I walked back into the same room to tell them that the position was worse.
Three weeks earlier, I’d stood in that same room and given them the better position. Dates moved to fit it. So did budgets. People had already made decisions on the shape of one sentence.
There was no version of this where I could avoid dealing with it. What the answer stood on had shifted under it, and everyone who’d planned around my word was going to find out, one way or another. The only option was to deliver the message myself in the right way.
So I stood there and said it straight. The call I’d made was wrong. Not nearly right. Not close enough. Wrong. It needed to be this instead.
I’d built my standing in that room by being right often enough that nobody checked behind me any more.
I watched exactly how much of that I spent, sentence by sentence, on their faces while I said it.
