This is a guest blog by Moe Carrick
| I almost drowned in the Rogue River. Not because the water was too big for us, not because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But because I didn’t say what I knew. The rapid was called the Picket Fence. Someone had died in it that year. I was in the raft, I’m an experienced paddler, and before we hit it, I had two clear thoughts. The first was that I couldn’t see the line (the safe path through the water.) The second was that I wasn’t sure we had the right paddlers in my boat to muscle through it if we got it wrong. I knew both of those things. I felt them in my body. And I said nothing. I told myself the others were more experienced than me. I told myself my read on the situation probably wasn’t right. I deferred to a confidence I assumed other people had and I didn’t, and we flipped. I went under, got worked by the current, got a huge gash on my head, and came up shaking and humbled and lucky. I have thought about that moment probably more than any other in my life. Not because I almost died in a rapid that had already killed someone that year, though that has a way of focusing the mind. But because of the silence. Because I had real information (earned, embodied, legitimate) and I talked myself out of it. The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know enough. The problem was that I didn’t trust what I knew. I see that same silence in workplaces every single week. I see it in leadership teams where someone around the table clearly disagrees with the direction but offers a tight smile and says nothing. I see it in one-on-one conversations where a manager knows something isn’t working but keeps circling the edges of the real issue, hoping the other person will somehow intuit what’s not being said. I see it in organizations spending enormous time and money on initiatives that half the room knows won’t work, and no one says so out loud. The energy that gets burned in those silences is staggering. The meetings that take twice as long because nobody will name the actual tension. The decisions that get relitigated for months because the real concern never surfaced in the first place. The relationships that erode quietly, not from conflict, but from the accumulated weight of things left unsaid. We tell ourselves we’re being professional. We tell ourselves it’s not the right moment, not the right setting, not our place. Sometimes we tell ourselves we’re probably just not reading it right, that the others in the room surely know something we don’t. But our bodies know. The palms sweat for a reason. In my experience, the silence comes from two places. The first is a lack of self-awareness. A lot of people genuinely don’t know what they’re feeling or thinking with enough clarity to name it. They sense discomfort but can’t locate it. They know something is off but can’t articulate what. This is not a character flaw, it’s a skill gap, and it’s an extraordinarily common one. We are not, most of us, taught to notice and name our inner experience. We’re taught to manage it, suppress it, push through it. The second is a lack of courage. And I want to be careful here, because I don’t mean courage in the heroic, dramatic sense. I mean the ordinary daily courage it takes to say the thing that might land badly, might make someone uncomfortable, might make you look uncertain or difficult or not-a-team-player. That kind of courage is not glamorous. It’s quiet and grinding and it has to be chosen over and over again, often in small moments that feel inconsequential and aren’t. Both of these things, self-awareness and courage, can be developed. That’s the part I want you to hear. This is not about personality type. It’s not about whether you’re naturally bold or naturally reserved. It’s about building the capacity to notice what’s true for you and then deciding, deliberately, to say it. Back on the Rogue, what I know now is that I had real information. I was experienced enough to read that water. My hesitation was not ignorance — it was a comparison I made in my head, a silent judgment that the other people in the boat knew better than I did. And maybe some of them did. But maybe one of them was doing the exact same math I was, deciding to defer to someone else’s presumed expertise, and the whole boat full of capable people floated silently into a rapid that had already taken a life that year because none of us said the thing out loud. That’s the thing about truth-telling in groups. It’s contagious. One person who names the hard thing almost always gives permission to the next. The silence, it turns out, is also contagious. Someone has to go first. I’ve spent 35 years helping teams and leaders build the conditions where people can say the real thing. It is the work I care most about, because I know what it costs when we don’t. I know it in my data (over a million and a half workplace data points that keep telling the same story) and I know it in my bones, from a cold river in southern Oregon where I learned the hard way what silence can do. If you’re sitting on something right now — something that makes your palms sweat a little when you think about saying it — I want to ask you one question: What is it actually costing you not to say it? Sit with that. And then, if you’re ready, say the thing. With you, Moe |
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