A client came into a session this week and told me that a ritual we created had stopped working.
For several weeks, she'd carried a private anchor — a small internal cue she'd repeat to herself to keep her aligned:
"Are we having fun yet?"
It had been useful inside our last session.
But later, she said, every time the phrase surfaced, she felt a flash of grumpiness. A small rebellion rose up in her chest. The words that had once lifted her now made her want to dig in her heels.
My first instinct was to assume the ritual had simply run its course. Sometimes that happens. Repeat anything enough times and eventually it loses its charge.
But that explanation felt too neat.
So instead of trying to repair it, we got curious about the rebellion itself.
As we stayed with it, something else came into view.
She said it herself, in her own words:
Generating fun for other people is a way of trying to control the situation.
Actually having fun is effortless.
That distinction has stayed with me.
Her body wasn't rebelling against fun.
Her body was rebelling against the labor of manufacturing it.
The phrase hadn't stopped working.
The phrase had quietly become a request to perform an experience she wasn't actually having.
And once we saw that, we started seeing versions of it everywhere.
We can perform almost anything
We can perform competence.
We can perform ease.
We can perform leadership.
We can perform being fine.
We can perform being "low maintenance."
We can perform connection.
What's difficult is that these performances often look remarkably similar to the real thing.
Effort can look like care.
Managing can look like leadership.
Fixing can look like love.
Activity can look like presence.
That's what makes these patterns so difficult to notice.
I see it in coaching all the time
Recently, in a training group I lead, we were talking about what happens when a client goes quiet — not disconnected quiet, but the kind of quiet that arrives when something important is beginning to move.
And I heard myself saying something I seem destined to relearn for the rest of my life:
Coaches tend to get more verbal precisely when something matters most.
A silence opens.
Something real starts to surface.
And suddenly we reach for another question.
A reflection.
A reframe.
An observation.
We mistake our activity for our contribution.
But often the activity is the retreat.
Talking can become a way of staying close to the client while keeping a safe distance from the moment itself.
We're in the room.
And we're not fully there at all.
Sometimes the work is not asking a better question.
Sometimes the work is staying.
I see it in long relationships too
I recently read about what sociologists call an empty shell marriage — relationships that continue for decades after the life inside them has quietly disappeared.
The structure remains.
The shared address remains.
The routines remain.
The history remains.
But somewhere along the way, presence left the room.
One woman who had ended such a marriage said simply:
"I finally came to terms with what it was going to be if we stayed together."
That sentence stayed with me.
Not because it sounded bitter.
Because it sounded honest.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from maintaining the surface of something long after the underneath has stopped being tended.
And the truth is that the shell can hold for an extraordinarily long time.
Proximity can stand in for presence for years.
Sometimes for decades.
And perhaps most painfully, we do it with ourselves
Over and over again, I've noticed how much people manage themselves down.
Not their behavior.
Their size.
They become easier.
Quieter.
Less demanding.
Less visible.
Less inconvenient.
They perform a version of themselves that feels safer to offer the world than the real thing.
Recently, in a coaching session, a client recognized that a part of her was working very hard to keep her own bigness under control.
She was afraid of being too much.
Too emotional.
Too visible.
Too expressive.
And as we sat with it, another question emerged: Who is actually doing the rejecting here?
Sometimes the outside world is not the first place rejection happens.
Sometimes another part inside us got there first.
Somewhere along the way, shrinking started to feel safer than being seen.
And if that's true, then the performance isn't a character flaw.
It's an old piece of survival logic.
It protected us once.
And it may be costing us now.
Those two things can both be true.
Back to the ordinary moment
Later in that same session, a very young part of my client spoke up and named feeling alone.
I didn't ask a brilliant question.
I didn't offer an insight.
I didn't move to fix anything.
I simply stayed there with her.
"I can see you're feeling alone."
"I'm here."
And her shoulders dropped.
She described taking what she later called a nourishing gulp of air.
Nothing was solved.
And yet something moved.
I've returned to that moment many times since.
Because what mattered there wasn't my effort.
It was my restraint.
The most useful thing available to me in that moment was to stop performing usefulness.
What this comes down to
I think many of us imagine presence as something that arrives once conditions improve.
When life settles down.
When work slows down.
When we finally catch up.
When we get enough sleep.
When we become less anxious, less busy, less distracted.
But I'm not sure presence works that way.
I'm beginning to wonder if presence isn't something we generate at all.
Maybe presence is what's left after we stop manufacturing a version of ourselves to offer instead.
The question underneath may not be: "How do I become more present?"
It may be quieter than that.
More exposing than that.
What am I performing right now?
And what would remain if I set it down?
I don't have a clean answer.
I only have the noticing.
A few questions to sit with
- Where in your life are you generating a feeling — confidence, ease, okay-ness, fun — that you aren't actually having?
- When something important begins to happen, what do you reach for? More words? More helping? More managing?
- Is there a version of yourself you offer in order to keep the peace?
- If some part of you is keeping your bigness under control, what did that part once learn it was protecting you from?
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