10. Mai 2026
The Seesaw: On Staying with Yourself While Letting Others In
Real communication is not about saying less or feeling less — it is about learning to hold two things at once
There is a moment many of us know. We are in a conversation, e.g. at work, with a friend, in the middle of something that matters, and something goes slightly wrong. The other person seems lost, or overwhelmed, or quietly absent. We are not sure what happened. We were saying something true. We meant it. And yet the connection slipped away somewhere between us. This piece is about that moment. And about what makes it happen — and what might help.
A Simple Image
I want to offer you an image I return to often in my work: a seesaw.
On one end sits your inner world — your emotions, your sensations, your personal experience of what is happening. On the other end sits the outer world — the facts, the topic, what needs to be communicated, the person in front of you.
Most of us, in most conversations, are not holding both ends at once.
We tip toward one side or the other, sometimes without knowing it, sometimes because it feels safer. And it is in that tipping that the connection is lost.
The Data End of the Seesaw
Some of us, particularly in situations where we feel less safe or less certain of being understood, tend to communicate from the external end. We describe what happened accurately. We present the facts, the context, and the relevant details. We tell a good story: coherent, clear, sometimes even compelling.
But somewhere in the process, the emotional thread goes quiet. The listener receives the content, but not the person. They are informed, but not invited in. And without that invitation, even the most attentive person will eventually feel like an audience rather than a presence.
This pattern often shows up most clearly at work esp. in expert conversations, technical explanations, and professional contexts where precision is valued. It can feel like the responsible way to communicate. And in many ways, it is.
But even in professional relationships, and certainly in personal ones, people need more than accurate information. They need to sense that someone is actually there, behind the words.
The Journal End of the Seesaw
The opposite pattern is equally common, and in some ways more surprising.
Here, the emotional world is very much present; in fact, it fills the space entirely. The person shares what they are feeling with full honesty and intensity. They open their inner world, as if reading directly from a journal. Nothing is held back.
And yet connection still does not quite happen.
Because genuine connection is not a monologue. It is a meeting. And a meeting requires two people — which means it requires awareness of the other: their capacity in this moment, the nature of the relationship you share, what they are actually able to receive right now.
When one person's experience arrives with great force and no pause for the other person to be real in return, even a willing, caring listener can feel overwhelmed or sidelined. Not because the feelings are wrong. But because there was no room in the exchange for them.
What Audience Awareness Has to Do with It
You may have come across data-based storytelling in marketing. It is a method for presenting data in a way that resonates with the audience: the story is tailored to who they are, what they already know, what they need to hear, and what they can receive in that moment. This method is grounded in business data and does not intend to reveal the speaker's own truth.
If we carry this template into our personal relationships, something goes flat. Applied to direct human communication, it becomes superficial — and, perhaps paradoxically, harder to follow. Because people do not only process information. They sense what is real. They feel when something is missing.
In our personal relationships, we are after direct emotional resonance. Clear is kind.
What matters, then, whether you are sharing something deeply personal or explaining something complex from your area of expertise, is to stay in contact with both realities simultaneously: what is alive in you, and who is actually in front of you. As Carl Rogers understood: we cannot afford to have only one reality.
The Movement Between
What I am describing is not a technique to apply. It is more like a habit of attention — a living, dynamic movement between yourself and the other person.
What am I feeling? Who is actually in front of me? Am I still here, inside my own experience? Are they still with me?
This oscillation does not ask you to find a perfect midpoint and stay there. It asks you to keep both ends of the seesaw in motion. To check in with yourself, and then with the other person. To honour what is real for you, and to remain genuinely curious about what is real for them.
The people in our lives have different emotional bandwidths at different times, shaped by their own histories, the quality of their sleep, and the weight they are already carrying. Adjusting to that is not the same as making yourself smaller. It is a form of care. For them, and for the relationship.
Your Depth Is Not the Problem
I want to be clear about something, because I think it is easily misread.
This is not about feeling less. It is not about editing your emotional world so that others can tolerate you more easily. If the depth of your inner life has ever been treated as a problem — too much, too intense, too complicated — this piece is not agreeing with that.
Your experience is valid. Exactly as it is. Whatever you feel, and however intensely you feel it, that is not something to be managed away.
What I am offering is something more specific: a small set of skills for navigating the surface layer of social life — conversations at work, exchanges with friends, moments in the family where things can go sideways without either person quite knowing why. Not the deep work. Not the places where you are truly known. Just the everyday moments where a little more awareness of the seesaw can prevent unnecessary disconnection.
A Closing Thought
Real communication that actually creates connection requires us to stay in contact with two realities simultaneously: what is alive in us, and who is actually in front of us.
Neither one can be dropped.
When we lose our own thread, the conversation becomes hollow. When we lose sight of the other person, the conversation becomes a wall.
The seesaw stays alive when both ends stay in motion.
That is the whole of it, really. And it is a practice, not a performance, not a personality trait you either have or don't. Just something to return to, gently, again and again.
If this resonates with something you are working through, I would be glad to hear from you.