You have a favorite coffee machine now. It is not the nearest one.

You've also developed firm opinions about which stairwell is quicker, and those opinions appear to change depending on the day of the week.

There is exactly one room where you are never nervous, and it is the room where you met her.

That should be more interesting to you than it is.

She doesn't have to be a colleague. The client you've had for six years. The woman on the board. The one at the gym at six in the morning, where you're the man who knows everybody's name. Anywhere you arrive already introduced.

You walk into that room carrying something you didn't bring with you. A title. A track record she has watched for years. Context. People defer to you in front of her, regularly, and neither of you has ever had to mention it.

So the ease between you feels like chemistry.

Some of it is. The rest of it is infrastructure, and infrastructure doesn't come to lunch.

The Authority Gap is the distance between the power you've built and the presence you actually show up with. Most places, you feel it. In that building, you don't, because the structure covers it before you get there.

She has seen you be decisive roughly four hundred times. She has never once heard you start a sentence that wasn't already on an agenda.

Think about what she actually has. She's watched you handle a bad quarter, run a room, be the man somebody went to when it went wrong at four on a Friday. You earned all of it.

It is also the most flattering possible lighting, and it's installed in the ceiling.
Every man is charming in his own office. Ask one how he does on neutral ground and watch him change the subject..

You've told yourself it's professionalism. Timing. The complication. You've run the scenario where it lands badly and you both still have to sit through the same meetings for a year.

Those are real. They are not what is stopping you.

Sit with this part instead. In that building, you are winning. The ambiguity is comfortable because the ambiguity is happening on your ground, where you have the title and the history and the four hundred reps of being the competent one.

Move it one block over and none of that comes with you. A table with nothing on the agenda has no org chart. Nobody there reports to anybody, and nothing arrives ahead of you.

You're not protecting her career. You're protecting the frame.

And it is a very good frame. It took twenty years to build, it works on everybody, and handing it back at the door feels like turning up to something important underdressed.
Which is sensible of you. It is also why this has taken as long as it has.

I'm not telling you to declare yourself at the Monday meeting. I'm telling you that you've been calling this restraint for a long time, and it has been something else for most of it.

Now the boring part, and I mean it. If she reports to you, directly or through anybody else, this is not a standards conversation and I am not the right page for it.

That's a power question and it goes to whoever's job it is. If she's married, or you are, the answer is no, and it stays no. I am not in the business of helping a man blow up a life sideways and call it growth.

None of which gets you off the hook, because the lesson here was never her.

It's that you have spent years somewhere that introduces you, and you have no idea how you land when it doesn't.

She meets a man she has never met.😏

Not a worse one. Just one who has to open his own conversation, hold his own silence, and be interesting without an agenda to be interesting about.

It's also not a catastrophe. Twenty slightly awkward minutes, once, and then you are two people at a table. You have sat through considerably worse on a Tuesday morning and called it a stand up.

It feels enormous because you have spent a long time somewhere you never had to go first. Any skill goes quiet if nothing asks for it, and nothing in that building has asked for this one.

Theo is forty nine and a partner at an architecture practice. He came to me with what he thought was a timing question.

There was a project manager at a firm they subcontract to. Eighteen months working alongside each other, both single, and he called it great chemistry. He wanted to know when the right moment was.

I asked him something much smaller. What do the two of you talk about when nobody else is in the room?

He started to answer. Then he worked out that there had never been a room with only the two of them in it.

So he went to lunch. Off site, nothing announced, nothing framed as anything.

He told me afterward that he was dull for the first stretch of it, because the building had opened every conversation for a year and a half and he had never once had to.

Then he told me the part he had actually called about, and it had nothing to do with him.
She was quieter than he expected. Funnier. Completely chaotic about time.

She spent eleven minutes on a complaint about her sister's wedding, and had no interest at all in the subject he had assumed all along was hers, because it had been a client's brief, not hers.

So he had done it too. He had built an entire woman out of how somebody behaves in a meeting.

"I kept telling people we had chemistry," Theo said. "We had a seating plan."

One coffee or one lunch, off the premises, this week. Not framed as anything. No speech, no stated intention, nothing that needs a decision afterward.

Then pay attention to the first ten minutes, and to one thing only.

Who starts it.

If you find yourself waiting for a topic to arrive, that is the whole lesson, and you just bought it for the price of a sandwich instead of another two years of corridor.

You do not have to decide anything about her this week. You only have to find out whether you've ever actually spoken to her.

From this chair, one last thing.

A woman can like a man for years and still not know him, and she usually works that out later than he does. Nobody's fault. Still worth avoiding.

She has never met you. That isn't a problem, and it isn't really about her either. It's a thing that hasn't happened yet, anywhere, with anybody, because the building has been doing your talking for twenty years.

You're the one who books it. For once it doesn't need five other attendees.

Hold your standard. It's undeniable when you do. 😈

~ Angela Seitz