One meeting, four receptions — the wave, the weather, and the sentence that explains twenty years of watching people at work.
A Tuesday briefing. A leader announces a change — new reporting lines, effective next quarter. The words are chosen carefully and delivered once. Then watch the room. One person hears a threat and starts calculating. One hears a relief they’d never admit to. One hears the last restructure all over again — the one with the consultation that was promised and never came. One hears nothing much at all and wonders what’s for lunch.
The leader delivered one message. The room received four. And in the corridor afterwards, each person will describe “what happened in there” with complete confidence — four honest witnesses, four different events.
The novelist Anaïs Nin put the explanation in a single sentence: we don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. Most of the work I do in HR lives inside that sentence. The gap between what was said and what was received — between the event and its reception — is where trust is won and lost, where feedback lands or bounces, where change succeeds or quietly doesn’t. “Finding people where they’re at” means working with the film they’re actually watching — not the one you screened.
One message — carefully worded, rehearsed, delivered exactly once.
As many versions as there were chairs in the room — each one arriving pre-edited.
Usually the first. Almost always, it should be the second.
The words emotion and feeling get used interchangeably. They shouldn’t be — and the difference isn’t pedantry; it’s the mechanism behind Nin’s sentence. The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio draws the line simply: an emotion happens in the body; a feeling is made in the mind.
An emotion is the body’s automatic response to an event — heart rate up, stomach drop, face heat, attention narrowed. It’s fast, it’s chemical, and it’s remarkably standard-issue: your threat response and mine are nearly identical. Crucially, it’s brief. The neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor’s famous observation is that the physiological wave of an emotion washes through the body in about ninety seconds — if nothing feeds it.
A feeling is what the mind builds on top of that wave: an interpretation, run through everything we are — memory, beliefs, old wounds, self-image, how the last one went. The emotion is standard-issue; the feeling is bespoke. And unlike the wave, the story doesn’t expire. Feelings can run for decades — not because the wave is still there, but because every retelling of the story sends a fresh one.
If two strangers in the same situation would have it, it’s probably the emotion. If it needs your particular history to make sense, you’re in the feeling.
Put the distinction to work. A restructure is announced in a team of three — reporting lines change, roles stay. The first response is close to identical in all three chairs: the jolt. Heart rate up, stomach drop, attention narrowed. Standard-issue threat response — the wave, doing its job. Ninety seconds later the waves have passed, and the weather is just getting started:
The filter: survived a badly-handled restructure years ago — the consultation that never came. Today slotted straight into an old story: they decide, we find out.
What finds them: not reassurance — acknowledgement. “You’ve been through one of these before. What did you hear today?”
The filter: newest in role, still proving themselves. Reads every change as a referendum on their worth — the announcement arrived as evidence.
What finds them: specifics. Vague comfort feeds the story; concrete facts starve it.
The filter: has carried a broken structure for two years. Change reads as rescue — then the relief feels disloyal to colleagues who are hurting.
What finds them: permission. “It’s allowed to be good news for you and hard news for someone else.”
If this series landed somewhere real for you or your organisation, the next conversation is about you: where you are, where you need to be, and what would move it.
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