Hi.
· 8 min read
Between What Is Said and What Is Meant — Lots of Love Is Lost
· 17 min read
The Communication Iceberg
What people see vs. what drives everything
💬 What We Say
"I'm fine." "No worries." "Sure."
🎭 How We Say It
The tone. The pause. The reply that took 6 hours.
🔒 What We Actually Mean
The real message, encoded in safe language.
❤️🩹 What We Need But Can't Say
To be seen. Valued. Chosen. Safe. Loved.
"Most conversations happen above the waterline. Most meaning lives below it."
"Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant and not said, most of love is lost." — Khalil Gibran
It never starts big.
It starts with a Tuesday evening. You come home tired. Your partner asks, "How was your day?" You say, "Fine." What you meant was: "Exhausting. I felt invisible in that meeting. I could use a hug." But "fine" was easier. Quicker. Safer.
Or it starts in a standup. Your lead asks, "Any blockers?" You say, "Nope, all good." What you meant was: "I've been stuck on this for two days and I don't want to look incompetent." But "all good" was safer. Faster. Less exposed.
One "fine" costs nothing. One "all good" costs nothing. But 365 of them? That's a year of someone living next to you and not knowing you. Or a year of your team thinking everything's on track when it isn't.
This is the daily drift — the tiny, almost invisible gap between what we say and what we mean, repeated so often it becomes the distance between two people who once understood each other without words.
A caveat before we go further: not every "fine" is a suppression. Sometimes it genuinely means fine. Sometimes it means "I don't have the energy to unpack this right now" — and that's a healthy boundary, not a failure. The drift happens when brevity becomes the default, when filtering stops being a choice and starts being the only mode.
Why You Should Never Do InnerSource
· 6 min read
Look, I get it. Someone at a conference said "InnerSource" and now Slack is buzzing — or is it Teams? Honestly, who can keep track anymore. People are sharing links to the InnerSource Commons, talking about "breaking down silos" and "cross-team collaboration" like they've discovered fire. Let me save you the trouble — here's why you should absolutely, categorically, never do InnerSource.