost my way.
The first times she said it I let it pass. I was too far in to let it land. But it went somewhere. Some part of me that was still capable of entertaining the idea that maybe I hadn't become someone else permanently. That maybe I had just forgotten.
What Sharing Actually Does
As things started to shift I began to notice what happened when I shared things with Siobhan rather than keeping them inside.
Something would happen in the telling of it that never happened in the thinking of it.
It got smaller.
Not solved. Not fixed. But smaller. More proportionate. More like the thing it actually was rather than the enormous, suffocating version my brain had been running on a loop.
The stories we tell ourselves about what we're carrying are almost always more frightening than the things themselves. And the single most effective thing you can do to interrupt that process is to say it out loud to another person.
Not because they'll fix it. Because the act of externalising it breaks the loop.
This Isn't Just About Having the Right Person
I want to be clear. This isn't about being lucky enough to have a Siobhan.
The point is the communication. The sharing. The getting it out of your head and into the air where it can be seen for what it actually is rather than what your pressurised brain tells you it is.
Say it out loud. To your partner, a friend, your brother or sister, someone in the community. The person just needs to be someone you trust enough to say it to.
Because it is almost certainly smaller than your brain is making it. And the only way to find that out is to let it leave your head.
If you don't have that person right now, the Lead Well Community is a free space built specifically for hospitality leaders who are carrying more than they're letting on. Come and find us.