Please tell me you recognise this one.

You’ve got a difficult conversation booked for Tuesday. So you rehearse it Sunday night. Then again in the shower. Then you rewrite the opening line in your head on the way in, and by the time you’re actually sitting opposite the person you’ve had the thing about six times already and you say none of it anyway.

I did that for years.

Then I learned COIN (from Anna Carroll). Four steps for opening a hard conversation, and that’s the whole thing. The conversations were still awkward, they always are, but I had a shape to lean into and the rehearsing just stopped. I listened better too, because the room I’d been using to work out how to start was free for the person actually in front of me.

That’s a lever. And I’ve got fussier about the word, because people use it for many things.

For me, a lever is small enough to do tomorrow morning without telling anyone. If it needs a working group and a launch, that’s a project. Projects are fine. I wrote a book about them. They just cost you something else entirely.

It has to survive being done again. Monday, then Thursday, working both times, because by Wednesday you’re tired and slightly annoyed and it still needs to work.

And it has to live inside something you already do. A meeting. A handover. Most leaders will happily add something to the week. Nobody’s got the room.

Which is Sweller (the cognitive load guy), isn’t it. We sit in CPD about not overloading children, nod along, and then run our own Tuesday like working memory is infinite. Opening a hard conversation from scratch when you’ve had ninety of them. Starting an agenda on a blank page. It’s not hard, any of it. It’s just being worked out fresh every time and it spends the space you need at four o’clock when someone knocks with something that matters.

None of this rescues a team that doesn’t trust each other, by the way. If you’re properly drowning, a new morning routine is a bit of an insult.

I go through what makes a lever hold up, and a few I actually use, in this week’s episode.

Pick one and tell me which. I want to know if it survives your Wednesday.

Shane

PS. My Leadership Intensive cohort starts September, and we spend a good chunk of it on ten of these. Small group. Reply if you want details.

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