A Mote in Your Eye

I’m flattered that people come to me for advice. It happens more often now than at any point in my career, and I take it seriously. But I've realized something about these conversations.

Most of the time, I'm not giving advice.

I'm asking questions and leaving space. Letting people talk long enough to hear themselves — what they actually think, not what they planned to say. More often than not, they find the answer themselves. They just couldn't get to it alone. 

It reminds me of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. She had the power to go home the entire time. She just needed the journey — and Glinda — to see it. Click your heels. You already know.

I've watched people figure out exactly what they needed to do, in real time, with nothing from me except the right question at the right moment.

But that's only half the story.. 

Sometimes you're Dorothy. The answer is already there and you just need someone to help you clear away the noise. Other times, someone shows up with a different angle, a different experience, a piece of context that changes the entire picture. A pattern you've been inside too long to recognize. A strength you've been discounting because nobody pointed it out. They're not helping you find what's already there. They're turning on a light.

And you can't always tell in advance which conversation you're in. You don't know whether you need space or new information until someone helps you find out.

That's the mote in your eye. Not a flaw, necessarily. Just something about your own situation that you can't see from where you're standing.

The Corporate Version and the Personal One

In Narrative Myopia, I argued that a company’s story can sound sharper every time it’s repeated inside the building while losing clarity everywhere else. The people telling the story can't see the drift because they're inside it. The fix isn't better messaging — it's getting someone from outside to tell you what your story actually sounds like from where they're sitting.

The same thing happens personally.Your narrative about your career, your strengths, where you're headed gets refined over time. You get comfortable with it. And eventually that comfort can turn into drift — not because the narrative was wrong, but because it stopped being tested.

I introduced FOS-ness in Assume Everyone Is Full of It as productive skepticism — assuming that what other people tell you is incomplete, motivated, or framed to serve something. The part most people skip is applying that same filter to themselves. 

Your own read on your situation is incomplete too, and probably motivated in ways you haven't noticed. It doesn't make it wrong — it makes it partial. And the longer you go without checking it, the more that partial picture starts to feel like the whole thing.

Not a Sounding Board. A Trusted Witness.

When people say "sounding board,"  it suggests someone who simply echoes your thoughts back to you. That's part of it — sometimes you need to hear yourself say something out loud. But the person across from you isn't just reflecting. They're noticing things you can't, because they're not you.

My good friend Jeff Gomez gave me a better term for this: trusted witness. Someone who's been paying attention long enough to see what you can't.

In Mentoring Is a Multiplayer Skill, I made the case that mentoring only works when both sides are playing — the mentor learns from the results, the mentee acts on what they heard, and the loop between them is what makes both people sharper. A trusted witness works the same way. The questions I ask in these conversations aren't prepared. They emerge from what I'm hearing mixed with what I know about the person's situation. Neither of us could get to the insight alone — it comes out of the conversation.

And it has to be a person. AI can help you think. It can't care about you. A person brings empathy — not just attention, but genuine concern, — and a life in context. They've made their own mistakes, developed judgment, and learned how the world actually works, and that shapes the questions they think to ask. That's what makes the space where someone can finally say the thing they haven't figured out yet.

Thinking harder doesn't fix this. You can replay a situation ten different ways in your head and still miss the thing that someone else would spot in five minutes. The mote is what your own vantage point can't reach.

The Longer You've Been Right

The mote doesn't go away with experience. If anything, I think it gets harder to spot. The longer you've been operating with a particular set of assumptions, the less they feel like assumptions. They just feel like reality. That's usually when someone walks in and asks a question that changes the whole view.

In Build Your Own Rubric, I asked: "Do you have people around you who reflect your strengths back to you — or are you relying on your own assessment?" Your own assessment, no matter how honest, can only see so far.

Berkson's Bits

When you compliment someone, be specific. Saying "you did a great job" is certainly appreciated, but saying "I really liked where you .... because..." shows you were paying attention and it was meaningful to you. It tells people what mattered and why.

What I'm Listening To…

One of my pleasures in life is sharing music.

For years the flow of song recommendations between me and my daughters was mostly one-way. Now one of my top sources of new music is them. My daughter, Olivia, recommended another Oliva for me. Here is begged from Olivia Rodrigo’s new album, you seem pretty sad for a girl so in love.

The people who navigate long careers well almost always have someone like that in their life. Maybe a coach, maybe a mentor, maybe just a friend who happens to pay close attention — someone with enough context to understand the situation and enough distance to see what's in it that you can't. What makes it work is trust — enough that the person can say what they actually see — and regularity, so they're seeing the current version of your situation rather than an outdated one.

Most people I talk to who feel stuck don't have that person. They're trying to read the label from inside the bottle.

The mote never goes away. You just get better at knowing it's there.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation...

Alan