If Nobody Would Be Disappointed

Last week I asked you to finish a sentence.

“I haven’t done it, because ______.”

Some of you wrote your answer where everyone could see it. I have been sitting with those answers all week, because together they say something none of them says alone.

Sandhya Jamadagni wrote, “I was too quick to quit.” Then she went further than I asked her to. She would start something, and when the people around her did not respond the way she hoped, she would take it personally and stop. Her closing line was the best thing anyone wrote all week. “The thing that I learnt from this isn’t to start something. It’s to stop quitting too soon.”

Ipshita Naik wrote, “I haven’t been able to achieve my fitness goals because it has never been a priority in my to do list.” Then, “The doctor has also advised me now, so if not now then when.”

Queenie wrote, “I haven’t had a day to just myself, because everything else was more important than me.”

Debdutta Dey wrote the most honest one. She listed the things she has not continued. Creative research and writing. The books she bought. Another degree. And then this: “because other things at work or life took up priority. Sometimes I’ve blamed the timing.. sometimes the money.. or sometimes I’ve just not been up for it.”

And mine, which I put up first so nobody had to go first alone. “I haven’t started going for walks, because I am lazy.” I had to correct myself in public, because when I looked at how full my days actually are, the word lazy did not survive. What is true is simpler and much harder to say out loud. I put myself last.

Now read them again together.

Five different lives. Five different things wanted. And underneath all five, the same sentence: everything else came first.

Five different lives. The same sentence underneath.

The part Debdutta named that the rest of us hide

Look at her line once more. “Sometimes I’ve blamed the timing.. sometimes the money..”

That is the whole mechanism, said plainly, by someone brave enough to catch herself doing it.

The real reason is rarely presentable. “I put myself last” is not something you can say at a dinner table without the room going quiet. So the mind goes shopping for a reason that will pass inspection. Timing. Money. The children’s exams. The quarter end. Next year.

These reasons are respectable. They are also usually true in some small way, which is exactly what makes them so useful. A story with a grain of fact in it is very hard to argue with, including for the person telling it.

The woman who could not name one

Some months ago, in one of my circles, I asked a simple question. Name one thing you want. Not for your family. Not for your team. For you.

One woman sat with it long enough that the whole room went quiet with her.

Then she said, “I don’t think I have one that doesn’t have somebody else’s name on it.”

She is fifty one. She runs a department of sixty people. She can tell you the goals of every single person who reports to her.

And here is what I have learned from watching that moment repeat, room after room. Asking a woman “what do you want?” almost never works. The question asks her to justify wanting, and she has spent thirty years learning not to. So she gives you something reasonable. Something small. Something that would not inconvenience anybody.

You have to take the audience out of the room before you ask.

So this week, one sentence again

It is shorter than last week’s. Finish this, honestly, in your head:

“If no one would be disappointed, I would ______.”

Write the very first answer. Not the sensible one that arrives ten seconds later. The first one. The one that turns up before your manners do.

Now the part I want you to sit with

Somebody came to mind. The person whose disappointment you have been managing.

Ask yourself one question about them. Have they ever actually asked this of you?

After twenty years of working with people, I can count on my hands the number of times the answer was yes. The request was almost never made. We inferred it. We saw a face once, years ago, at a dinner table or in a meeting, and we have been obeying that face ever since.

So we are not standing in front of real disappointment. We are standing in front of a disappointment we imagined, and we are paying for it in decades.

And there is a second cost that nobody talks about. The people we are protecting usually have no idea.

Your daughter does not know you gave up the course. Your team does not know you did not apply. Nobody is thanking you, because nobody was ever told.

The sacrifice is invisible even to the person it was made for.

Three steps, today

• One. Write your sentence. “If no one would be disappointed, I would ______.”
• Two. Name the person. Write their name next to it. Vague guilt cannot be examined. A name can.
• Three. Ask the question. Did they ask me for this, or did I decide it for them?

If the honest answer is that you decided it for them, then you have just found something you can change without needing anybody’s permission.

Then do the smallest possible version of your answer this week. Not the whole thing. Fifteen minutes of it. Fifteen minutes is enough to prove that the sky stays up.

Ipshita already said the line that belongs here, so I will borrow it. If not now, then when.

I am doing mine too. Ten minutes outside after the school run, which I promised you last week, and which I will report on honestly either way.

What came after your “I would”? One line is enough.

Thank you to Sandhya Jamadagni, Queenie D., Ipshita Naik and Debdutta Dey for answering out loud. This piece exists because of what the four of you wrote.

This piece first appeared in The Transformation Playbook, my weekly newsletter on LinkedIn: one idea a week, for women rising at work, at home, and in their own lives. If this one found you, send it to one person who has been putting herself last for so long that she has stopped noticing.