The short answer: I make a living finding the problem underneath the one a business came in with. When my marriage ended and I went into a long depression, I pointed the same method at myself, and it took four years rather than one meeting. This is my own account and not medical advice: I did not see a doctor, which is a fact about my case and not a recommendation.
Everything else I write about here, I was the outsider.
That is the whole reason those cases have endings. I could stand outside every department at once, or outside the deal, or outside a decision somebody had stopped examining years earlier, and see the thing that was invisible from inside it. None of that requires being clever. It requires not being in it.
This is the one where I was in it.
What happened
I decided to end my marriage. Why is not mine alone to publish, so it is not here.
My three children were small.
And then I went into a depression that lasted years, and it was deep. I say that because the alternative is letting you assume it was a low patch, and it was not.
I am going to be plain about one thing before I go any further, because it sits at the front of the story and I do not want it doing work it should not do. I did not see a doctor. That is a fact about what I did, not a recommendation, and the reason I say so is that I would rather you knew the shape of the account than have it look tidier than it was.
The question that could not arrive
What I know now, and could not see then, is that I was refusing to accept that my situation had changed.
Not consciously. If you had asked me, I would have told you I understood perfectly well that I was divorced. What was actually happening is that I kept living against the life I had expected to have. Broken dreams, broken promises, a future I had already decided on and was not going to get. I was arguing with a version of my life that no longer existed, and I was losing, every day, because there is nobody on the other side of that argument.
Here is the part that connects to everything else on this site.
I could not ask myself the right question, because my capacity was already spent. My attention was completely occupied by the feelings. Not by the situation, by the feelings about the situation. And an occupied mind does not generate the question that would help it, because generating that question is itself work, and there was nothing left to do it with.
That is exactly why the people inside a company cannot see what an outsider sees in a day. It is not that they are less capable.
It is that the thing consuming them is the thing they would need spare capacity to examine.
Turning the method around
At some point, and I could not tell you when, I started doing to myself what I do to a business.
I broke it down. Every conflict, every situation that had led where it led, and I asked the questions I ask a client. What is the actual problem here. What did I do. What part of this did I cause. How did it get from there to here.
With brutal honesty, which is the part that costs something. Because the answers were often embarrassing, and the finding, more than once, was that I was the reason for the thing I was upset about.
And then something happened that I did not expect, and it is the reason I am writing this at all.
I assumed the sequence would be: find the cause, then recover. Diagnosis, then treatment. That is how it works with a company. You find the contradiction in the targets, and then somebody rewrites the targets, and the improvement comes later and separately.
That is not what happened, for me. As soon as I started finding true causes, I was already getting better. Not afterwards. In the act of it.
I still do not have a clean explanation for that. What I can tell you is that finding the cause and recovering were the same motion, and I have never seen that in any business I have worked in.
What do you do about a trigger you cannot remove?
You stop trying to remove it and change the medium it reaches you through.
Not a breakthrough. A queue.
I started watching myself the way I watch a process. Something would drop me into a bad state, and instead of treating that as weather, I would stop and work out what specifically had set it off. Then find the cause of that one thing. Then remove it. Then take the next one.
One at a time, for years.
Here is a real one, and it is deliberately unglamorous.
Every time my former wife rang me, I came off the phone in a bad state. When I stopped and looked at it properly, the trigger was not the conversation. It was her voice. The voice belonged to a life that no longer existed, and hearing it say ordinary things pulled the whole thing back up.
I could not remove her from my life. We share custody fifty fifty, and I was not going to be less present with my children to feel better. So I did not try to eliminate the trigger. I changed the channel. I asked her not to call, and explained why, and we moved to text and email.
I would estimate that about half of it went away. From that.
Not half of the divorce, and not half of what I felt about it. About half of the recurring bad states, the anxiety, the days that fell apart. Because one specific input had been producing them on a schedule, and the input was now gone while the obligation behind it stayed exactly where it was.
That is the distinction I would keep if you keep nothing else. Eliminate what you can. Engineer around what you cannot. You are not going to remove a co-parent. You can change the medium she reaches you through.
Why did it take four years and not a weekend?
Because that is what one-at-a-time costs.
Every trigger had to surface before it could be examined, and they do not all surface at once. Something would come up months later, produce the same familiar drop, and go into the queue: what is this, where does it come from, can it be removed, and if not, what does it get replaced with so it stops reaching me.
There was no version of this that took a weekend.
I did not do it alone, and this is the part people leave out
Through all of it I talked to two friends. Not constantly, and not formally, but for years.
What helped was not their advice. It was that describing the problem to another human being made my own reasoning audible to me. I would say a thing out loud and hear, in the saying of it, that it was not true. Or that I had been carefully not looking at something. That happened repeatedly, and it is what moved me, not anything either of them told me.
You cannot hear yourself without somebody to say it to.
Which is, almost exactly, what I do for a living. When I work with an owner, I mostly do not tell him what is wrong. I ask him to describe how things actually run, write down what he says rather than what he concludes, and hand it back to him arranged in a way he has never seen. He is persuaded by himself, which is the only kind that holds.
Two friends did that for me, without either of us calling it that.
What I am not saying
I want to draw this line clearly, because the rest of this site is about being precise regarding what a claim actually supports.
This is one case. Mine. It was a depression with a cause I could point at and triggers I could physically do something about, and I had time, and I had two people, and I had a method I already trusted from other work.
I do not know whether it generalises. I am not qualified to tell you that it does.
Plenty of depression has causes that no amount of examining reaches, and not getting better is not a sign that somebody failed to look hard enough. If you are in something that is not lifting, the first useful move is not analysing harder, it is telling somebody, and a doctor is a perfectly reasonable somebody to tell. That I did not is a fact about my case, not a feature of the method.
What I will stand behind is narrower and, I think, still worth something: the discipline of asking what is actually causing this, rather than arguing with how it feels, was the thing that moved me. And it is the same discipline I use on a P and L.
So what
Across the businesses I write about here, the pattern holds every time.
A company has to accept it might be part of it. Nothing else is available until that lands. One that believes the problem is the market will not go looking in its own targets.
Then it can see the real problem, which is usually one it is producing.
Then the root cause. Then a fix, or a workaround where a fix is not on offer.
I found that I had to do the same thing to myself, and I am only claiming it about myself. I had to accept I might be part of it, and that was the hardest step by a distance, because there was nobody outside it to point at anything.
I spent years being the person who could see other people’s situations because I was standing outside them. Then I spent four years learning how much harder the same work is from the inside, and how much of it depends on having somebody to say it out loud to.
If you have a business decision in front of you and would rather not be the only person looking at it, that is what I do for money, and I will tell you when the answer is that you do not need me. That offer is for businesses. It is not what this piece is for.
Everything above is first hand and is my own account. Nobody else in it is named or described beyond what was necessary, and the reasons for the divorce are not mine alone to publish, so they are not here. Nothing external is cited, because this is one person’s case and I am not going to dress it as evidence of anything wider.
Related reading
- Being Right Is the Cheap Half: the same gap between seeing something and being able to act on it, in a business.
- The Deal Was Already Lost: six months of a good argument, made in a room that was never going to decide.